Flickr Co-founder Unveils Her New Startup: Hunch

People have been whispering about a new web application in development called Hunch. Today, Flickr co-founder and Hunch head honcho Caterina Fake divulged some more details about the new project on her blog.

The new project aims to become a site that can help anyone make a decision about anything. The way it will do this is through the application of decision trees that are created by contributing users. Using decision trees in expert systems is nothing new, but applying that idea to a crowdsourcing model might possibly be a stroke of genius. Think Aardvark meets Wikipedia and you start to get the idea.

Hunch is still in closed beta, but is accepting requests for invites. We're thinking you will want to sign up, though, after you hear what Caterina says about it:

Look. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly. What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What toe ring should I buy?

It's dark and lonely work. Coin-flipping, I Ching consultation, closing your eyes and jumping, postponing the inevitable, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and asking your sister are all time-honored means of coming to a decision -- and yet we think there's room for one more: Hunch.

She adds that a lot of content in Hunch is going to be generated by its user base. Do you know the right questions to ask to help someone pick out the right pair of shoes for hiking, or what cell phone to buy? With Hunch, you will be able to get in on the ground floor and know that your contributions will help many people get the right answer to their question.

While we know very little about the inner workings of Hunch, it apparently combines decision trees with a fair amount of end user personalization in the form of questions it asks people visiting the site. These questions allow Hunch to form affinities with other users who ask similar questions. On the back end, contributors will be able to create topic areas (called Super Questions) and add questions and results underneath those topics. How much control you will have or how the interface looks for this we aren't sure yet.

Caterina also says that there is room for the site to make money, by including Super Question areas that are affiliated with commercial products or services, but that part is not being rushed as they want to get the core functionality working just right.

We think the potential for the idea behind Hunch is huge. If you look at another very famous crowdsourced project, Wikipedia, and combine that with the sheer utility of the application Aardvark (which lets you pose questions to an extensive network of Aardvark-managed instant messaging contacts; our review here), the sky really is the limit for how much this tool can grow in usefulness and popularity.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/

A 3D web moves closer to reality

The 3D web moved closer to reality as Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, joined forces with graphics consortium Khronos.

Khronos has set up a working group to create a standard for what it calls accelerated 3D graphics on the web.

It could lead to widespread browser-based gaming as well as creating 3D environments in social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The aim is to produce a first public version within a year.  "For a number of reasons, I think now is the time to .. figure out what an initial take of 3D on the web should look like," said Mozilla's infrastructure engineer Vladimir Vukicevic in his blog.

"People are doing more and more on the web… adding 3D to this mix ensures that current web applications can experiment with new user experiences, while also enabling new classes of web applications," he said.

Walking around

The development of the standard being proposed by Mozilla will create a mechanism to let JavaScript - the programming language used to write many web-based applications - tap into the widely used OpenGL graphics interface technology.

Browser-based games are beginning to take-off and, in February, classic game Quake III was re-released specifically for the browser.

A 3D-enabled web could provide a kickstart for virtual world games such as Second Life thinks Paul Jackson, an analyst with research firm Forrester.

"One of the things which puts people off virtual worlds is that it requires users to make very big downloads to install the games," he said.

Having them available directly from a web browser would eliminate this and have much wider implications for non-gamers.

"Social networks could create 3D chatrooms and retailers could provide proper 3D visualizations of their products," he said.

"If you think about the traditional browsing experience of flat pages and links this is not a natural way to interact. People are much more used to walking around and picking things up so a 3D browser could lead eventually to a more naturalistic way of interaction," he said.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Google taps student developers for OSS

Google has opened applications for its Summer of Code open source coding program, and is reaching out to university students in the country to participate.

This is the fifth year the search giant is running the global program, which offers students stipends to write code for various open source software projects over a three-month period. Google said 150 open source organizations including The Linux Foundation, PHP and the Fedora Project are participating as mentors.

