Congratulations to the 'Mash for Cash' Contest Winners!

 A few months ago we announced the 1st Mash for Cash Contest.   And you responded with some great mashup submissions!  Now we’re happy to announce that http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/users/timm, a business technology analyst for a telecommunications company, was the Mash for Cash Contest winner with a ‘Product Management and Customer Feedback’ mashup. 

Why should you care?  Because the winners of the Contest are like you. They are real-world folks who happen to be mashup fans with real problems to solve. These are some great example mashups to learn from.  You can watch videos of these mashups and, better yet, grab all the mashup code they used to win.  

The Grand Prize Winner

 A ‘Product Management and Customer Feedback’ mashup may not sound sexy but it’s a problem that any company with customers would appreciate (and who doesn't have customers?).  Here’s the problem and solution exactly as it was submitted by the winner:

This mashup solution supports a product manager in a wireless carrier who is looking for insights and business intelligence into customer churn. 

The challenge is the product manager knows there is churn, but is not exactly sure why it is happening.  Is it seasonable, because of competition, a problem with customer service, a missing feature in a cell phone or plan, etc.  The other challenge is the product manager would need access to several databases and systems to begin looking for trends.  The customer feedback emails, the call center logs, product management feature databases, forum posts, customer records.  One legacy solution is to export data from all these systems into a business intelligence system, like a data mart or data warehouse, but the data is not real-time and it's another system the manager has to learn.

The use case for this mashup solution is the product manager will launch mashlets in mashboard, starting with customer terminations.  She also pulls up a mashlet of daily call volume to the call centers and confirms spikes during the same termination date spikes. Spotting a date trend, she will then look at customer service emails and forum posts to notice feedback, specific to customers who eventually terminated, and also to the root cause - that a product update to BlackBerry Internet service, on the network side, caused the web browsing to stop.

With this information in hand, the product manager is able to rectify the technical glitch, send offers to the terminated customers asking for their service back, and improved the customer experience.  The product manager can also use Wires, to create one-off mashups, like joining the forums and email feedback databases, where the userid/email is the same. She will use these email addresses to offer a return promotion or one month free service, to protect the carrier's brand and their customer revenue.  She can also use Wires or a Mashlet to search on keywords like 'Problem' in the forums database, looking for customer discontent.

This mashup is impressive!  Why?  Because it’s a meaningful and ubiquitous business problem.  It is a well executed mashup.  And it is very well documented.  We think it truly speaks for itself and certainly is worthy of winning the 1st Mash for Cash contest and the $2500 Grand Prize. 

We've posted the entire roduct Management and Customer Feedback mashup (documentation, videos, screenshots, mashup code and even sample data) for the 'Product Management and Customer Feedback' mashup at http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/knowledge-base/code_sample/mashup-code-sample-product-management-mashup.

If you are serious about learning more about mashups, this is the chance to learn from a true Mashter.

The Runner Up

 http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/users/igo, an Engineering student at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico City, was our runner-up Mashter.  He submitted the 'Investor Advisor', a set of interconnected mashups that supports an investor looking for a good business to invest in:

Imagine you want to search for a good business investment idea.   Let's say you want invest in a chocolate-making company.  So you go to your mashup and type "chocolate" in. 

The next thing you see is a layout which tells you which companies have public offerings in the market, for you to see if it's a good idea to invest in such a business.  There's also the chance to click on any of those companies and reveal more information and a brief summary of them.

You decided that you want to invest in 'JackBe Corp.' (a great chocolate company) but you stop and think "I live in Australia and I don't know the price of the dollar".  Well now you do!  There's an information box which tells you your country, the currency and the rate against the US dollar.

Not enough?  There's also a Google map to plan a trip to close the deal in person. You get to see the distance to your destination.  And last but not least there's Google Finance News which tells you the latest headlines related to your initial input. 

You can watch a video of the Investor Advisor mashup in action at http://www.screencast.com/users/igocancun/folders/Jing/media/2f2cffc0-6e5a-46f5-80d1-90d986cee788 and download the mashup code at http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/knowledge-base/code_sample/mashup-code-sample-investment-advisor-mashup.

What's Next

Congratulations to our Mash for Cash Contest winners.  They truly deserve their prizes and the title of 'Mashter'!

We are so excited about the results of our 1st Mash for Cash Contest, that we're already planning another Contest.  We’ll be announcing it on the Mashup Developer Community very soon.

Mash on!