It's what you don't see about the emerging Web that has everyone excited these days. Namely, it's the powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are nothing new and have been traditionally cryptic and difficult to use. However, the advent of Web services along with the notion of mashups has changed the way we consider and leverage APIs going forward.

Enterprise mashups - the convergence of Web 2.0 mashups and service-oriented architecture (SOA) - can create a world of opportunities for enterprises to come up with internal and customer-facing self-service, composite and 'situational' applications. These applications can be created just-in-time by empowered enterprise business users and by simply combining SOA-enabled information sources and services or SOBAs (service-oriented business application) on the intranet and Internet.

More and more enterprises are looking into how they can benefit from mashups to improve their business. Unfortunately, many of the best-known mashups today are more consumer oriented. Many mashup examples do not pay justice to the real enterprise value of mashups and they certainly don't explain why mashups are something every company needs to start using.

'With openkapow,' said Stefan Andreasen, founder and CEO of Kapow Technologies, 'we hope to accelerate the adoption of mashups in the enterprise through the network effect and grassroots momentum that a large open community can generate.' Andreasen was speaking as Kapow launched the industry's first software service and developer community designed to accelerate mashup adoption.

Scott Isaacs, now with Windows Live but widely known in the industry for having led the team that gave the world DHTML, without which AJAX couldn't have been invented, enraptured a full house at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, where he gave a session this afternoon entitled 'Architecting Great Internet Applications with AJAX.'

Mansour Raad, from 'the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to mapping,' ESRI, is the senior software architect behind ArcWeb Services, the next-generation mapping unit of ESRI that creates and serves up 6 million maps a day on the fly in real time (www.arcwebservices.com): a real-world proof point for what ESRI is doing - the real-world deployment of Flex on literally a massive scale.