MindTouch's Momentum Shows The Power Of Mashups

There's no question that mashups are hot right now. In fact, it's a market that Forrester Research's Oliver Young says could be worth nearly $700 million by 2013. Vendors in every sector are rushing to deliver these so-called "situational applications" to sophisticated business users everywhere in the hopes of improving collaboration and spiking productivity.

A vendor we covered recently and one that's in the in the middle of mashup mania is MindTouch, makers of Deki Wiki, Web 2.0 middleware that's part content management system (CMS) and part mashup maker.

Part of my inclination to cover MindTouch's recent announcement was the results I was able to achieve on my own using Deki Wiki. Pointing and clicking through a hosted instance of its Pro version is a breeze. I was able to build a fairly extensive site with multiple pages, widgets, and several other Web services extensions in less than 30 minutes. Once you navigate through your own instance, you quickly get a sense of what all the fuss is about.

Apparently its latest "Jay Cooke" v8.05 release was good enough to turn the heads of  Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of its Developer Community. In a prepared statement, Mike Shaver, Mozilla's chief evangelist, said the platform's ease of use, architecture, and feature set drove the decision after a lengthy evaluation.

One of the features MindTouch told InformationWeek about was what it touts as the first polyglot application on the Web.

That new capability is helping Mozilla host all languages as a single site, allowing Deki Wiki's user interface to adapt to the particular requirements of each page. That's big, especially if you're like Mozilla, who previously had to managed 16 distinct multilingual sites before partnering up with MindTouch. 

You can see a quick demo of its polyglot feature below.

Similar to last week's story on Alfresco's approach and its vision of mashups, MindTouch is sometimes hard to pin down. But that's also the beauty of what both companies do so well: they give the power of the platform back to the users.