Start-Ups Juggle Platforms, Prioritization

Moves by major tech companies to open up to outside developers have been a boon for small start-ups. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo (YHOO), Apple (AAPL) and Intuit (INTU), to name a few, all allow developers to build software that hooks into their services.

But the cascade of companies opening up has created a new question for cash-conscious start-ups: which ones do you build for and which ones do you build for first?

“A lot of start-ups are wrestling with prioritizing their relatively scarce resources,” said Jim Hornthal, a partner at CMEA Capital and chairman of Triporati, a travel destination discovery service.

In the “not-too-distant past” companies could justify tackling most available platforms, said Hornthal, who founded online travel company Preview Travel, which Travelocity bought in 2000. “More likely today, the answer is something less than that,” he said. The decision often boils down to which ones a company “can’t afford not to support.”

Read the rest of this post

Must-Reads from other Websites

Panos Mourdoukoutas

Why Apple Should Buy China’s Xiaomi

Paul Graham

What I Didn’t Say

Benjamin Bratton

We Need to Talk About TED

Mat Honan

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

Chris Ware

All Together Now

Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The Sculpture on the Moon

About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Websites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other websites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

We also solicit original full-length posts and accept some unsolicited submissions.

Read more »