Mashape, The Etsy Of Cloud Services, Goes Beta; Lets You Monetize Your APIs In A Click

Mashape has a somewhat unusual backstory: The Italian startup spent two years looking for funding in its home country, only to be rebuffed at every turn. So, in 2009, it moved operations to Silicon Valley. The team found funding in less than three weeks. Granted, it was $100K, but it was enough to begin building a real service. Persistence, it seems, is key. (It also helps to have a great idea and position your business in a market that's on the rise.) As you may have noticed, APIs are all the rage these days . Twitter attracts 15 billion API calls per day, Google and Facebook were pulling in 5 billion per day as of last year, Amazon currently stores over 260 billion objects in S3, and Saleforce.com receives 50 percent of its traffic through its API. You get the picture. Mashape , which is going into private beta today, hopes to ride this API surge to victory through a marketplace makes it simple for developers to discover, distribute, and consume all things API.