The Weather Channel lets you “mashup” your own episode of Epic Conditions simply by dragging and dropping five existing clips onto a video bar, choosing from four provided sound selections and adding a title.  After you preview your episode, you publish it by emailing the finished product for friends to view.  All you need is a browser.

Lots of fun, but how can Mashups provide business benefit?

Mashups create user-facing web applications by combining pre-existing digital content and components from multiple sources using public APIs.  Sounds like a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and they’re related, but Mashups are different due to their informality.  Until recently a grass roots effort within the Web community, Mashups have begun to gain traction in the business application community due to their ease of development, the power of content sharing, and because of the relative simplicity of creating Mashup portals to access and combine pre-existing information.

This half-day concepts and facilities briefing provides an overview of the Mashup phenomenon and shows how organizations can use Mashups to achieve business benefit.

What are Mashups?

• How do they work?

• What are they good for?

• When should you use (and NOT use) a Mashup?

This briefing surveys, explains and demonstrates current Mashup capabilities and characteristics:

• Presentation Mashups via “Smart Clients”

• Multiple Content Sources and Services

• Application Scope

• Technical Impacts

• Design Impacts