Business Mashups FGTC 2008

Business Mashup

Mashups take numerous data sources combined and layer them together to form an informative presentation that can deliver services tailored to individuals. The presenter used the book “The Long Tail” as an explanation to the shift from mass production of generic stuff to niche markets.

“The Long Tail, in a nutshell“

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

Courtesy of http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

The graph above is divided in half, the first half (red) is made up of the most popular products, while the second half (yellow) is more niche products. To make this graph more understandable, The Presenter altered the words within the graph to give an example that everybody could understand.

Scientist ran a study on thousands of books that have been scanned in to computers and to find out what were the most common words used in the English Language. Through their study they learned that 50 % of the printed English language consisted of only 137 words. After the 137 most common words, there was a leveling off in to regional or Niche word within the rest of their scanned information. When put in to a graph it looks like the above. The presenter explained that this example demonstrated that the need for a more diverse section of content (yellow) that can be “Mashup” with the vastly more popular, but smaller, main content (red).

Zillow.com was used as a real world example show how combining niche information with globally accepted formats.

Zillow.com: is an online real estate service dedicated to helping you get an edge in real estate by providing you with valuable tools and information. Zillow can overlay recent home sales information (cost of home, mortgage rates, and monthly mortgage payments) which is niche information for only those interested in buying homes, with map technology that most people use.

Another example of using Mashups was submitting a leave request for work. Normally, when an employee submits a leave request an email would be sent to their boss, she/he would approval or deny without any knowledge of how much leave the employee had left. The employees request then would be sent to the HR department for recording the hours of leave taken. If there is not enough leave time on the books it presents a problem for the employee and the boss.

With a Mashup from the HR database when the employee submits a leave request it would have showed that there was only 7 hrs leave. The application would not have allowed the employee to send the request for time off.