Feb 20 & 21, Mashup Camp: Mixing Open Systems

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, several hundred attendees meet in the San Francisco Bay Area for Mashup Camp. It is the first conference of its kind focusing on internet services and applications that are enabled by openly sharing data and services like mapping, e-commerce and search. This new aspect of web applications is often called “mashup” because applications will take services of several providers like Google Maps, Amazon Web Services, Flickr, Yahoo APIs, and others to combine (mash) their functionality in distinctly new ways. Wikipedia defines Mashups here.

The several notable sessions of conference include Mashups and Creative Commons; Business Models in Mashups; Venture Capital and Mashups; and others. The event was also covered by CNET earlier this week. From the article:

And while those in attendance will surely be working on creating all kinds of free and publicly available mashups, Berlind said the companies and developers alike will also be thinking beyond shareware, software that can be tried without cost. “The real elephant in the room is what’s the business model,” he said. (read full article)

For providers like Amazon and Ebay, the business model for such services is directly related to increased sales or transactions. For other providers offering maps, web search results and other data, offering raw content for free appears to be a battle for platform dominance. Microsoft, being a latecomer to this revitalized online services space, announced earlier that such open services and platforms will be crucial in its strategy to compete for developers and the web-enabled solutions they build. In Microsoft’s view, this is the same strategy that has promoted Windows to its dominant position for desktop applications, which it hopes to reapply on the internet. Google and Yahoo will only increase the competition for their share; but unlike previous platform battles, openness is an inherent aspect throughout. All to say: the first Mashup Camp comes at the right time for this discussion! Follow up and stay tuned – the second one is being planned.