At Exygy, we work heavily with different API platforms and as we develop as a company and creating our own apps and products — looking at the business development when it comes to building out our products is becoming more and more crucial.

This is a good introductory and helpful article to understand the business part of the tech your company creates.

Excerpt:

API stands for Application Programming Interface and is a specification of how some software components should interact with each other in order to marry two technologies. Once a company builds an API, other companies are able to plug in their technology (whether it be for maps, SMS, or something else).

Why You Need An API

There are typically two use cases for APIs. The first is building a developer community to extend the ability of your platform–these are usually free to use. The second is building a service that other people can use and pay you for; sometimes APIs as a service are free and monetized by other means. Both use cases make it much easier for a company to get functionality they need and/or partner with another company without the heavy lifting of custom integrations for each partnership…

At Aviary, we made it easy for any developer to plug in photo editing to their website or mobile app. They now power the editing and filters ability for a slew of apps, including Walgreens, Twitter, Flickr, Squarespace, Box, Edmodo, MailChimp, and more. When I left the company in April 2012, they had around 6M MAU; in May they announced 50M MAU. They have one of the best scalable APIs, and helping to work on the infrastructure for its growth taught me a lot. We are still in the infancy of the API at Dwolla, but there are some big things in the works and the rest of the year should be very exciting.

Read more at FastCoLabs.