ReadWriteWeb

JackBe is releasing technology to allow enterprises to to create their own internal "app stores" on June 30. Complementing JackBe's existing line of mashup and app making tools, the JackBe App Store will enable users to share the AJAX apps they've created with other uses within the enterprise. The apps are portable and can run as standalone apps, on dashboards, in Sharepoint, on mobile devices, and pipe data into Excel.

Who does not love to make predictions? Tis' the season, right?

We posted our Top 10 Enterprise Products for 2009 and so it feels like a good time to provide some perspective on what the enterprise can expect in the year ahead.

IBM has announced a mashup integration that fits Cognos Business Intelligence with a new version of the company's Mashup Center. The two services fit together to create an environment that leverages IBM's existing technology base with a service that's right out of a play book for social computing.

It's a small move for IBM but demonstrates that the company is thinking strategically about how to leverage its strengths in business intelligence and analytics. At the same time it shows how IBM is adopting new ways for users to communicate more effectively with multiples sources of information.

The long awaited catalog of public data from the US government launched this morning at Data.gov. Developers, watchdogs and data nerds around the world rejoiced - but the initial offering is a bit of a let down.

New federal CIO Vivek Kundra is in charge of the site, which will act as a central repository for government data, including XML, CSV, KML files and more. At launch a mere 47 data sets are included and they appear to lean towards the least controversial matters. None the less, it's exciting to see the effort happening. Hopefully some awesome mashups are on the way!

Today is an important day in the history of politics and technology - the US Senate voting record is finally available in machine-readable XML (extensible markup language) format. Mashups, vote tracking and comparison applications, will now be welcomed in the front door of Congress as first class technologies.

On May 1st South Carolina's Senator, Jim DeMint, officially asked the Senate Rules Committee to make the data available and just four days later the feed is here. Not everyone is happy about about the information being made publicly available like this, however.

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

From May 19th to 20th, mediabistro will hold its Web 3.0 Conference in New York City at the New Yorker Hotel. The conference focuses on the semantic web, mashups, text and data analytics, and how they add real-world value to end users and businesses.

Chips, dip and government data are everyone's three favorite things to take to a party, right? Ok, so government data is actually quite boring on its own, but in these exciting times of democratized programming, government data can be turned into some pretty exciting mashups.

That's just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and today the six fabulous winners were announced. We've got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.

I've always felt mashups represent the greatest opportunity to deliver game-changing benefits to organizations experimenting with Enterprise 2.0. Although, a lot of what I've seen in the mashup community I coin "mapups" because they're based on the Google Maps open API plus another interesting data set. Serious mashups are not for beginners and still require a developer's skill, but many vendors are making inroads here - such as IBM and Serena Software.

While reading is one of the main activities on the Internet, a lot of sites pay very little attention to the readability of their text. Instead, the reader's eye is constantly drawn to other UI elements, ads, and widgets. Arc90's Readability experiment is setting out to change this. Readability is a small bookmarklet that extracts the text from almost any web site and displays it on an easy to read page that removes all of the clutter that can make reading on the Internet so hard sometimes.

Music mashup site shows how User Experience is done.

MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine launched a new microsite today called the Music Blog Zeitgeist. There you can listen, for free, to entire albums from the most blogged-about musicians of 2008. Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.