StrikeIron Blog

Get ready for Mashup Madness!

StrikeIron’s March Mashup Contest, based on our live college basketball data API, is in full swing and the innovating has begun. If you haven’t heard about this, check it out at www.strikeiron.com/hoops

We are anxious to see what ideas emerge as a result of making data that has traditionally been locked up or otherwise unavailable now easily accessible in a 24x7 hosted environment over the Web that everyone can use. We have taken raw data sources and have delivered easy-to-integrate Web Services APIs to make this possible. In this particular case it is live college basketball scores, schedules, and statistical data (and a whole lot more) that updates every 60 seconds. This is the foundation of Web 2.0 and SOA-based innovation.

So while the contest appeals to the competitive gene in us all and captures the excitement of the NCAA March college basketball tournament, it is not really about college basketball at all. Rather it is about how when translating these concepts to other types of data, including business data, the same kind of innovation can occur. Once you remove the data integration step, the complexity of building applications, mashups, and Web sites around this data is dramatically reduced, allowing new value creation to flourish within a much larger audience.

For example, I quickly built the following mashup in Microsoft Excel using StrikeIron’s SOA Express for Excel (download for free) that tracks schedules, the latest news, results, poll data (with Excel charting capabilities), injuries, odds, and player statistics that change in real-time as the data is refreshed utilizing eight different tabbed worksheets: www.strikeiron.com/assets/soaworkbook/TSNNCAABasketballv1.zip.

Working with any Web service, it turns Excel in to a universal data consumption client in an environment that most business people are already fairly familiar and comfortable with. While it is far from the contest winner, it does demonstrate the value, flexibility, ease-of-use, and innovation that can be achieved when the ideas of data-as-a-service, a Web services delivery platform, and easy consumption solutions are all pulled together.

We are looking forward to tracking the contest, seeing the innovation that will occur, and crowning the eventual champions from each category.

StrikeIron Mashups are "Red Hot"

Note from the President: StrikeIron and Mashups are "Red Hot"

Mashups have received a considerable amount of airplay throughout the entire year, but the movement now seems to be picking up more steam than ever. We recently had our second mashup contest of the year hosted with IBM and saw some really innovative entries, including the winner from Apatar which integrated our Global SMS Web service with their own technology utilizing IBM's QEDWiki mashup platform to create a valuable Salesforce.com customer mobile communication solution.

Several other mashup contests have been announced by other companies, and there are all sorts of new mashup offerings rolling off the production lines such as Tibco's new enterprise opensource AJAX platform, Microsoft's Popfly, Google's Mashup Editor, Yahoo Pipes, and countless others.

So why are these mashups increasing in popularity and why the momentum now? Additionally, why are they gaining more and more traction within the enterprise?

A primary reason is an increasing understanding of the benefits that mashups can provide. Leveraging data from both inside and outside of the enterprise in new creative ways by a larger group of people within an organization (including knowledge workers, not just I.T.) enables time, resources, and technology to be leveraged in any way that they can - ideal of course for the bottom line.

Knowledge workers are recognizing that they can now participate in answering their own needs by building customized views into organizational data enhanced with external data and external functionality without having to wait in the IT queue (which in some organizations can be over a year). This provides a supercharged creative movement internally that allows business users to participate in providing their own short-term solutions, many of which can become prototypes for useful and more complete applications for the I.T. organization to distribute enterprise-wide. This in turn eases the I.T. burden, provides significant visibility into which data in the organization is deemed most useful by those within it, and also provides a greater deal of control for the I.T. organization as security at the API level is often easier than at the UI level.

Another equally important driver is the increased access to larger and more diverse sets of data, both internally and externally. Internally, more and more organizations are standing up APIs (with the proper governance of governance of course, sometimes within an SOA and sometimes not) creating a more fertile ground for mashups to occur. In addition, companies like ourselves are making more and more data sources available with less friction and greater accessibility and diversity of data than ever before. These factors and others are helping to form the perfect storm of mashups that is beginning to organize and will become stronger and stronger as time goes on.

The Mashup Ecosystem

StrikeIron recently participated in IBM's Mashup Ecosystem Summit event in San Francisco. The idea was to bring together the leading thinkers in the Mashup space to discuss what collective steps could be taken to help pave the way for increased customer benefit and adoption, especially in the areas of interoperability, and of course with the enterprise in mind.

Attendees other than IBM included StrikeIron, Coghead, Reuters, Accuweather, JackBe, Kapow, Mashery, SocialText, SnapLogic, and Programmable Web.

