The Video Mashup (Part 2)

A few more mashups from Mashup Camp, including video interviews. This time a smaller player, Denodo, and some unlikely big dogs, Intel, and IBM.Denodo makes an enterprise data mashup tool that can pull data from a host of data sources (Web services, XML, relationship databases), combine it, and publish it anywhere, creating a unified data layer for any application to access. The beauty here is the ability to pull that data from both inside the company and outside, so you can mashup data from, say, Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. A bio-pharma company is using it to access patents and combine that information with data in Web-based gene repository.

IBM has a number of Mashup tools, including its Mashup Hub, Data Mashups (or DAMIA, data mashups over Internet apps), Lotus Mashups, and IBM Shareable Code, or Swashup. Swashup is kind of interesting in that it built on Ruby on Rails and outputs in Ruby On Rails. The app builder lets you take in just about any kind offeed (SOAP, WSDL, REST, RSS) and create a Ruby on Rails DSL. Essentially, you're building a Rails DSL instance of your mashup, which can be shared. In fact, Swashup uses Morph Exchange to push the Capistrano files to Amazon's cloud service.

Finally, Intel released the APIs for its Mash Maker while we were hosting Mashup Camp. This is a pretty compelling service. Making Mash Maker widgets is as easy as writing a little JavaScript (during Mashup Camp, someone actually wrote an app and then submitted it for best Mashup while we were there). The challenge is getting users to install the Firefox plug in (only this for now; Internet Explorer to come; Safari is a glimmer in Intel's eye). Once they do, Mash Maker learns the user's behavior, including which widgets they like best and then starts to make suggestions based on user habits. In other words, it starts adding the widgets for you.