According to a Google spokesperson, Singapore contributed four completed projects last year, from none in 2006 or 2007. Google did not say how many participants in total applied, nor how many it is expecting this year.

Local developer Eugene Tan, who last year contributed code to the Thousand Parsec project--an open source framework computer game--was invited by the project's lead developer to mentor this year's participants for the project.

Tan told: "Returning as a mentor is important to me because this is in keeping with the spirit of the open source community, where I am sharing my knowledge and contributing my expertise to collaborate with other programmers to develop better, more innovative applications."

He added that the experience in coding for a "real-world" project "forces" programmers to apply their skills to "real-world" applications.

Leslie Hawthorn, Google open source team and Google Summer of Code program manager, said the program hopes to help discover open source programming talent in Singapore.

Contributions to the Summer of Code event have brought final products to the open source world. A project that originated in 2007's event contributed Mousetweaks, an accessibility feature for mouse control, to the Gnome project. Gnome is one of the two major Linux desktop environments, along with KDE.

Google said the past four years of Summer of Code have given US$15 million in funding to some 2,500 students from 100 countries, with "millions of lines" of source code produced.

Some 1,000 student projects are expected to be funded globally this year. The application deadline is Apr. 3.

Source: http://www.zdnetasia.com/

Red Hat Launches Second Generation Development Environment

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that JBoss Developer Studio 2.0 - Portfolio Edition is now available; the complete development environment not only enhances the Eclipse-based toolset, but also adds JBoss Enterprise Application, Portal, SOA and Data Services Platforms. The solution provides a robust, integrated development environment for rich web applications, mission critical enterprise applications, integration services in a single package, and at a price point that is expected to deliver compelling value to Red Hat customers.

"We launched JBoss Developer Studio Portfolio Edition to provide developers not only with outstanding development tools, but also with an easily accessible way to begin enterprise development projects on the exact same code that is in our supported JBoss Enterprise Middleware Platforms," said Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat's middleware business. "This strategy is expected to enable customers to make a seamless transition from development into production."

With this new release, JBoss Developer Studio becomes the core component of JBoss Developer Studio - Portfolio Edition. It builds on Eclipse - the de-facto standard Java developer toolset and includes a comprehensive set of tools developers need to quickly develop highly interactive applications and services using technologies like Seam, Java EE, AJAX and Portlets as part of standards-based Service Oriented Architectures. The ability to quickly deploy enterprise applications is important for organizations looking to achieve value through cost and time savings.

JBoss Developer Studio - Portfolio Edition can help reduce the time between development and deployment by including and supporting the full portfolio of JBoss Enterprise runtimes and tools:

• JBoss Developer Studio 2.0
• JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
• JBoss SOA Platform
• JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform
• JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform
• JBoss Operations Network
• OpenJDK
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Source: http://www.foxbusiness.com/

Eclipse to detail platform, SOA plans at conference

Microsoft, IBM to ponder IDEs at EclipseCon 2009, while Eclipse will show off progress of its E4 platform

The Eclipse Foundation will cite at the EclipseCon 2009 conference this week the latest developments in areas ranging from the core Eclipse platform to SOA and modeling, including plans to make the platform available as Web services.

The open source tools organization will tout at the event in Santa Clara, Calif. progress of its planned E4 (Eclipse 4.0) platform, which represents the next generation of Eclipse. The popular Eclipse IDE is built on the base platform. A beta release of E4 is planned for this summer with a first release due in 2010, Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said.

Plans call for E4 to be implemented as a platform of services available over the Web; currently, Eclipse is implemented as tightly linked plug-ins. Developers could access E4 remotely over the Web.

"One of the scenarios we're hoping to [enable] is to be able to allow developers to work on code remotely through a Web browser," Milinkovich said. "That currently is quite difficult to do."

E4 also will offer improved UI capabilities to offer a more Web-like style of development using stylesheets and XML-based layout descriptors. A model-based approach will be used in the Eclipse workbench. "Right now, there's a lot of places in Eclipse where there's hard-coded relationships, and by modeling those relationships, we'll be able to build our UIs much more flexibly and much more rapidly" said Milinkovich.

