I love the word Mashup - I picture in my mind one of those old fashioned potato mashers just pounding a number of concepts in a big Internet bowl until something yummy emerges!
And at the recent Broadsoft Connections show, the whole pile of new voice mashup apps were certainly innovative, if not yummy.
A new company called Blue Visor LLC out of Nevada took 3rd place in the Broadsoft mashup competition with mobile voice control apps demo'ed on an iPhone. Joe "Developer", the companies' spokesman, made use of these apps look so easy that the overhead "text-to-billboard" was full of those claiming Joe should run for President.
The winner of this contest - Thomas Howe, created a mashup for disaster relief services that integrated Twitter, Broadworks and RSS feeds to create a dashboard for workers that illustrated real time information that could be critical to their efforts. Called "Disaster Dispatcher", this was a great real world app that could be very useful, especially if the climate change we are seeing continues. The interface was pretty clear, and the demo was interesting. All key info was in one window, and I can see that this could make life and death difference in an emergency. Digging for data under duress is no fun.
Voice mashups are the next great thing for the telecom industry - and I can think of about 20 or 30 I would like to see someone actually create. Voice enabling job search sites with a server based voicemail box for each recruiter would streamline the process for those on both sides of the fence. Many many more possibilities exist - some of which I am NOT going to write about as who knows, maybe I will start creating them myself?
BT certainly has faith in the mashup concept - with its $105M purchase of Mountain View based Ribbit in July. Who will be next?
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