Think mashup says Go Daddy’s Irving

Say `mashup’ to most people in or around the cloud business and they will think of smartphone apps that combine paid-for adverts about shops or restaurants together with location data and a map service to help consumers go and consume.

But according to Blake Irving, CEO of large US hoster and Cloud Service Provider (CSP), the whole notion of mashing up applications, technologies and even concepts has already taken on a much larger form and that there are now huge opportunities for businesses and individuals to think `outside the box’ to create new opportunities and markets.

Speaking at the recent Parallels Summit in New Orleans, he presented an evangelistic call to the audience of MSPs, CSPs and software vendors to think broadly about the possibilities, as there are many new mashups to be created and can, as yet, be barely predicted - except to say that they are out there, somewhere.

To help make his point he gave the audience a series of examples that demonstrate that even thinking outside of the box is no longer sufficient, it is about thinking outside several boxes at once and imagining what new service might sit between them.

For example, he talked about how putting the ubiquity of smartphones and peoples general love of music together.

“This became the service we call Spotify,” he said. “What is more, the result of that mashup is that sales of music products such as CDs and even paid-for downloads are now declining, while streaming music sales are up. When it comes to home entertainment these days, kids can't understand why anyone would buy a CD or DVD anymore. They simply download it.”

In much the same way, broadband ubiquity, when put together with a client architecture that can play videos on almost any device, has created Netflix. This, in turn, has led, in the USA at least, to a drop in subscriptions for cable TV services.

Another mobile-oriented mashup he identified is the combination of mobile ubiquity and predictive analytics, which he suggested has led to the development of Waze.

“This has already acquired 70 million users in just two years because it can take in large amounts of data to predict and inform car drivers of problems on the road, including the fact that there is a cop car just out of sight round the bend ahead,” he observed.