Last week we released five new widgets on Greenhouse from partner Strikeiron. For those of you unfamiliar with Strikeiron, they host a set of useful services that businesses can 'rent'. For example, rather than have to write an 'address verification' function or a 'Credit Check' service, you can purchase those services-- typically based upon the number of hits you need (per month or year).
The widgets we released from Strikeiron are as follows:
These widgets wrap several of Strikeiron's 'lite' web services, which customers can play around with for free. So what can you do with these services? Well, below is an example of something I built really quickly using the Census Information widget and IBM Mashup Center. The mashup is pretty simple. Enter in a zipcode to see a chart of the age distribution of the population, as well as a chart of the racial makeup for that population.
I happen to live in a town on the coast of New Hampshire, which I perceive to be extremely homogenous and also a bit on the old side. My perceptions are clearly backed up by the data shown below: Rye, NH
The makeup of my town is very different from where my sister lives in California, which is more racially balanced: Salinas, CA
For those of you interested in playing around with this mashup yourselves, you can do so by going to the Mashup Center catalog on Greenhouse. Once there, search for a page called "Strikeiron Census" and import it into your Mashups environment. I also encourage you to try charting other data from the Census service, including % of male/female, # of children, total households, etc.
2- The Greenhouse Webinar last week (July 24) was canceled due to an big outage in our Westford labs due to some severe storms. This has been rescheduled to this coming Thursday, July 31st- same time - 11am EST.
Today I am going to be presenting in a first of several webcasts about Mashup Center on Greenhouse. Today's webcast starts at 11am EST and the title is "IBM Mashup Webcast - Come learn to Mash!" Basically, I will be providing a high level overview and demonstration of IBM Mashup Center.
Here is more information: Conference telephone numbers: Confirmation Code: 8804398 Participants: 888-554-1430, 719-867-0352
Unyte Web Conference Information 1. Go to the URL -http://www.sametimeunyte.com/join/?schedid=3336625 2. Enter your name and email address 3. Click the 'Log In' button *If this is your first meeting with Unyte Meeting we recommend that you perform a system check to ensure a successful conference. To begin click: http://www.conferenceservers.com/browser/?brand=SametimeUnyteMeetingProM
We will repeat this session on July 24 for those of you who can't make it today. Then, in August, we will have two sessions on more of a deep dive on mashup creation.
Anyway, as part of the build up to Enterprise 2.0., I had a chance to work with the talented folks at Kapow to create a demo that integrates Kapow with IBM Mashup Center. As a basis for the demo, we used a scenario which I am fond of showing.. which starts with a new rep taking over a territory, and wanting to figure out as much as she can about the customers she now owns, and which ones she should target first. As part of this demo, I typically show how to build up a new mashup, which allows the rep to select a customer, and refresh a wide variety of widgets on the page, which include a news results for the selected customer, their financials/stock performance, a chart of the pipeline, all related dogears or bookmarks from Connections, etc.
I wanted to use Kapow to enhance this scenario by unlocking some common information that is available in external websites - like Google Finance and LinkedIn- but that isn't exposed via an API or feed. Below is a screenshot of the results! This contains one widget from IBM Mashup Center (the customer table), and five widgets that are powered by feeds from Kapow. Now, when I click on a customer name, I can see related blog entries, events, and discussions - all coming from Google. I can also see the corporate officers - extracted from the Reuters site. And, finally, (and to me the most powerful capability)- I can see a list of people that work at the selected company that I might know from my LinkedIn Network. It is not visible below, but I can even see my degrees of separation from that person! This particular feature struck me as quite useful- especially since the first time I used the mashup below, I was surprised by its power. For example, before this mashup, if you had asked me to "cold call" into a company like Capital One, I would have had to go and manually pull all of this information together. And, and as soon as I did this, it would be out-of-date! Also, without this mashup, I would not know, for example, that I had 2 direct linkages at Capital One (old business school classmates) that I could easily call.... which would be a much easier entry point than a cold call.
Next step is to share this information with some of my sales team to get more feedback. Of course, feedback from readers would be welcome as well! What information would you like to see in a "Customer 360" type of mashup?
Up until very recently, I have not had any real desire to create and post videos to YouTube. Now I could blame this on the fact that I am a child of the '70s, and thus a bit older than average YouTube power user.. but the fact of the matter is that I lacked a good topic. But now, with the impending launch of IBM Mashup Center, this is no longer true! As a result, I decided to jump in and create and share some IBM Mashup Center "how to" demos.
I have just started creating this video series- so there are only about 9 or so demos, but I plan to add more over the next several weeks, so please stop by, take a look, and let me know what you think!
Every so often Mark and I will pepper this blog with answers to burning questions (also known in the marketing world as FAQs). One question I have heard a few times over now is, "How are customers using mashup technology?" Luckily, we are working with many interesting customers, and thus have a lot of good use cases to talk about. For this entry tonight, let me focus on just one pattern that has emerged, which is (drumroll please..)
Rapid Reponse to Change.
Challenge: Organizations are not agile when responding to unplanned situations When unplanned situations arise, whether it is a natural disaster like a hurricane or tsunami, or a threat to security of a government agency, or even something less foreboding like major traffic backups – organizations need to be better prepared to respond.
Who is Interested in using Mashups for Rapid Response?
Companies that deliver or receive shipments that could be disrupted by weather, traffic, or piracy
Government agencies and government contractors needing to respond to terrorist attacks or natural disasters
Retail companies that need to better manage routing or ordering of inventory due to weather patterns.
Other? Comment and let me know what you think!
Example: A company needs to quickly see how they can adjust their store inventory to respond to a rapidly developing situation such as a large storm. They need to adapt their logistics to find available inventory and match them with the stores in the storm area. They create a mashup that combines available information on inventory such as number of units, alongside a list of past order history at that store. They can then take excess inventory from available stores and match it to in progress supply chain logistics to reroute it to stores in the storm area – ensuring enough inventory for all stores.
Today David Barnes, from IBM's emerging technology team, created a new channel on Youtube called IBM etInfo. Here, Dr. Demo, er., David has started posting some of his cool new demonstrations, as well as a seven part episode called "Rod Smith on Mashups" . For those of you who don't know Rod, he has the VP of our emerging technology group here at IBM, and he has also been working in the mashup space for going on 3 years now. I encourage anyone who wants to learn more about mashups and web 2.0. to check out this series.
Here is the first part in the Rod on Mashups series:
Welcome aboard to our new blog, where we will discuss the emerging mashup market and IBM Mashup Center - IBM's core mashup platform.
Mix-and-mash.com will bring together viewpoints from several aspects of product development and marketing, including architecture, best practices, usage patterns, and customer value. Our intent is to educate our readers on IBM's mashup offerings, with a specific focus on IBM Mashup Center, which includes IBM Lotus Mashups and IBM InfoSphere MashupHub. We also intend to discuss how mashups are bringing value to our customers, tips and tricks, ways to extend our products' capabilities, case studies, and other exciting items! What topics would you like to hear from us most?
Special thanks to John Head from PSC for hosting this blog and making this happen!
