In a mash-up world where end users assemble customized “long-tail” business applications, there are a whole bunch of things that are important to a business end user:

1. How hard is it to assemble my customized business app?
2. Are there any network effects? ( A customized app on a server is better than a customized app on my desk top.)
3. What kind of cool easy to use services are out there?

I’m going to ignore the first two questions and just deal with the last question. If you are going to assemble a business class mash-up and if that thing is actually going to help you get work done, then you need cool useful web services.

Say, for example, you are a venture capitalist and you are about to invest in a company. Before making your investment decision, you need to gather detailed financial information on a series of comparable companies. How else are you going to come up with a valuation?

Today, you log onto Yahoo! finance, cut and paste the information you need into a spreadsheet. You repeat this manual process for every company you want to include in your analysis. If you add a new input variable, you have to go back and get that new piece of information for every single company you looked at. If you are a stock analyst or a fixed income investor. You do the same thing. But you get the information from a Bloomberg terminal, which costs over $1,000 per month.

This model of manually going to Yahoo! or Google finance will change as people move towards a customizable executable web. Instead of doing all the manual cut and paste, you will bring that information directly into a pre-build VC Comparables App. And the information will come from a highly specialized Web Services Vendor, or WSV.

Xignite is a great example of Web Servcies Vendor. Xignite powers “on-demand” financial applications.   They have a cool phone number: 1-866-XML-SOAP.   Xignite has API’s for exchange rate quotes, stock price quotes, EDGAR filings.   This information is really valuable and Xignite charges for it.

What kinds of Web Services Vendors are out there or are needed?   Here are a few ideas:

• Financial information
• Social network / contacts information
• Competitive pricing
• Mobile connectivity
• Data back-up and storage
• Billing & payment
• Translation
• Specialty/vertical analysis tools
• Work flow management

If you think of other types of Web Services Vendors, please let me know.