Increasingly competitive markets will push businesses into building smart, interconnected systems.
In a world of increasing complexity, seek interoperability.
JUMP TO –—-
<aside> ⚙ CHAPTER 1 — APIs
</aside>
<aside> ✨ CHAPTER 2 — The Metaverse
</aside>
<aside> 🏗️ CHAPTER 3 — Building in the Metaverse
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<aside> 💵 CHAPTER 4 — Investing in the Metaverse
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[This is a TL;DR presentation. If it doesn't load (bug on MacOS) visit the slides directly](https://preview.pitch.com/app/embed/dab11234-4b6d-4463-9df9-fa75475c04e8)
This is a TL;DR presentation. If it doesn't load (bug on MacOS) visit the slides directly
If you could have been one of the first people to work on the internet in the early 90s, mobile in the early 00s, or blockchain in the early 10s, would you have done it? Well, now is your chance. People often talk about AI in the context of workforce automation, but that is far from the only application. Pour another cup of coffee and let's dive into how the future will be filled with AI, APIs and metaverses.
In this article we set out to understand how the metaverse will be structured and how emerging technology can help us get there.
<aside> ⚙ CHAPTER 1 — APIs
</aside>
Long-gone are the days of the technology monolith. The technology stack that was owned completely by a single company. Fully closed-source. Pay up or hit the highway. Microsoft. Oracle. Adobe.
Today the average company has technology woven into every facet of the business. From the basics of finding customers or making a website to heavy machine learning analytics and payment processing. This complexity makes it impossible to build everything yourself, and why would you? Simply buy a world-class solution off-the-shelf and move on. Even a startup will have 20-50 different tools that they pay for monthly. Letting someone else solve everything but your core specialty enables focus on only the most valuable tasks. This abstraction of busywork has made it easier than ever to start a company.
In a world of increasing complexity, interoperability becomes the new ideal. How can similar processes be bundled up so that they each don't steal away attention? The answer has pretty clearly emerged as APIs (application programming interfaces). An API can be thought of as a pathway that provides the core value of a software product, whatever that may be. They can be very small and specific, or large complex beasts that perform major operations. They run almost everything on the internet and, arguably, are just getting started.
An API takes the form of a standard black box system:
Request → [operation] → Result
Requests are made to an endpoint (URL) that is publicly known, such as example.com/api/login. This lets a server know what operation it is expected to perform, in this case login. Requests typically have data that are sent along with them, such as a username and password.
I won't belabor this point as there is a wealth of information available on APIs, but they are very important to the future when everything is virtual and not on exclusively the web. APIs allow services to talk to each other efficiently.