Sachin Rekhi

Last year at the SocialMedia Business School I gave a presentation on Media APIs and how they could be leveraged to enhance existing experiences or build entirely new services around freely available media content. Since I have received many follow up questions, I thought I would take the opportunity to expand on the topic.

The most exciting news out of CES 2009 was the Palm announcement of the Palm Pre, webOS, and Palm Mojo Application Framework.

2008 was definitely a year of open platforms with the continued growth of the Facebook and OpenSocial communities, the unveiling of the iPhone and Android app stores, and the countless Twitter clients and mashups.

Yet I believe there is still considerable untapped opportunity in several promising platforms that have yet to see significant traction in terms of hype, developers, and ultimately end users.

So here is my list of the top underhyped platforms that I hope to see many entrepreneurs build on in 2009.

It's that time of year that everyone is putting together their predictions for 2009 and so I decided to do one of my own.

Over the past year I've had the opportunity to work with a variety of music startups. Not only with the two music startups I've been directly involved with (Anywhere.FM and imeem), but also countless music startups looking to leverage the imeem Media Platform APIs I manage at imeem. Based on what I've seen, there are three music verticals that I am bullish about and 5 exciting startups that have started to pursue them in 2008 and expect to see much more from them in the new year.

I recently took the time to build a web application on Google App Engine and wanted to share my thoughts on the experience and the pros and cons of Google App Engine as a web development platform.