Enterprise 2.0, Kapow

Nicole Carrier  June 15 2008 06:49:24 PM

Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0. conference in Boston.  While I was there to speak about mashups (in both a panel and also in a dedicated session), highlight some of our new partners and customers, and show off our upcoming release of Mashup Center v1.0 , the highlight for me was definitely the Enterprise 2.0. faceoff between IBM and Microsoft on Monday.  Pretty cool stuff!

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  And, and as soon as I did this, it would be out-of-date!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?

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