Enhance Business Promotion for Enterprises with Mashup Technology

Technology improves people’s life and makes business more viable than ever before, especially eleisure and e-business. Many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which might not have enough budget for establishing their IT (Information Technology) department can today easily benefit from the use of technologies like Web technology, Web applications and their underlying supporting platforms and meta-application development methods. This paper presents an ideal about how to easily make business applications to attract customers for their patronage. Such applications are called meta-applications since they build from a simple set of basic applications to create a high-level advanced application through retooling. These meta-applications are very attractive solution in the business domain because of their low level development cost and rapid rebuilds. Through our investigations and series of experiments we found that SMEs can apply mashup technology to do some basic and simple integration without having an IT department or costly external consultancy services to assist them. This paper also demonstrates a real effective example of how to create a meta-application based on Google Maps and Flickr services which shows various photos with their geographical coordinate information about restaurants, shops and hotels. Such examples not only to help SMEs saving money without increasing their budgets but also to enhance their advertising and promotion for business with ease through the Internet at competitive prices and attract customers more effectively. While it is acknowledged that this form meta-application can be developed by most novices, important issues regarding security threats and privacy violation cannot be ignored in this loose way of assembling resources. These issues are also broadly presented in this paper as well.