Mashups are hot. A mashup is essentially a Web site or an application that brings together information from various sources, making some useful or enlightening data spring to life in the process. Both regular users and businesses are using mashups to get smarter.

• Mashups for fun or more
  
  Mashups can help Internet users plan a trip, find a house or learn about the link between political donations and votes.
• Mashups help businesses
  
  Thanks to underlying API (application programming interface), mashup can meld together all sorts of business data to give entreprises a clearer view of their environment.

According to some estimates, 30% of all Internet searches are people-related. To “Google somebody” is now such a common practice that it is part of the vernacular.

Hoping to overtake the search giant, several start-ups are exploring this promising niche. Among people search engines, specialization is already at work. LinkedIn and ZoomInfo look for business executives within their own network or beyond. UpScoop goes searching for people who are in your address book. Other engines (ProfileLinker, Streakr, Wink) basically trawl the main social networks. One of the most promising start-ups is Spock which should launch its engine within weeks with 100 million profiles. Atelier met Spock’s CEO Jaideep Singh at their spartan Redwood City offices for a chat and a demo.

Search on Spock.com

Isabelle Boucq, for Atelier

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Mashups can help Internet users plan a trip, find a house or learn about the link between political donations and votes.

With summer finally here, Yahoo’s Trip planner is the high-tech way to prepare a vacation. Plug in a destination and dates: this mashup application will pull in maps, hotels and restaurants, suggested activities in the visited cities as well as the itineraries of other users for inspiration. It brings all the needed tools in one central location from the planning to the sharing of the trip with friends.

Yahoo Trip Planner

Lending Craigslist a visual component it lacks, MapsKrieg mashes up the real estate ads from Craigslist with maps that let you chose a location and click on the description. Craigslist has inspired several mashup creators with sites like Listpic which emphasizes photos in the listings and HousingMaps which also organizes real estate ads on a map.

MapsKrieg

Here is something a little different for the Star Wars fans out there. In time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first movie, Lucasfilm is letting enthusiasts edit and remix scenes using 250 clips as their palette. It is all on the Starwars.com Web site. This is a smart way for Lucasfilm to bring fans to its site and let them have some creative fun. In a similar way, Eyespot is a video mixing Web site where music fans can create videos using legally-available materials. Giving back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, it should be noted that mashups came from the world of pop music. DJs have long mixed songs together to create their own new version.

Let’s get serious again. Mashups have become a way to track campaign and special-interest money, giving voters a way to keep track of elected officials. The site MAPLight.org “brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, providing an unprecedented window into the connections between money and politics.”. The site covers the California Legislature and U.S. Congress. Its database combines three sets of data: bill texts and legislative voting records, supporting and opposing interests for each bill and campaign contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics. By bringing this information together, the site “illuminates” the connection between money and politics.

At GeoCommons, you can create your own intelligent maps calling upon a geodata repository with over 2 billion location attributes, 35,000 variables & 1,500 data sets. For example, it is possible to answer questions such as “What is the university town which has the lowest crime rate?”, “Where is the hippest neighborhood in San Francisco?” or “Has there been a meth lab bust in my area?” This site can also help businesses answer geo-related questions. On GeoCommons, users are encouraged to share their own data sets as well as to create new maps and to embed them on their own site.

For the mashup enthusiast with no programming skills, Microsoft came up with Popfly, a tool to build and share mashups, gadgets and applications which is currently in beta. Google already has its Google Maps mashup builder and Yahoo offers Yahoo Pipes which focuses on combining RSS feeds.

Looking for more? The site ProgrammableWeb lists nearly 2,000 mashups geared to fishermen, bicyclists, Italian food lovers or beers enthusiasts.

Isabelle Boucq for Atelier

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Thanks to underlying API (application programming interface), mashup can meld together all sorts of business data to give entreprises a clearer view of their environment.

