Amazon Web Services
Platform Associates provides consulting practices for our clients who are interested in adopting Amazon Web Services.
Our Amazon practices focus on two areas of Amazon Web Services functionality: storage and hosting.
Our Amazon Storage practice utilizes the Amazon S3 storage service to give your application or web site access to Amazon S3's unlimited metered storage service. We can provide advice pertaining to application architecture as well as implementation of software and web sites that utilize Amazon S3 storage.
Our Amazon Hosting practice utilizes the power of Amazon EC2 hosting product to provide a flexible, scalable way to deploy software. We work with you to architect a solution that will grow as your online business grows.
Our goal is to save your business time and money by paying as you go and using server resources only when you need them.
Contact us for more information on an Amazon Web Services consulting engagement.
Consulting Practices
With more than 200 million users, Facebook is one of the most compelling social networking sites on the Web. Facebook gives third-party software developers access to its users through the creation of applications that run within the context of Facebook.
Platform Associates provides two consulting practices related to Facebook application development: Facebook Product Strategy and Facebook Application Development.
Read MoreAmazon Web Services
Platform Associates provides consulting practices for our clients who are interested in adopting Amazon Web Services.
Our Amazon practices focus on two areas of Amazon Web Services functionality: storage and hosting.
Read MorePlatform Product Strategy
Platform Associates provides platform strategy consulting for both new and established businesses. Our objective is to work with your management, product, legal and engineering teams to help make your platform business compelling to third parties (including users, developers, and partners).
Read MoreDeveloper and Partner Relations
Increasingly, partnerships between platform companies involves technical integration. For an open developer platform, this usually means you'll want to devote some attention to the developer relations role, to ensure that developers and partners can access your platform in a multitude of scenarios with a minimum of friction.
Read MorePlatform Product Evangelism
An evangelist encourages others to join their cause. Platform product evangelists generate interest and excitement for platform products, engaging adopters as deeply as necessary to ensure they get the right product at the right time. Platform evangelism is a hybrid role that falls on the cusp between technology, marketing, training, public relations, product management, and business development.
Read MorePlatform Product Marketing
The landscape of technology product marketing has altered radically in the last five years. As companies seek to engage more deeply with users and partners while opening their products to them as platforms, the risks — and potential rewards — increase.
Read MoreMetrics, Reporting, and Surveys
You make what you measure, as they say. But when it comes to providing platform products it's doubly important to track metrics and remain deeply engaged with your customers and developers. Without the ability to discern what your community is doing with your platform, you may miss useful opportunities for your business.
Read MoreOnline Community Management
Thriving online communities don't happen by accident. They require careful planning and hands-on management. For businesses that engage with customers the benefits are great, but doing online community right requires thoughtful planning and ongoing management.
Read MoreOur People
Jeffrey McManus has spent nearly a decade as a consultant, developer, and writer. He has managed platform businesses and developer relations for two iconic internet businesses, eBay and Yahoo!. He was eBay's first technology evangelist and led eBay's platform evangelism team from 2003 to 2005 when eBay was opening its web services platform to third parties. He also championed new technologies within the company, such as corporate blogging, RSS, wikis and open source, creating eBay's first open source developer community.
Jeffrey co-founded and led the Yahoo! Developer Network team, which opened Yahoo! properties to innovation by third-party developers and established the company as a platform leader in less than a year's time. He and his team also created Yahoo! Gallery, a site that enables third-party developers to share their applications and mash-ups with Yahoo! users.
Jeffrey has also served as a product manager and developer relations specialist at startups such as Kenamea. He has written or co-written six books on technology including the best-selling Database Access with Visual Basic series. He frequently speaks to corporate groups on both strategic and tactical issues pertaining to emerging technologies. As a consultant, he has engaged with stealth-mode startups, established small businesses, local and federal government agencies, and Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, Dell, Intel, Eli Lilly, Duke Energy, Pfizer, SBC, Sears Roebuck, and many others.
In addition to consulting, speaking and writing, Jeffrey also developed and manages the consumer document-sharing site Approver.com.
Carole Newton McManus has managed some of the most successful communities on the Web, including BabyCenter, TechTV.com, and the 100,000,000 member Yahoo! Groups community. Her past clients also include E*TRADE, Edmunds.com, HBO.com, CBS Sportsline, Oncology.com and AllBusiness.
As Director of Community Product Management at MarketTools, Carole led a team of developers, designers and producers to build the Idea Network platform. Idea Networks help companies like Frito-Lay foster product innovation using the wisdom of the community. Carole also oversaw the complete redesign of ZoomPanel Moms, where companies like Sylvan Learning and Disney gather insight from moms across the United States.
Prior to joining MarketTools, Carole was the community manager for Yahoo! 360 and Yahoo! Groups. Her team introduced Moderator Central, a resource for Yahoo! Groups moderators worldwide. Carole wrote the product blogs for Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! 360, and served as a member advocate with the product and engineering teams. While working in the Search & Marketplace team, Carole was the project manager for community integration initiatives on Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Travel, Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Local.
