Mashery raises less than $1M for mashup controls; Yahoo’s BBAuth

We mentioned that San Francisco start-up Mashery had raised an angel round to help companies manage mashups, or integrations of two different software programs — for example Google Maps and Craigslist’s real estate listings.

VentureWire (sub req) has more details: Besides angel investor Jeff Claiver, others included First Round Capital, About founder Scott Kurnit, angel Ron Conway and Rose Tech Ventures. The amount was between $500,000 and $1 million.

Mashery’s service, available in November, aims to help companies manage the terms and conditions of their application programming interfaces, or APIs. Used by Web developers to create mashups and other applications, APIs describe how computer applications and software developers may access a set of functions without requiring access to the source code.

This is significant because it comes at a time when mashups are proliferating widely.

Indeed, Yahoo has just released a new product called BBAuth, a mechanism for non-Yahoo application developers to access Yahoo’s authentication mechanism.

Techcrunch has a piece about this, noting few mashups involve user data from secure sites (banking, for example) because these sites protect the data via a log-in.

BBAuth fixes that problem when it comes to accessing data locked up at Yahoo. Using the tools Yahoo provides, non-Yahoo applications can request a user to sign in to Yahoo and give permission for Yahoo user data to be sent to the non-Yahoo application.