ENTERPRISE MASHUPS: Hype & Reality – John Musser, Programmable Web
John talked about the what, why, who, where, and how companies are planning to use enterprise mashups in the upcoming year. He explained that enterprise mashups are lightweight apps developed from within an enterprise. These can be built by IT or business staff. They are created in days, not months and use web oriented architecture. These mashups often use internal and external web services and occur at the data, login and/or presentation layers. His examples included ways to save money, save time, save effort, and how this can reduce the IT backlog. Composite applications often resemble portals and dashboards. John described some of the external and internal drivers for bringing web 2.0 to the enterprise. Those drivers include: open APIs, Software as a Service, rich internet applications, reducing IT complexity, and greater ROI. He talked about making decisions to allow non-IT staff to develop their own mashups using existing composer tools. This could be the Excel spreadsheets of this era and the start of the decentralized IT. Some of the tools include: pipes, RSSBus, SnapLogic, Kapow, Dapper, Etelos, Bungee, Google, Proto, and widget builder. Some of the trends to watch include: open web technologies, SOA, WOA, API’s on ProgrammableWeb.com, SLAs, and the mashups occurring in vendor software (example: salesforce.com + facebook.com = FaceForce.com).
Adding “Where” to Mobile and Web Applications – Ryan Sarver, Director of consumer products
Skyhook Wireless / Loki
Ryan talked about how location comes in many flavors. Locations can be blurred by the way you choose to present them. For example, you may want to only reveal a city, neighborhood, or a quadrant of the location (ex. Ben checked into Soma, San Francisco, CA) for general public while still sharing exact location with friends. He gave some general rules of thumb for geotargeting such as: offering everything you can, allowing the user to change it, knowing your clients, and degrading gracefully. He talked about various methods of geolocation such as triangulation. This method determines the position of an unknown object relative to known objects. Wi-Fi is accurate to 20 meters, GPS accuracy to 1 meter, and cell tower accuracy to 2000 meters. There are some companies who try to use a method called Associate. This is where an IP address is matched to a physical location. This is not an exact science and is best used for city-level geotargeting. There are many false positives and is easily misrepresented when VPN is involved.
Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia
Gregarious Narian, Jeremiah Owyang,Brian Solis, Stowe Boyd
This was a very interesting session, I was jam-packed into a room of Twitter nuts! The seats were full, people were standing in back and sitting in the isles around the perimeter of the room. What could this be all about? This session helped to explain the relatively new terms, micromedia and microblogging. Micromedia refers to applications such as twitter, pounce and jaiku that have been written for mobile devices. Microblogging is what is done in applications such as twitter, pounce, or Jaiku. Only 140 characters can be entered at one time in twitter and then the send button must be pushed. This burst of text is considered to be a micro-blog. This microblog is then sent to mobile devices or micromedia. Businesses are recognizing the importance of monitoring twitter streams for better customer service and product development. Businesses are also finding that twitter is a great tool for collaborating on projects when users are spread out in various locations. Tweetscan is a search tool developed to help search and feed users with the twitter streams they prefer. Though some success stories were shared where twitter was used during an emergency and firefighters were deployed to a scene from a feed sent through twitter. It was emphasized that the uptime is not guaranteed and therefore should not be used as a replacement for 911 and emergency calls. Throughout this presentation, attendees were encouraged to send twitter notes to the presenters so they could reply to questions in real-time. These twitter feeds were displayed on the presentation screens at the front of the room and were quite funny at times.
