Mashup tool - WebFOCUS for Google Maps

A new mashup developer tool for the enterprise... Information Builders today announced the release of WebFOCUS for Google Maps, the first rapid mashup application in the business intelligence market. WebFOCUS can drive what is displayed on a map, use location indicators to visually convey operational trends, and navigate the map from a related report to zoom in and out of critical areas. Users can leverage Google Maps to pre-filter and drill down to WebFOCUS reports containing all the details on one or more locations of interest. See http://www.informationbuilders.com/

Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries - integrate these data into your Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft mashups

Maponics, LLC announced today the full release of Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries™. Until now, websites offering local search, including social marketing, real estate and Web 2.0 sites, have had to provide search results based upon ZIP Code or city name. By integrating Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries, search results for hundreds of cities can now be filtered and even mapped by universally accepted city neighborhood boundaries. The result - more relevant local search results, more loyal site visitors and higher ad revenue. More about the dataset... Covering hundreds of the top US cities, the Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries database includes all latitude and longitude coordinates for each neighborhood polygon. It is specifically designed for easy integration into Google™, Yahoo!®, or Microsoft® map mash-ups or into back-end data analysis applications.

The idea of mapping by neighborhood is a very clever one and I belive offers to amazing opportunities to the users of these data. Given the social and economic characteristics that residents of a "neighborhood" share this could indeed truly become a very powerful and useful data product... I can't wait to see where this goes as we see apps developed based on neighborhood data. See www.maponics.com

Pilots Program To Expand the Universe of Gadgets

Google announced a new pilot initiative called Google Gadget Ventures aimed at bootstrapping an economic ecosystem around gadgets. Since the launch of Google Gadgets more than a year ago, we've seen an increasing opportunity for individuals and companies to build successful businesses around this technology and are piloting this program to help support additional growth. Google Gadget Ventures will offer third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses two types of funding:

Grants of $5,000 to developers who've built gadgets in our directory that already receive at least 250,000 weekly page views. To apply, qualified Gadget developers will be asked to submit a one-page proposal.
Seed investments of $100,000 to previous Google Gadget Ventures grant recipients who'd like to build a business around the Google Gadgets platform. Qualified developers will be asked to submit a business plan. See http://www.google.com/gadgetventures.

Mappam - location-based advertising for Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and virtual Earth

First we delivered details about Lat49 and their solution for serving contextual ads to Google maps, Yahoo! maps, and virtual Earth. Now there's another player entering this space... from the developer; With Mappam advertisers can within minutes create campaigns on www.mappam.com targeted to geographic locales, paying only when users click through to the advertising website. Adverts are displayed to visitors on the maps of Mappam network partner websites as 16x16 pixel icons which when clicked on open a descriptive text and a link to the advertising website. See http://www.mappam.com/

An Ajax-Mashup Sample Application on Sun Java

Here's an interesting read on the Sun DevNet - The sample displays the latest news, weather, stock-quote, traffic, and map information; also the results of user-initiated searches for videos, blogs, and photos. Besides Ajax and a mashup, key to the development of the sample are Really Simple Syndication (RSS) software and public Web-service APIs from Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, YouTube, and Upcoming.org. Includes an 8-minute Flash demo.