Enterprise Mash-ups

Mashups are getting a lot more focus at the present time. I believe that the reason for this is that mashups can deliver to the 3Rs

* Return value quickly
* Rapid deployment
* Reuse of existing capabilities

As part of my understanding in this area a pulled together a slide show on the evolution of mashups.

The next steps from this slide show are to better understand the value a corporation receives from exposing their data as an API to the public. One way of doing this would be to understand the actions/interactions that a business partner or customer performs with the corporation, from here we can identity chunks of function that should be considered for exposure.

We always have to understand the hard dollar return of any investment and it is unclear how that value will be realized. There is a sentiment umoung the Social Media community that people just need to "get it" but this doesn't help a financial case.

Once we can justify exposing internal APIs then I believe that the corporation will enjoy additional benefits. However, there are only a few examples where this is documented e.g. NBA web site opening a store which relies totally on Amazon. Amazon didn't even know that the NBA were doing this as they were using Amazon's APIs.

I think we can say that "innovation" will happen when APIs are exposed to the public but it is still unclear how to quantify these additional benefits.

Initially we will be looking at customer retention and customer loyalty as the by products of delivering a Web 2.0 experience that better serves the customers needs. There ain't anything new about ensuring that the customer is satisfied!

Here is an Enterprise Mashups slideshow please have a flick through. If you enjoy it please share with your friends and colleagues.

| View | Upload your own

My Damn Channel

I have been a close observer of the Media Industry and in particular broadcasters and professional media producers such as Fox and MGM.

2007 and 2008 have been interesting in terms of media distribution with YouTube in dominance but a bunch of other web sites offering video such as Current TV, Revver and now The Damn Channel.

I am a real fan of new media content producers and broadcasters as the methods they employee show us the future of content creation. Basically a blurring between the amateur, pro-sumer and professional content creators. The advantage to us is that the audience (should) get(s) a great experience and a huge amount of choice.

There are challenges with approach which relate to the quality of the output. In order for these new media channels to work in the long term the quality has to be of a good standard. If The Damn Channel lives up to its billing of a good quality media site then is will have a prosperous future.

Here is interview by Sarah Austin with Rob Barnett of The Damn Channel.



You have to check out "You suck at Photoshop".

Blogged with the Flock Browser

My Tag cloud

Wordle is a cool little tool for building your tag cloud from del.icio.us. (thanks to wonderwebby for blogging on this). I thought I would give it a go and see what mine would look like and here it is!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Augmented Reality

Yesterday at IBM Auckland I attended the a Retail industry session.  The keynote speaker was Myron Flickner the Global Industry leader for Disruptive technologies.

One of the most interesting developments for me was Augmented Reality.  This is where virtual world constucts, web sites and video technology meet.  It allows us to take a real life image and in real-time paint additional information over the top.  Below are some examples of the technology from YouTube.

This shows a path for enhancing our experience wherever we interact with a physical object - wow!


Augmented Reality via a mobile phone


Augmented Reality via Glasses

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Wot no RSS?

I am just researching Government 2.0 and I was looking at the New Zealand Digital Strategy website.  I thought I should subscribe to the RSS for this site so I looked at the URL field in 'FLOCK" where it tells me about the RSS fields available and to mu horror there isn't one!!  It just struck me that the digital strategy web site for the county doesn't have an RSS feed, I hope this is an oversite!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Virtual Worlds

I have just returned from the first International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking ICCMSN . It was a really interesting conference. I will blog on aspects of the conference in later posts but for this post I want to focus on Virtual Worlds. First of all I want to highlight the press release from IBM about a pilot project between IBM and Linden Labs. I think the value to IBM in doing this is it allows them to experiment with Virtual worlds as another communication channel that will sit next to Video, Voice , IM conferencing. I believe that it will also be used to provide a construct to deliver education and training.

During the ICCMSN Telecom and Otago announced a partnership whereby Telecom would provide the hardware to allow Otago and other New Zealand universities to run anOpenSim server implementation and utilising KAREN for the network infrastructure. This looks like an exciting development and seems to be comparible to the IBM and Linden Labs announcement.

Clearly the ideal situation for New Zealand Universities would be for Linden Labs to allow them to run their own instance of SecondLife. As an obverser it looks as though the battle between SecondLife and OpenSim has truely begun. I don't believe that this is a great division (Corporate Vs Open) as it goes against the ideals of modern IBM.


Here is a video of Australian Open in SecondLife as an example of some of IBM's Second Life initiatives.

I joined Flock

I have finally caught up with the rest of the Social media folk and joined Flock and I have to say that I am really enjoying it. The main reason being that I don't have to log onto loads of sites everyday, its all done for me.

Have a look at the flock video and join up if you fancy it.

logged with the Flock Browser

TuPac and the Police Riff

I was looking at the post on Facebook going open where I added an MTV "Mashup". I forgot how much I liked the song Tupac Vs BIG remixed with the Police "Walking on the Moon" riff so I hunted out the full track on YouTube as sung by PDiddiy. Not my usual post but thats blogging!

Live Twittering

I must remember this page as it is great!! More to come on how to use Web 2.0 tools at conferences

http://livetwitting.com/

click on!

Firefox at work

My primary laptop at work (T60p) has a problem in that the screen is Kaputt. I have now switched to my secondary laptop (T60) which has the company build loaded onto it. Now comes the task of configuring it for my usage. This really means that I have to go and get the Firefox plugins. I just wanted to share with you the plugins I use with firefox:

- Scribefire for blogging
- Meebo for Public Instant Messaging
- Dashblog to grab content
- Del.icio.us
- Video Downloadhelper for downloading videos
- Schrink URLs using Shrinkify
- Better Gmail2 for
- Twitterbar for twitter
- Theme
- Linkedin and Facebook

I also use a bunch of internal IBM plugins such as

- My Activities (Lotus Connections)
- Cattail (document sharing aka. slideshare)
- Dogear this (Lotus Connections)

Facebook goes Open

I was looking at the press that Facebook delivered some open source components it is all very interesting. The front runners in this space are Facebook, OpenSocial and IBM Mashup Central - I am wondering how or if organisations will jump into bed with Facebook and OpenSocial to deliver Social Networking sites. Gartner certainly thinks that they will and points out that the collaboration space will see more niche players entering the market to the detriment of IBM and Microsoft. I think Gartner may well be right but we still hit the same old problem of how do I aggregate many services in one place? Outside of the IBM wall I can see LinkedIn and Facebook really delivering a mashup environment but the question will be how agnostic will they be? As a mashup standard is developed will they follow? who knows but it is fun to see how this technology area progresses.

Lets have a love in and mashup together. - enjoy the MTV music mashup vid.