Raise your hand if you like Lotus…

IBM is working on developing a Lotus Mashup. This mashup software will be able to help mathematically challenged people like myself who can’t build algorithms and other exotic mathematical based endeavors. Jeff Schick, vice president of social software for IBM, says “Lotus Mashups will let organizations and communities easily assemble new applications with interoperability across the entire span of [business] tools,” Schick said Monday at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, FL, when he announced the product. An employee could, for example, combine a map of store locations with store inventory information, so that clicking on the location brings up, say, a stock list. Normally, this would require programming skills. But Schick says that with Lotus Mashups, the process is simple: users connect existing applications by dragging and dropping them onscreen.”The tool will allow users to build custom widgets from disparate sources.

Excerpt: “”The holy grail for a long time has been to design something that lets the nontechnical person do software engineering,” says John Gerken, a senior architect for the Emerging Internet Technologies Software Group at IBM. “This is a step toward that goal.” The product’s drag-and-drop interface conceals several technical problems that had to be solved to build the software, he says.”