What do you get when you mix on-demand CRM software Salesforce.com and Google Maps? You get your sales reps directions to their meetings and much more. That’s what Salesforce integrator Arrowpointe offers with its mashup. The application creates a new tab in Salesforce.com to display the location of each account, shows color-coded leads and creates all sorts of customized maps.

Salesforce.com has inspired a slew of other mashups: Skype for AppExchange launches Sype calls within Salesforce, ShareOffice provides on-demand desktop applications integrated with the CRM software and Infopia is an auction management tool that interacts with Salesforce and eBay. On the face of it, there seems to be a high demand for mashup services from the Salesforce.com community.

One step further, Denodo is a Spanish company that has been working on real time information extraction, integration and retrieval since the 1990s. Today it is offering its Denodo Data Mashup which it describes as the “agile creation of new services by integrating existing data from all kind of sources (not only structured and internal data, but also unstructured or semi structured content on the Internet).”

In a recent podcast explaining the benefits of mashups to prospects, Denodo’s VP of marketing Suresh Chandrasekaran enthusiastically declared that “Superior Data is 90% of the battle! Enterprise Data Mashups combine data from any source, automatically adapt to website changes, structure the unstructured data, and build unique correlations and virtual data views for extending the reach of BI, single customer views and more.” Among the company’s clients are financial institutions, government agencies and media companies. The company opened offices in Palo Alto in 2006.

Another IT company jumping on the mashup bandwagon is FireScope. A couple months ago, it announced that its namesake product, which analyses and reports on networked systems installed around the world, would include mashup capabilities. “As a mashup solution, FireScope allows IT workers to access the tools and information they need most. Workers can pull together network tools; third-party applications such as firewall administration programs or helpdesk systems; collaboration tools including wikis, forums and shared calendars,” explained the company in a release.

Mashup, a new model of software development

Google recently touted mashup as the future of software development. Even though one advantage of mashups is their low development costs (after all, the developer is usually using open tools and data), the question remains of the business model for those building new mashups. Several models exist: advertising, lead generation and affiliate programs, transaction-based mashups, subscriptions, premium services. In the meanwhile, mashup creators can attend Mashup Camp, an event held July 16 and 17 in the Silicon Valley.

Isabelle Boucq for Atelier

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Founded by the man who brought us Expedia, Zillow is a “predictive real estate” site. After 16 months online, Zillow covers 72 million American homes. It all started in Seattle.

Rich Barton started the travel site Expedia because he felt that Internet should make it easier to book a flight or reserve a hotel room without calling a travel agent. After he left that company, he happened to be looking for a new home in Seattle. He got that feeling again: how can Internet help a prospective buyer, or seller for that matter, research the market?

Every night, Zillow updates its “Zestimates” on 72 million American homes (the team is working hard to cover all estimated 91 million family homes in the U.S.). Some of the 100 data points entering into the mix don’t change (square footage of the house and lot, number of rooms,…). What does change is the sale price of similar houses in the vicinity. To gather this information, Zillow works with companies that collect this public data from the 3,000 counties in the U.S. Until Zillow, only professionals had access to the information.

“We clean up the data and enter it into our algorithm. Every home gets a home page,” explains Amy Bohutinsky, director of communications at Zillow. “Since the launch, we have added new features. Homeowners can update the information, either privately or publicly. Already 750,000 of them have done it to mention a remodelled kitchen or other features that add value to their home. They can also signal that their home is for sale. In December, we added a “make me move” price.” This above-market price has already resulted in a few sales, according to Bohutinsky.

Unlike Expedia which is an ecommerce site, Zillow will not sell houses, a much too emotional and important decision to make online. The revenue model is based on advertising. Besides the traditional banner ads for brokerage firms, home improvement stores and car companies, the company recently introduced what it calls EZ ads. “Using their credit card, landscapers or other local businesses can create their ad online. Over time, we think it will be 50-50 between banner ads and EZ ads,” says Bohutinsky of the promising ultra-localized ads.

