The “Jump” e-bikes in the city of London have had Lime decals and tags applied to them in the last six months or so, as the business and physical assets have transferred over to Lime.

Matt Webb’s Thingscon keynote introduced me to the notion of “Jobs below the API” as coined by Peter Reinhardt in his excellent 2015 blog post “replacing middle-management with APIs”

As I spotted them, the Jump bikes resonated with this – a fleet of physical objects in the city that had moved from one distant company to another beneath the API, probably re-branded and maintained by humans beneath another…