The Return of the Mullet and Corporate Mashups

Just got back from Barcelona yesterday where we were demoing our technology to folks from British Petroleum. They have developed a very robust and cool mashup with MS Virtual Earth. Definitely a mashup on steroids with all sorts of goodies rolled in ranging from video to IP based coms. It is great to see an enterprise like BP making a significant investment in web mapping and mashups. They are working at being at the fore front of location intelligence and I think it bodes well for where web mapping is headed in the future and its potential to create value for the enterprise. Here is hoping many other enterprises follow suit.

A question to the crowd – a few folks we talked to over the week thought that MS was going to win web mapping for the enterprise over Google. Not sure what I think on this yest, but interested if anyone has opinions. The VE mashup we saw at BP was definately the most robust I’ve seen to date.

While BP treated us very well and the Barcelona beaches were awesome – there was one disturbing conclusion from the trip…. The mullet is back, at least in Spain. At first we thought it might be Spanish rednecks stuck in an 80′s time warp, but no such luck. It was the hipsters – sporting mullets. Several new varieties of mullets in this apparent revival, we saw the rasta mullet – business in front and dread locks in the back. There was also the faux hawk mullet. That’s right short all over except a moused faux hawk in the back. How long before this arrives in America remains to be seen, but be on the look out.

In better news our API and Google Maps mashup will be up next week. We should have an URL up here late Monday or Tuesday for folks to check out.