I’ve spent a lot of time this past year thinking and talking about mashups. As Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out after the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year the market has really begun to mature. Of all the Web 2.0 tools and approaches, mashups are the most complex and as a consequence one of the more interesting from a strategy standpoint. In my May report, The Mashup Opportunity: How To Make Money In The Evolving Mashup Ecosystem, I discussed the three major mashup types: presentation, data, and logic. (A brief aside: its amazing how out of date the below graphic looks already, a mere 7 months later.)

When looking at the market opportunities my focus has been mostly on the later two types of mashups. This is where the mashup platform vendors — JackBe, IBM, Serena Software and newcomer Corizon — all play and, ultimately, where the most money will be made. It would be going to far to say I have ignored presentation layer mashups outright, but in all honesty the market there is not nearly as dynamic as in the other two categories and is in many ways indistinguishable from basic portals. The focus is on bringing content near other content, not data transformation or insight which we see in the most complex mashups.

That said, I was reminded this past week of exactly how much room there is to run in the presentation layer mashup and widget space by, of all things, ESPN. I was reading a game recap of the Michigan upset of Duke in Men’s college basketball and came across the simple game recap data presentation at right.

In one simple graphic I saw all I needed to see: it was a close game; there were lots of lead changes; Michigan pulled away with about 7 minutes to go in the second half and never gave the lead back. In other words, there was a ton of information wrapped up in one simple presentation.

Now, lets compare the Michigan/Duke game to another on the same night, Vermont at Pitt. Same chart, new data and we see a very different game. Here we can see that Pitt went on a quick run to start the game and never looked back, shellacking Vermont by nearly 30 points.

These simple graphics — widgets or presentation mashups if you like — provided a ton of information in a very neat package, saving me the trouble of reading the specifics for anything more than details.

In a business context this style of data and content presentation can be tremendously valuable, despite the relative simplicity of the application. Think of this same graphic with sales data versus plan, feature burn down rate, or project milestones over time. This information is available today, of course, however the presentation of that data is not nearly as elegant or accessible. Business intelligence software — which this application most closely resembles — is not yet focused on these simple, business-friendly applications, and thus far no mashup or widget vendors have focused on this type of solution for the enterprise.

It seems to me there there is a market gap here: basic presentation mashups and widgets for the lines of business, surfacing these types of simple data presentations on desktops, intranet pages, and in SharePoint. I would be shocked if Clearspring or Widgetbox couldn’t easily do this today, but neither company seems to focus much attention on the enterprise. And the mashup vendors like JackBe, IBM, and Serena seem much more focused on the lower volume, higher margin business of data and process mashups. Even Lotus Mashups, the business friendly mashup environment from IBM feels a bit too heavy for something this simple but useful.

Don’t get me wrong, the mashup platform vendors are right to look elsewhere when committing development and marketing resources; this would have to be a volume business and a tough one at that. But at the same time there is real value here for either the widget vendors, a start-up, or (more likely) the BI vendors who will use this kind of presentation mashup to drive license use and application stickiness.

What do you think? Has anyone seen these sorts of simple presentation mashups and widgets in action in a business context? Are the BI vendors farther along this path than I am giving them credit for?

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