Techies converge to talk mashups

In the wake of last year's launch of Google Maps and the slew of applications like HousingMaps--a blending of the mapping service and Craigslist housing listings--that quickly followed, many people have been focusing on mashups.

Now that interest will coalesce as about 300 people arrive at Mountain View's Computer History Museum for two days of meetings, panel discussions and hard-core networking among those who seek to develop mashups and those providing the APIs behind them.

Among the companies that are supporting MashupCamp--a nonprofit event in which anyone who signed up had the opportunity to organize a talk--are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, Amazon.com and Salesforce.com.

MashupCamp co-organizer David Berlind is executive editor of business technology for ZDNet.com, which is owned by CNET News.com parent company CNET Networks.

In any case, the idea behind the event is that as an increasing number of companies make their APIs publicly available, more and more developers will come along to create mashups. Those in attendance--and dozens more who were unable to sign up in time to get in--will have the unique chance to network among each other and hopefully, Berlind said, figure out the next stage of the mashup ecosystem.

It's important to have an event like MashupCamp "because all the other events so far under the rubric of Web 2.0 have been executive-level events," Berlind said. "But we've never really before had an event where the actual developers of the mashups get together with the API architects to talk through what's going on."

At the end of the event, attendees will vote for the best mashup. The winner will receive a Sun Niagra server.

And while those in attendance will surely be working on creating all kinds of free and publicly available mashups, Berlind said the companies and developers alike will also be thinking beyond shareware, software that can be tried without cost.

"The real elephant in the room is what's the business model," he said.