I know I’m probably not allowed to say this, it’s like saying you actually prefer one kid over the next, but I immediately liked Brian, a Partner at Florist One.
His story is the kind of story that means mesh is doing exactly what mesh is meant to do- inspire!
Brian has been attending mesh from the start, this will be his sixth year attending, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you he looks forward to it like it’s Christmas morning.
He was suffering, like a lot of you out there, not finding conferences that really captured what was going on with Web 2.0 in terms of social media, user generated content and the participatory web. Intro. ..mesh conference!
Florist One’s API is a direct result of Brian’s “mesh” learning.
In learning about APIs, he thought about they could be applied to Florist One – they are an online florist that delivers flowers through local florists in the U.S. and Canada. They had an affiliate program where they paid affiliate partners on flowers they would sell for them. They ran their program like a traditional affiliate program – with links that take a visitor from the affiliate’s site to their site where the visitor makes the purchase. The affiliate is paid a commission on the sale.
With the Florist One API, a partner such as Stewart Enterprises, a large operator of funeral homes in the U.S., can create a flower storefront directly on their website. For example, Stewart’s Garden of Memories website offers flowers using the Florist One API – the visitor never has to leave the Garden of Memories to make a purchase. The order is sent to Florist One via the API and they handle every aspect of order fulfillment and customer service.
The Florist One API can also be used to build mobile applications on any mobile operating system to let users of the applications send florist-delivered flowers through their phones. Florist Now is a mobile application built by an affiliate that is available through iTunes that let’s you send flower nationwide through your iPhone or iPad. Mobile Florist is another application built by an affiliate using the API for the HP webOS operating system.
There are many uses of the Florist One API including Facebook applications, dating websites, helping corporations and helping good causes. Their API let’s our partners offer flowers directly and it creates new and easy revenue streams for them.
The Florist One API fundamentally changes flower buying in many ways – mainly in that flower buying moves across the internet and trust is leveraged as the visitor never has to leave a website or application to make a purchase.
The release of the Florist One API and their presence at mesh this year as a sponsor is like coming full circle.
It helps that Brian is also amazingly prompt, extremely hard working and a really really nice guy. Make sure you take some time to connect with Brian next week.
These are the stories that inspire US.
After a hiatus, we decided to bring back “15 Minutes of Fame” this year as a way to help put the spotlight on the growing number of start-ups doing interesting things. We were delighted to receive a flurry of applications from a wide variety of start-ups. It made life difficult for our judges who were given the challenge of boiling it down to six selections.