It’s tough to be a regular blogger when spending the summer in beautiful Prince Edward Island. And while PEI is still primarily rural, it is actually quite technologically advanced, and there are some superb bloggers right here in PEI–but the pace of life is still much slower here, so the idea of a daily (okay, even weekly?) blog seems frenetic. Anyway, I figure you’d rather hear from me when I feel I had something to say, rather than forcing or manufacturing blog entries…

But I recently had to do a little digging on the topic of the intersection of mashups and business research, and came across a handful of existing Google map mashups that look promising for business researchers, so I thought they would be worth sharing here.

Geoindex
View weekly returns of the S&P 500 companies.

World NewsVine Map
A mash-up of world news and Google Maps. Pins are placed on spots around the globe where there is breaking news.

Locations of recent venture funding in Southern California

SRC: Extend the Reach
This demo site lets users input an address to obtain demographic reports from either the Census 2000 Report or the Census 2000 Housing Report.

If you have any other business research related mashups to share, please feel free to do so here!

Technorati Tags: mashup

Technorati Tags: Business Research

It’s hard to imagine a press release from Big Blue with a discussion of hip-hop, but a couple of weeks ago, IBM put out a release that described its new Enterprise Mashup application, which includes a side reference to the remixing of songs in hip hop music as an origin of mashups.

While I don’t think we’ll see IBM setting its next release to Rap, the concept of the Enterprise Mashup is certainly intriguing, and of course a company that wants to encourage and empower its users to overlay internal content with Web services like Google Maps or another one to create new applications to solve business problems doesn’t need to rely on licensing a product from IBM.

The phrase “Enterprise Mashup” sounds contradictory and intriguing. There’s promise if its done right, but seems like there’s also the potential to create lots of messy mashes too. I’m hoping to delve more into this topic in one of the upcoming Knowledge Management supplements to The Information Advisor.