Mashup University, Day 2

(picture to the left - Jay Mari, Director of Software Development for Techrigy and super-nerd)

Presentation from Kapow Technologies right after lunch. They have a service that creates APIs for web sites that dont give you an APIs. So much information available out there can not be accessed programmatically. They have created a kapow robot called RoboMaker that allows you to build on a Web page to create a "virtual" API out of any HTML source. It allows you to find a specific tag in the page and create fields out of that, perform conversions on fields, etc... Then you can right a Mashup using the "virtual" API. They called it "Mashups for the Long Tail of the Web". From Openkapow.com, "a free open service platform that makes it possible to use data, functionality or GUI from the web as part of your mashup." Andreas Krohn's, the presenter, final words "HTML is the worlds most common API - start using it today!"

Also saw a presentation from Chris Radcliff, "That API Guy at Eventful". Eventful has an API you can use to incorporate events into your Mashups. Something interesting he talked about was actually people requesting events. If enough people ask for a performer in a specific area, they can possible cause a grass roots efoort to not just schedule but even create an event. Event can be GEO coded in the HTML and in the API, so that you can locate the event based on GEO location.

A presentation from Autodesk on MapGuide Open Source and MapGuide Enterprise. Autodesk is actually a large $2 billion company - this is not their core business. It seems they decided to open source this product and offer it out to the community. It has some very complex options to create maps and run operations around GIS and mapping. They have the ability to create multiple parcel layers and run complex queries on those layers. Its integrated with Google Earth.

Next presentation was from Infusion Development on mashups in the enterprise. Infusion is a 120 person tech consultancy working with some large financial institutions. There demo was based on a Virtual Earth mashups. I found it interesting and helpful when they started addressing what is needed for an enterprise mashup - Reliability, scalability, security, Interoperability and integration, documentation, and maintenance. These are the really issues Mashups and Web 2.0 have to address before it is going to become mainstream. All the cool technology in Mashups and Web 2.0 are going to remain on the fringe until they can address those concerns by Enterprise Admins. There demo was of federal emergency mashup - basically was done in 150 lines of code.

Final presentation of the day was done by Jeremy Lueck. He was part of Truveo which was bought by AOL for $40 million. He is an AOL Video Search Evangalist. The most interesting part of his presentation was that he forgot his keyboard for his MacMini so he used the overhead projector :)

Tomorrow starts Mashup Camp, although I've heard several reports of weather ruining travel plans. I look forward to report how it goes tomorrow.