Mashupnomics

'If you torture numbers long enough, you can get them to say just about anything...'
-- Original Author Unknown

I am a Mathematics geek by training (Carnegie-Mellon University, class of 1990) and still have a big fixation with numbers today. And I am proud to say that I've used my skills to turn a mathematical equation into a memory trick, one I've been befuddling my coworkers with for days:

600,000,000 + 8.4 + 5 + 10 = ?

The answer is 'Enterprise Mashups', of course. More accurately, it's a Reader's Digest list of a number of notable events you might want to take note of. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, 'Lemme esplain':

• 600,000,000 is the number of service calls our partner, Xignite, gets every month for financial information. I heard this number for the first time in our joint webcast with Xignite yesterday, 'Enterprise Mashup Boot Camp: What, Why and How?', and it's a number I will not soon forget. If you didn't think hosted business information services were coming of age, this should put that idea to rest. (And if you missed the webcast, we've got a whole slew of them in the next few months!)
• 8.4 is the rating JackBe received in a recent InfoWorld review, 'Refining the art of enterprise Web apps'. JackBe has worked very hard for the last 2 years to evolve from a simple Ajax provider to an enterprise-class mashup vendor. This kind of review makes us very proud and, we think, validates the results of our efforts. And we're already hard at work on the next generation of enterprise mashup features (some of which you may have seen us preview at AjaxWorld last month), which we're confident will put us even further ahead of our competition.
• 5 is the number of 'must haves' for enterprise mashups that we outlined in an ECommerce Times article, 'Making Mashups Work in the Enterprise'. We 've talked a bit about the 5C Framework in the past and this article gives it even more depth.
• 10 is the number of Gartner’s top technologies for 2008 and, no surprise, mashups make the list. To steal straight from the column, 'Gartner outlined its top 10 strategic technology areas for 2008 and many roads lead to service oriented architecture'. Definitely worth a read.

I think I've tortured the numbers enough for one day. I hope my mother reads this and finally sees that my math degree wasn't wasted.