Over the course of this summer, we have embarked on a roadshow to get in touch with leaders and innovators in mobility across two different continents, three different countries, and four different cities. Gathering people in San Jose, USA, Berlin and Hannover, Germany, as well as Paris, France (with the help of the awesome team of Five by Five), has given us the opportunity to gain insights from very different markets and further specify our vision of the future of Mobility as a Service.

15 years after front-runners Amazon and eBay pushed for APIs, and 10 years after the proliferation of API management layers such as Apigee (acq. by Google), Mashery (acq. by Tipco), Layer 7 (acq. by CA Technologies), and 3Scale (acq. by Redhat), the API economy is at the beginning of a new wave. Platforms like programmeableweb.com (acq. by Mulesoft) reached peak popularity around 2010-2012, but has been replaced by Product Hunt, Mashape, Github, Stackoverflow, and Google searches for API information.

Today, many of us own a car, but advancing mobility systems may eliminate the need for everyone to have their own car. Ownership is moving from single ownership to fleets - a model that many business have already adopted. Think rental cars, Ubers, van or truck fleets—even city buses.

Automotive companies do not use their data to its full potential. This makes them not only miss out on billion dollar revenue opportunities, they also fall behind their customers' expectations regarding state of the art user experiences in automotive.

Over the past century, automotive companies have perfected one specific process: building cars. Today’s cars are more secure and fuel efficient than ever before. But they aren’t truly smart.