Piers Jones

Mashup demo writeup

Will try some live some live blogging from the mashup demo event taking place this time around at the cc club in London.

(Added later - this was a list typed in as I watched some very quick fire presentations so my apologies in advance for any lack of detail about each product. If you'd like a more extensive write-up on the products that demo'd then please go to blognation for example:

http://uk.blognation.com/2007/10/02/turn-off-your-web-tv-and-go-and-do-something-less-boring-instead/

http://uk.blognation.com/2007/10/04/podcast-meecard-puts-the-online-you-within-reach/)

 

1)enterprise mashup tools provider called from serena software. a yahoo pipes . popfly for business?

2) mobestar mobile social networking, fully hosted whitelabel solution.

3) 15 second tv. can place your face in a video clip. personalised media

4) Babel tv, set top box that gives you internet on the tv. music, files, photo etc. Everything is stored centrally. Biggest potential of everything shown?

5) welovelocal, social reviews site which includes an API

6) Rummble, time out guide written by your friends, social reviews. trusted  reviews  via a network.

7) Magpie - brand sentiment analysis based on tracking blogs, sites and forums. Could the hugh's bluemonster be kicking in? microsoft seems to be top for brand buzz.

8) Inspire design.  Brand design  company , nothing  to demo.

9) bondaii - pervasive identity computing. Personal identity server stores your personal information which can be accessed via the mobile phone. use case is linking two profiles together of friend's mobile phone numbers, then automatically updated when the number changes. Not sure on openid integration.

10) mee card - unify your personal identity. A snippet of your youness online. Works with openid.

11) roll sense content recommendations for blogs which recommends content based on related content on the blog roll, then creates a network of blogs.

12) fav.or.it making it easier for people to leave blog comments and comment on rss feeds, also an RSS reader.

13) Kwiqq - social website builder platform.

14) Tipped  Social Reviews - trusted ratings and reviews of venues,  3rd social reviews site for london so looks like a crowded space?

15)   edocr - allows documents that are not published online to be accessed, converts documents to flash which can be embedded on blogs etc Not sure on differences between this and .pdf.

16) testcard.tv allows you to find the tv that you want to watch online. aggregates all the results from you tube etc into one place via a standard player. Quite liked this one, simple idea done well from the demo.

and thats it for now

Update: Edocr presentation here;

 

Popfly here we come...

Unexpectedly got an invite to the popfly alpha test last night. Really looking forward to some mashup creation a little later in the day.

Thanks Microsoft.

Popfly mashups, dont underestimate the power of a good user interface

The recently announced MicroSoft popfly mashup and web page tool looks good. So far the reaction I've read seems to be that this is only for individuals and maybe small companies who lack development resource. Microsoft would seem to agree.

I don't see why it shouldn't be even more widely used than that. I'm sure that many people with a keen interest in online but who can't code (like me!) would love to get their hands on this type of service.

With the right user interface it should be easy to pull together mashups and web pages without having to spend hours with the code. So, why couldn't this approach be used in all businesses?

It would democratise creativity for anyone in an organisation that has an interesting idea and wants to try it out online. An element of collaboration and reuse is also good for innovation. It looks like a space to play with ideas in a framework which I imagine will be well tested and robust.

There will always be a need for excellent developers, especially for complex products.  However sometimes for ideas in the early stages you just want to pull content (API's?) together quickly, get them out there into the real world and see where the interest is. Popfly might be a good way to achieve those goals.

Of course I haven't tried it yet!  I've requested an alpha log in along with the rest of the world so will see how long it takes as I think it's a pretty limited alpha.

Mashups, it pays to be a big or a small fish

A couple of interesting articles that I picked up today on the subject of mashups. The first from Dion Hinchcliff looking at Mashups as the future of software development, the second from Janko Roettgers at GigaOM on whether the ability to create a new site using a mashup would be a useful litmus test to assess startups against.

It seems likely that the use of mashups will vary according to the size and resources of the people or groups involved. The smaller you are the easier they will be to set up, being bigger means you have the resources to create data sets that no one else has. Maybe being in the middle is a problem? as Nat mentions there is no thing as a free API.

Individuals - may want to create mashups using Yahoo pipes and widgets to create very light weight and flexible services either for themselves or their community

Small companies - may want to mashup as a way of getting quick to market with a new product, by mashing up data and services from larger providers.

Large companies - are still working out how to use mashups for themselves but may want to concentrate on opening out their large and hard to re-create data sets via APIs, RSS or as SaaS (software as a service) so that other smaller companies or individuals can mashup their data for them. The innovation (or mashup) can then take place elsewhere using their data. If they are really smart then they will be gathering more intelligence from the collective use of their data by many individuals to further enhance what they have.

If you are the one mashing up someone else's data then the question to ask would be 'what value am I adding for the user?' and 'what stops someone else doing the same?'. It's not hard to envisage lots and lots of small companies that could make a good business out of repackaging data for someone else if they are providing good services which meet user needs. Of course if you are doing it, then it's pretty easy for someone else to do the same thing.

Where is my RSS?

I have been doing a little reading around GeoRSS.

It is looking increasingly important to tag your RSS feeds with 'Where' information,  or in Web 3 speak use an "RDF vocabulary for representing the latitude and longitude of spatially-located things".

Apparently Yahoo pipes can now use GeoRSS and can output pipes in a yahoo maps format or as a .kml format that can be used by Googlemaps.

So if you want your data mashed-up into more interesting forms on maps  GeoRSS looks the way to go.

 

Having  done the reading I'm going to have to set some time aside to see how I can start GeoTagging the RSS feeds from this blog to see what simple GeoRSS mapping applications I can put on top, like this one or this one.

UPDATE:

You can even read GeoRSS from within SecondLife

Mashup event & digital identity a summary

I tried some live blogging notes from the mashup event over on my vox blog. Here is a summary of what I took away from the discussion;

1. Open ID might not be the answer to all our prayers when it comes to identity theft, but if it means I dont have to remember a million usernames and passwords to log into my favourite sites then I'm all in favour of it. I imagine it will take off fairly fast this year.
2. There is obviously a lot of concern about the security of your online identity and I was surprised to find that fraudsters can make on average £85,000 if they can steal key information like usernames, mothers maiden names etc.
3. We need a wider debate about identity an how to manage it in an online world and I fully support Luke's efforts to get the conversation started. I'll be tracking his blog with interest