When surveying a neighborhood, users get a typical satellite view. They also get a more useful view taken from an airplane, courtesy of Virtual Earth from neighbor Microsoft. A new feature allows prospective buyers to ask questions about the home of their dream. The next step is to make it possible to ask questions about the neighborhood. “I recently bought a home here. I used Zillow of course. But it was not until the first summer days that I could talk to my neighbors on the lawn and get a lot of information about the area. This feature will be very useful,” predicts Bohutinsky.

Of the 150 employees working at Zillow (in a prime real estate location in downtown Seattle with a breathtaking view of the Puget Sound), the majority are developers. Zillow combs the company blog and does focus group, looking for features users need. The company is focused on adding the homes still missing from its site. Future plans might include development abroad. For now, it savors its 4,2 million monthly visitors, attracted to the site by word of mouth.

Isabelle Boucq for Atelier

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On one hand, new content is created for the Web, both by amateurs and TV professionals curious about the new medium. On the other, old media have realized that an online presence helps their shows and series connect with viewers. In another development, TV itself will increasingly be delivered over the Internet.

• Made-for-the-net: a complement to TV
  The Internet gives old shows new life and current shows a way to involve viewers in a way TV never could.
• Made for the net: IPTV is revving up
  Convergence is finally here. For what else is triple play, the delivery of Internet, phone and TV over the same connection? Providers can deliver all three at lowered costs, but deployment has been slower than expected.
• Made-for-the-Net: new content tailored to the Web audience
  Whether amateur or professionally-produced, some content with the ambition to capture sizable audiences is made for the Net and for the Net only.

The Internet gives old shows new life and current shows a way to involve viewers in a way TV never could.

Have you heard of minisodes? Get ready. Sony is about to release its Minisode Network, initially an exclusive on MySpace. Minisodes are quick versions of old TV shows like Charlie’s Angels boiled down to five minutes for Web audiences. Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett-Majors andJaclyn Smith have a meeting with Charlie on the intercom and get right to work. After a couple of fights and chases, they get the bad guy. The end.

“We’ve been looking for a legitimate way to make money from our library. Something that could bring new life to shows that have been on the shelf for awhile,” Steve Mosko, president of Sony Television, told The New York Times. All Sony needs to do is some quick editing. Surfing on the user-generated content feel, Sony is looking for an edgy look. “You could almost look at this and say a group of college kids put this together,” said Mocko. If it is a success, Sony might launch its very own Minisode Network later.

Using the Internet to breathe new life into old shows is nothing new. AOL and Warner Brothers launched In2TV last year. Of the dozens of classic TV shows and cartoons available for free, Wonder Woman seems to be the most popular. Advertising is the backbone of In2TV.

The first service the Internet can do for TV series is let their fans watch at a convenient time. Just go to the sites from ABC, NBC or CBS. Full episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Friday Night Lights, The New Adventures of Old Christine and many more are routinely available online. NBC even offers “webisodes” of The Office to keep viewers watching during seasons.

But there are more ways to hook in viewers. Some strategies provide them more information about the shows (photo galleries, bios, episode summaries). But other tools seek to involve them and get them to participate: message boards and wikis where they can exchange about their favorite shows, games and other ways for them to participate actively (CBS gave viewers 15 seconds to record a message to Bob Parker, the retiring host of The Price is Right).

In an interesting twist, the Internet has even given audiences a way to pressure networks into keeping shows on the air. One example is Veronica Mars, a CW show that survived only because loyal fans rallied and lobbied via the Internet. It is doubtful that a pre-Internet letter campaign on behalf of the show would have yielded the same results.

And then there are the examples of Internet celebrities that made the move to the small screen. They were literally discovered online. Such was the happy destiny of Stevie Ryan, an actress who became famous on YouTube as Little Loca and who just landed a job on CW’s show Online Nation where she will be reviewing – what else? – “the best, funniest and most bizarre amateur Internet video clips.” She followed in the footsteps of Lisa Donovan, aka LisaNova, who now is on Mad TV or Andy Samberg who joined the Saturday Night Live cast. Expect more Internet-made celebrities to cross the border.

Isabelle Boucq for Atelier

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