Mashups in India

Mashups are becoming popular with more and more consumers getting engaged and increase in numbers of public portals. But, today I don't find any perfect and particular business model to follow, a blend is best fit, so deciding business model remains bottleneck.

Mashups originated long back in different form with the need to have something more refined by integrating things from different sources and bringing and also sharing on a common platform. Remix song was result of such innovative thought - a new entity by mixing and matching from several different entities. Mashups is a web application that combines data from different sources into a single integrated screen.

Just as two different elements combine to form compound with new properties. Mashups are hybrid formed from hetrogeneous sources.

In Technical terms mashups are formed from three logically and physically separated sources: third party public interface API /content providers, web browser and mashup site.

The API/content provider is source of content that has to be mashed. Using a technique called screen scraping mashups extract content from several websites to be mashed. Content may be from Wikipedia, commercial domain, government or public domains or may be from educational domains. Using screen scraping method original content is broken down.

The mashup site is the place where the mashup is hosted but not necessary that mashups will be executed here itself. For implementing mashups dynamic content generation server side scripting technologies may be used. Also content for mashups can be generated using client side scripting.

The clients Web browser is for rendering application graphically and where user interaction takes place. Mashups often use client-side logic to assemble and compose the mashed content and Ajax for asynchronous loading and presentation of content.