Now that collaborative, decentralized development is the norm, how do you harness the ability to "mashup" data sources? What's happening in the industry? What's the motivation for a business to start serving mashups from the "long tail" of the Web? These and other questions were asked and answered yesterday by Stefan Andreasen, CEO and Founder of Kapow Technologies

Danish-born Andreasen's principal contention is that mashups address the long tail of automation within a company. Companies can achieve incredible efficiencies through empowering their employees to get to Web-based data in a more ad hoc way. Mashups created by individuals can be fostered through giving them acees to the data they need and allowing them to combine it automatically, rather than keep everything centralized.

Andreasen has more than 20 years experience in software design and development. He spent five years in Boston with Advanced Visual Systems working on cutting-edge Java and visual programming projects. In 1998 he started Kapow as a marketplace for cars, real estate and boats for sale. The items for sale were collected from dealer websites and published on www.kapow.net. The collection software was based on visual programming, which made it possible to collect information from thousands of web sites with very limited resources.

In 2001, Andreasen sold the marketplace to the largest bank in Denmark and changed Kapow into a pure software company - Kapow Technologies. The software was productized and expanded to a general web-based integration platform for mashups, data collection, portal clipping and web service enabling of web functionality. In his current role as Founder and CTO, he focuses on all technical and strategic aspects of the Kapow Mashup Server. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of mashups and web-based integration.