Our own Jean Bedord highlighted the overall nature of mahsups and efforts to integrate content into business information services via what some call broadly "mashups." Wikipedia calls mashups a web-based application that combines content from two or more sources. There's not much new about mashups in a general sense - integration of content is at the core of the industry - but with affordable user technologies that allowed remixing of videos and music the general audience for aggregating content accelerated. Hurricane Katrina's explosion of user-generated mashups that leveraged application programming interfaces from Google Maps, Flickr and other sources. Jean highlighted an interesting example of content from public data records on Chicagocrime.org to allow citizens to understand where crime was occurring and what kind of crimes. A key problem resulting from mashups: what owns what, especially when people are creating derivative works.

In the enterprise mashups are progressing quickly to help businesses accelerate their efficiencies, as highlighted by Jean's panel. John Taschek VP of Market Strategy for Salesforce.com highlighted the Apex platform used by publishers of software and content vendors to develop services via SF.com's AppExchange platform. Instead of proprietary APIs and technologies mashups use standardized APIs that allow content to assemble content simply and effectively. In the process, how we think of integration is changing. It democratizes innovation, allowing communities instead of vendors to create valuable integrations. SF.com enables through its APIs integration into Google Maps, Skype and Sales Intelligence to allow SF.com users to create valuable contextualization of proprietary content both inside and outside of their own platform. Right now they're doing basic integration, but they're moving to provide further integration of ads and other key tools that will help to make for monetizable services. The key point is that nobody at SF.com prompted these integrations - innovation came from the growing ranks of Salesforce.com users.

Simon Bradstock, VP of Corporate Products for Dow Jones highlighted DJ's ability to support mashups. Within the Factiva interface Factiva integrates their content into a map display, an account planning tool from Factiva SalesWorks, which can be populated with external information. [COMMENT: this is traditional integration as far as I can see - very effective, but a closed platform.] Dow Jones wealth manager provides a customizable interface. Web services APIs are powerful but most have traditional development cycles that are slow to deploy. Factiva is working on "widgets" that allow them to embed information such as key executive profiles into other applications. Simon showed content integrated into a QED Wiki, and IBM-based mashup enabler that included conent from Factiva and Google Maps which is a true user-enabled mashup.

Tim Ramos, President and CEO of Before the Call, a platform that aggregates content with personalizing controls that allow salespeople to focus on their sales processes. Content is aggregated from Google Maps, YouTube, Factiva and other online portals to create applications such as geographic displays of prospects, reps familiar with the accoutnts, nearby restaurants for wining and dining and the "Glengarry Leads" button which gives the most likely closable leads.

It's interesting to see the transition of traditional business information services into environments in which online mashup tools are allowing both individual people to create applications as well as content companies who want to build more powerful business information applications. On the one hand you have traditional workflow integration powered by Factiva's powerful platform and then you have the open Web tools that allow content to be integrated from any content sources quickly and effectively. To some degree the capabilities offered by a platform such as Before the Call is emblematic of how a new generation of aggregators are enabling enterprise-based professionals to combine licensed content from any source in a way that is in general in line with existing licensing. But that's not going to be the case in all instances. As we tend to underscore content owners have to be ready to accelerate efforts to enable licensing of content on an on-demand basis so that content can flow to its most valuable contexts more effectively.

Labels: business information, mashups, SIIA Content Forum 2007