As part of a white paper I’m writing, I have been doing some research on ‘mashups’. (Web applications that combine data from multiple sources in one user interface.)

The idea behind mashups is simple. As anyone in IT can tell you, there are far more demands for their services than there is time available to get to them. No wonder people find corporate IT not moving fast enough for their needs, particularly if their needs are simple and highly situational. Enter mashups. The idea is that you can create simple ‘widgets’ where you combine content and services from within the corporation and out on the web to create new, simple applications. This can be created by the end user, not IT.

Two interesting mashup makers are available from IBM and Microsoft, called QEDwiki and PopFly respectively. If you don’t know what mashups are, check out the IBM video on YouTube, and the 30 second overview from Microsoft. Will give you a good idea of what is possible…

Are you using mashups to help your customers? Let me know how!