At BabyCenter, Carole managed the largest community of new and expectant mothers on the Web. She was part of the team that designed and launched a new BBS in 2003. At TechTV she managed the Interact Department, which provided community features for all of TechTV.com's program portals, including the late, lamented "Screen Savers".
Our people are eager to meet your people. Contact us to get started.
Our Clients
Our consultants have managed third-party platform products and developer programs at eBay and Yahoo! as well as multi-million member social communities at BabyCenter and TechTV. Here's a list of our current and recent clients.
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Twitter is a short messaging service that brings together users from around the world to communicate and view information as it happens — from breaking world news to updates from friends. Platform Associates assists with the management of information resources for Twitter's third-party developer community and helped with the design and requirements for Twitter's developer web site launched in April 2010. | |
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Platform Associates provides strategic and tactical support to open data and online community initiatives for the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART). We assist the BART web team with third-party developer outreach, an application directory, and the district's Facebook presence. | |
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Twilio provides a platform to make the creation of telephony applications easy. Platform Associates is a strategic advisor to Twilio. | |
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Platform Associates works with HP's Corporate Ventures group to formulate product strategy, create product designs and develop proof-of-concept applications pertaining to HP's web properties and integration with emerging social networking services. | |
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Platform Associates serves as a technical advisor to Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), assisting with their student journalism Web site, The Loyolan. | |
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twentysix New York is one of New York City's leading solution providers specializing in Microsoft platform application development. Platform Associates advises twentysix New York on open-source strategy and supports its developer team with the adoption of new technologies. | |
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Alfresco is the leading open-source alternative for enterprise content management. The product couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. Platform Associates is engaged with Alfresco to provide strategic platform product consulting as well as advice and assistance regarding the creation and maintenance of a third-party developer community for their product. | |
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LogLogic is a market leader in log data management and intelligence. The company's award-winning appliances collect, store, and build reports using log data from firewalls, routers, servers, applications, operating systems and devices in near real-time for compliance and risk mitigation. Platform Associates assists LogLogic with the creation and management of platform integration products and strategies for use with their core log analysis products. | |
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The Code Project is one of the largest developer sites on the web, with more than six million users. The site is a wealth of technical content for developers. Platform Associates provides strategic advice to The Code Project, including assistance with site design and information architecture. | |
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Box.net provides a free online service that enables users to store and share files. Although many sites enable users to share files, Box.net provides certain key competitive differentiators, including an easy to use interface, a generous free storage allowance, and Box Enabled, a programmable platform that enables developers to integrate Box.net's storage and sharing capabilities into their sites or applications. | |
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Etelos provides an open application development platform that makes it easy to build applications that share the best of both worlds: software-as-a-service combined with the flexibility and openness of open source. Platform Associates provided Etelos with strategic and tactical consulting in the area of developer user experience, product management and go-to-market strategy. | |
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Songbird is a desktop Web player, digital jukebox and Web browser. It supports extensions and user interface customization. Like Firefox, it is built from Mozilla, cross-platform and open source. Platform Associates provides strategic product management and developer content services to support the community of third-party Songbird developers and partners. | |
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Breakaway Communications is Platform Associates' public relations partner. We work together with the Breakaway team to provide comprehensive product, marketing and communications services to our clients. | |
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Prosper makes consumer lending more financially and socially rewarding for everyone. People list and bid on loans using Prosper's online auction platform. Borrowers create loan listings and set the maximum rate they are willing to pay a lender. Platform Associates provides evangelism and platform product management services to the company and its community of borrowers, lenders, and third-party developers. | |
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Coghead provides a radically new way for tech-savvy business people to create, manage, and deliver their own web-based applications. The Coghead service enables the users closest to a business challenge to create customized solutions in hours or days at a fraction of the cost of large packaged applications or custom development projects. Platform Associates provides product strategy and developer ecosystem consulting to Coghead. | |
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Pageflakes provides a customizable homepage to make it easy for users to view all their favorite internet content and applications in one place. For developers, Pageflakes is a compelling and powerful content delivery platform. Platform Associates provides strategic product management and developer outreach consulting to provide powerful new tools to Pageflakes' developer community. |
BART Departures on Facebook
Late last night we released a new Facebook app, BART Departures. You can use this app to see when the next BART train is leaving from the station of your choice.
Once you've found the train you plan to take, you can click on the "I'm taking this train!" link and we'll post a little note to your Facebook profile to let your friends know you’re on your way. The application also displays the last few status updates from @SFBART on Twitter, so if there are delays or other unusualness with BART, it's easy to see what's going on.
This is one in a series of Facebook apps we've developed as part of our Facebook application development practice. Contact us to find out more about how we can help you with your Facebook strategy.
