Mashups - web services, SOA, cyber-infrastructure, Enterprise 2.0, grids P2P, are all aspects of radically changing environment of the Internet that will have major impacts on research and business. Thanks to Dirk Van der Woude for the pointer to this book and Fabchannel. Some excerpts from his posting on NANOG -- BSA
http://www.mashupcorporations.com/
This book is a cultural, rather than technical, guide to Service-Oriented Architectures and Web 2.0 technologies.
Mashup Corporations: The End of Business As Usual tells the story of fictional appliance maker Vorpal Inc. and its pursuit of creative sales methods for its popcorn poppers. Marketing manager Hugo Wunderkind has identified a new channel and willing market for a personalized popper. CEO Jane Moneymaker recognizes a winner, but how can she persuade CIO Josh Lovecraft to adapt his processes?
http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2007/01/simple_minds_and_motorpyscho_l.php
Still need to get a better grip on what the new world of Mashup business models really is leading to? Have a look at this new mashup service of Fabchannel: until now 'just' an award-winning website which gave its members access to videos of rock concerts in Amsterdam's famous Paradiso concert hall. Not any more. Today Fabchannel launched a new, unique service which enables music fans to create their own, custom made concert videos and then share them with others through their blogs, community profiles, websites or any other application.
So suppose you have this weird music taste, which sort of urges you to create an ideal concert featuring the Simple Minds, Motorpsycho, The Fun Loving Criminals, Ojos de Brujo and Bauer & the Metrople Orchestra. Just suppose it's true. The only thing you need to do is click this concert together at Fabchannel's site – choosing from the many hundreds of videos available -, customize it with your own tags, image and description and then have Fabchannel automatically create the few lines of html code that you need to embed this tailor-made concert in whatever web application you want.
As Fabchannel put it in their announcement, "this makes live concerts available to fans all over the world. Not centralised in one place, but where the fans gather online". And this is precisely the major concept behind the Mashup Corporation: - supply the outside world with simple, embeddable, services – support and facilitate the community that starts to use them and – watch growth and innovation take place in many unexpected ways.
Fabchannel expects to attract many more fans than they currently do. Not by having more hits at their website, but rather through the potentially thousands and thousands of blogs, myspace pages, websites, forums and desktop widgets that all could reach their own niche group of music fans, mashing up the Fabplayer service with many other services that the Fabchannel crew – no matter how creative – would have never thought of.
Maximise your growth, attract less people to your site. Sounds like a paradox. But not in a Mashup world.