Total Immersion specialises in so-called web mashups, where an online user sees a video reflection of themselves coupled with a 3D object that they can control, such as camera that responds accurately to button presses, or a pair of glasses that lets the user switch the frame or colour scheme.

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Programmable Web, a site that tracks mashups, figures that about half of the mashups it sees are based on Google's map business and about half of all mashups fund themselves using the Google ad machine.

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Mark Lucovsky, a legendary Microsoft engineer now at Google, recently released a Google search box optimized for mashups on a user's own Web site.

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Such Web candies are three among thousands of examples of "mashups, " which blend software from multiple sources and recombine them on the fly to create novel entertainments and services.

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These novel products are called mashups, a marriage of bits of two or more Web sites to create a third product: a directory of pizzerias on a neighborhood map, for example, to show where the nearest deep-dish resides.

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Already, it boasts mashups from Microsoft's Virtual Earth map service on Marriot's Web site.

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