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We Help Platform Businesses Succeed

Platform Associates is a technology consultancy based in San Francisco, California.

We provide strategic and tactical advice and assistance to technology businesses looking to create, support and adopt platform products.

Our people have made platforms work for companies such as eBay, Yahoo!, HP, and many others.

News and Notes

There's A New Mayor In Town

Governing magazine did an interview with the BART web team on their integration with mobile social game Foursquare. In the interview the team describes the rationale for using Foursquare and how BART's embrace of open data platforms and social communications has worked for the transit district.

Read more...

Fake Steve Jobs: "Developers only now realizing that Android is not a platform"

According to Gadget Lab, app writers have somehow just realized that the reason open source fails in customer-facing use cases (as opposed to back on the server in a locked room) is that it splits like a bead of mercury into a zillion different forms, and nobody can write apps that work across the platform [...]

Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure

Platform Associates CEO Jeffrey McManus is quoted in a story in today's Redmond Developer News. The piece discusses Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud offering in light of new product releases and aggressive pricing by competitors such as Amazon EC2.

BART Partners with Foursquare

Bay Area Rapid Transit has become the first transit agency to partner with the location-based mobile network Foursquare, with the goal of encouraging public transit use. You can read more about the partnership on bart.gov or the Foursquare blog.

Platform Associates advises BART on their open data platform and social media strategy; this partnership resulted from our consulting engagement with them.

Welcome Twitter!

Twitter has retained Platform Associates to assist Twitter's platform team. We'll be working hard to make Twitter an even better place for developers so you can use Twitter's web service APIs to create amazing applications for users.

For a while now, Platform Associates has been creating Twitter integration solutions for our clients and in our applications using the Twitter API. Twitter has built an amazing platform for sharing and discovering what's going on with your friends and with users around the world, and third-party applications are a huge part of that.

You can follow Platform Associates' Twitter feed at @platform_assoc. Jeffrey's feed is @jeffreymcmanus, and you can find Carole on Twitter at @puttopal. We also maintain a feed specifically for announcements and discussion pertaining to our Tinypug open-source customer inquiry portal; you can find that at @tinypug.

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Products and Services

We provide consulting services to assist you with the technical, community management, and data analysis functions of your customer community.

We have particular depth in the creation and management of third-party developer products and communities. We've done this for tiny startups as well as larger public companies such as eBay and Yahoo!. Members of our team have managed multiple million-member online communities.

Tinypug Customer Inquiry is our open-source software platform for creating customer innovation portals.

We've developed a number of proof-of-concept Facebook applications including Oscar Picks and BART Departures.

Approver.com is our document-sharing product.

Resources

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