One of the challenges that surfaced at the summit is the term "mashup" itself. It sounds rough and inexact; characteristics not usually associated with enterprise IT priorities. Enterprise IT folks typically will cringe at the term, so coming up with a new one would be a good start.

While some folks point to subtle semantic differences between terms for this class of application for categorization, as I mention in this article, http://www.sdtimes.com/article/special-20070415-01.html, for the most part mashups, situational applications, composite applications, and to some extent RIAs (nothing that says an RIA can't be browser-driven) all have the same general purpose - to create more value by combining together information assets in creative ways and with new interfaces.

Some of the notes my colleagues shared (along with my own thoughts) on the challenges the mashup world faces include:

• Availability of services, the industry needs more -- services represent the building blocks.
• Need a definition for the essential ingredients for a successful mashup.
• What kind of analytics need to be in place to demonstrate success, ROI?
• How does the industry create widgets/gadgets that don't create new integration/interoperability problems?
• How do we overcome inconsistencies across multiple service implementations? (hint hint)
• Is the browser a constrained environment, and how can we best move beyond?
• What about the vast seas of copyrighted data that exist all over the Web, what issues might arise if utilized in ways other than intended.
• Who will decide the answers to all of these?
• How are enterprise users security concerns addressed?

The good news is that identifying the issues gets us half way to the answers, and the summit was a great step forward for the industry.  I look forward to answering and addressing these issues as mashups become more integral to the enterprise.

One-stop Shopping for Mapping Mashups

We have just made our Mapquest Driving Directions Web Service available, the first in several map-related Web services that will be available from StrikeIron. This is interesting not only in the types of mapping and route planning functionality that can now be intergrated into desktop applications on a per-use basis, but also because it is the first service where we are delivering images via the Web services API.

Of course, anybody can go to a browser these days to look up driving directions, but having them integrated into an application and automatically generated as part of a business process is useful. For example, driving directions can now be automatically generated as part of a CRM system, utilized to improve shipping and route planning efficiency, within mobile devices, and even automatically generated and printed with each order as a pizza comes out of the oven. Finally the giant city street map can be taken off the wall, and late/cold pizza can be a thing of the past.

As we make additional mapping functionality available, more advanced applications such as pinpointing network intrusions on a map, integrating with business intelligence applications, or even combining with our 24-hour accurate reverse telephone number lookup service could help plot a database of phone numbers on a map. In other words, it's great stuff and we are just at the beginning of combining mapping with other data sources that are callable from within desktop or Web applications.

Here is the WSDL: http://ws.strikeiron.com/MapQuest?WSDL

And a sample HTML application that utilizes it: http://www.strikeiron.com/sample/MapQuestRoutingSample/MapQuestRoutingSample.aspx

If you build anything creative that you would like us to promote and showcase, let us know!

ETel Telephony Mashup Contest

StrikeIron announced its telephony mashup contest, the first of its kind, this past week with O’Reilly Media. Three finalists will present their telephony mashups at ETel, the Emerging Telephony Conference, that begins February 27^th near San Francisco.

A mashup is an application where the data and/or functionality come from multiple sources and are presented/re-purposed in novel and often unintended yet useful ways. In the case of this contest, one of those sources is a telephony source.

There are two examples of telephony sources available from StrikeIron’s Web Services Marketplace.  The first is the Global SMS Web service, which enables text messages to be sent programmatically via its SOAP and REST-based Web services API. It supports over 400 carriers in 160 countries, and all you need is the mobile number of the recipient and the message to send along. It’s ideal for text message-based notification and alerting systems.

The Notify! Web service provides access to an Interactive Voice Messaging platform. It enables a computer-generated voice (including voices that represent different ages, gender, and country) notification to be sent to ANY phone, including mobile, VOIP, or land line. Not only is it a great way to alarm your friends with an unexpected computer generated voice message, but it is also another great notification mechanism enabling those without mobile devices to be reached, such as for appointment reminders, news alerts, and other timely notifications.

I’m excited to see some of the creativity that emerges, as the winning mashups are likely to be significantly different than the browser-based mashups we have been seeing. Along with (or instead of) a browser, the resulting mashup can occur within an IVR system, reporting results back via telephone (VOIP or otherwise).

There are lot of new mashup platforms emerging, such as Yahoo! Pipes (See Tim Reilly’s post at http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_and_filte.html/), Adobe’s Apollo, QEDWiki, Flex, and our own SOA Express for Excel. However, this contest should also see telephony mashup platforms shine such as TellMe, Sylantro, Angel.com, Voxeo, and Lignup.

I will be sure to list the winning mashups and a few other close finishers in the next couple of weeks.

Bob Brauer
President and CEO