The Big in Japan team is now working on several Facebook brand integration projects.  Now that Facebook has opened their platform to allow development companies, like Big in Japan, to develop applications within the network, a new opportunity for brands has emerged.  How can we help?

• License your brand for use in Facebook (i.e. we own the application)
• Customize and modify your existing application for use in Facebook
• Provide community assistance for operating your brand within Facebook

Our latest project is to incorporate a popular strategy game into Facebook’s community.  The challenge?  It isn’t porting the existing application into Facebook, it is helping leverage the social advantages the site can offer the game.  Just putting the game inside the community won’t really extend the brand, but incorporating the game into the community can potentially enhance the companies relationship with the brand.

Nat Torkington wrote an interesting piece titled, "Six Basic Truths of Free APIs."  He made six suggestions worthy of reprinting here:

• Free APIs are not a god-given right. Businesses offer them for their own self-interested reasons. If you build on top of the API but aren’t delivering the value for the business that provides the API, your use of the API will probably go away.
• If you build your own business on top of an API, you need a contractual relationship to ensure the service doesn’t get taken away from you. These generally cost money.
• If you find a way to get something from a site that isn’t explicitly offered as something for you to build on, your use of it will probably be fought unless you’re delivering value as in (1).
• he provider of your API will find it easier to implement services on top of their API than you will. Therefore you have to add something of your own that’s difficult to replicate, something beyond a simple UI tweak or a feature like "search", so that the business that provides the API doesn’t simply compete with you when you look like you’re succeeding.
• For these reasons, free APIs are a very poor substitute for having the source and the data and thus owning and controlling every piece of your application.
• For these reasons, there’s no such thing as a free API if you’re looking to build a business.

Certainly click-to-call has limitations and risks for abuse, but implemented correctly it can offer clear advantaged for certain web service providers.  Contrary to some reports, Google’s click-to-call was not pulled (it is still functioning).

Integrated into web based services such as Salesforce.com, Mailroom (woot!), Basecamp ~ our Podcall functionality can offer unique social interactions and services previously difficult to implement and afford.

Yesterday I had an interesting call from a prospective Podcall customer and a feature we had previously not announced came up.  While we provide the phone system, network interconnection and API hooks we don’t necessarily have to provide the minutes.  If you want to negotiate your own wholesale minute rate we can simply connect to your provider and let you pay them directly.  No need for us to markup the dial-tone costs.  (our pricing for North America is currently around 2.5 cents per minute)

In a move that reflects the current direction of the Big in Japan business, we are launching our first true tool set ~ an API to allow web applications to build in robust voice features  that are built, managed and hosted by Big in Japan. Big in Japan doesn’t want to build the applications you use, we want to make the applications your deliver better! Think BASF for web services.

We have been providing Voice 2.0 integrated applications as dedicated services for quite some time. Now we are offering a robust API (application programming interface) that allows any web developer or application developer to integrated custom phone features into their application.  The first API provides hooks into our Podcall system.  The API work regardless of the web technology (Ruby on Rails, PHP, Flash and of course simple HTML to name a few). Want to offer this sort of functionality found on Google:

Originally built to allow for quick and easy integration for Courtney Cox’s new television show Dirt, the Big in Japan team is opening the API for any developer who needs access to a telephone system. What can it do? The possibilities are endless. Start with simple functions like providing messages or wake-up calls to your users or clients. Then build interesting dating applications to connect people together. Or create robust identity verification system for your services for payment processing or demographic data collection. The system is robust and the applications are limitless.