Case Studies - Interfaces

• Twilio provides APIs to automate voice, text, and email as a service. Customers can build their own business around these APIs. Among these services, Twilio digitizes VoIP + text infrastructure, machine-to-machine communication, machine-to-people communication, and bridging analog to digital. As of May 2023, Twilio was worth $11 billion.

• Solidity. The protocols underlying blockchain implementations are good examples of decentralized Interfaces. Solidity, a scripting language, turns the Ethereum ecosystem into a decentralized application-development platform. 

• Google Adwords. Developed nearly a quarter-century ago, Google Ads is an online advertising platform by which advertisers bid to display advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. Adwords has the capability to place ads either in Google search results or on non-search sites, including websites, videos, and mobile apps.

• Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume, has no headquarters, and all employees work remotely. This unique organizational structure makes good Interfaces a necessity, as does the fact that Coinbase’s core business is powered by a cryptocurrency exchange platform and used by more than 100 million customers.

• Templafy. Since 2014, this fast-growing business B2B SaaS company has established itself as a global powerhouse that helps clients process business content—including documents, presentations, and emails—and turn it into smart templates (i.e., Interfaces). Templafy serves more than 2.8 million users, including such enterprise customers as KPMG, IKEA, and BDO.

• Australia’s Canva, whose MTP is “Empowering the world to design,” is a free (for basic service) online design platform that makes it very easy for anyone to rapidly create quality designs, such as posters, flyers, presentations, documents, social media images, etc., through a library of thousands of graphical templates that can be accessed via a drag-and-drop Interface.

• A particularly innovative Interface, Amsterdam’s Miro is a collaborative platform that helps people work together, from anywhere at any time, at scale, using virtual whiteboards. The company claims 35 million users, including 99% of the Fortune 500.