At the conference on Thursday, officials from Microsoft and IBM will participate in a session called "Darwin among the IDEs," which will ponder issues pertaining to the IDEs, such as how to deal with multicore and cloud development. Speakers include Tim Wagner, a former Eclipse official who is now principal development manager for the Visual Studio platform at Microsoft, and Kevin McGuire, an Eclipse UI architect at IBM.

In the runtime area, Eclipse will note the planned release of the first release of the Swordfish enterprise service bus for SOA deployments. Code is to be offered for Swordfish 0.8 in early April. "You use it to implement enterprise SOA applications," said Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director.

Swordfish is based on OSGi and leverages open source projects like Eclipse Equinox and Apache ServiceMix. The release has not been called a 1.0-level release because the APIs are not fully ready, according to Milinkovich.

Other capabilities featured in Swordfish include support for distributed deployment and a runtime service registry for loose coupling of services. A monitoring framework tracks messages, and a remote configuration agent can configure distributed servers.

In another runtime-related development, Eclipse will announce its new jurisdiction over the Jetty Web server project. A competitor to Apache Tomcat, Jetty is small, lightweight, and be used as an embedded Web server in other applications, Milinkovich said. It also can be made to scale on larger machines.

Moving it to Eclipse from its previous home, jetty.org, will give it broader community support, the benefit of intellectual property due diligence processes, and involvement with other pieces of the Eclipse runtime, Milinkovich said. Eclipse plans to ship Jetty 7 as its own first release of the project in June. Version 7 will feature support of the Java Servlet 3.0 specification.

"[The specification] basically defines how you write Web pages in Java or produce Web content in Java," said Milinkovich.

Another runtime to be promoted at the conference, EclipseLink 1.1, serves as a Java persistence runtime implementation of Java Persistence Architecture 2.0. Released on March 11, the runtime works with a relational database to get data in and out of Java programs.

Eclipse will also tout what it described as momentum in the modeling space. "We're seeing a lot of growth in modeling in Eclipse," Milinkovich said. There are eight different modeling projects within Eclipse, including Eclipse Modeling Framework.

A lot of the projects extend the framework into such areas as domain-specific languages via the XText project. Domain-specific languages are languages geared to a specific problem area, such as banking or insurance.

The conference also will air developments in industry vertical areas, such as the recent formation of the Eclipse Pulsar project for mobile applications as well as creation of industry workgroups for areas like development of a credit management framework. "The hope is banks would adopt this as the basis for their applications," Milinkovich said.

"Right now, every one of these organizations is basically building their own. We think it would be a lot more efficient [if] they collaborated on building just one implementation," Milinkovich said.

Also at EclipseCon on Monday, Red Hat will announce availability of JBoss Developer Studio 2.0 -- Portfolio Edition, offering a development environment to enhance the Eclipse-based toolset and adding the JBoss Enterprise Application, Portal, SOA, and Data Services Platforms. Developers can build rich Web and enterprise applications. JBoss Developer Studio -- Portfolio Edition is available via subscription. Developer support must be purchased separately.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/

Microsoft Courts Students at MIX

Microsoft is continuing its courtship of students, some as young as high school age, to bring new blood into the ranks of .NET developers and Microsoft platform users. Microsoft invited more than 150 college students to the MIX09 show in Las Vegas as well as more than 75 high school students to check out web design and development technology advancements.

Microsoft is continuing its courtship of students, some as young as high school age, to bring new blood into the ranks of .NET developers and Microsoft platform users.

Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group, said Microsoft has used its MIX09 web development and design conference to appeal to students and young developers as young as high school age in an effort to bring more people into the IT industry, particularly by showing them some of the hotter areas of interest, such as web design, and game design and development.

Abu-Hadba said Microsoft invited more than 150 college students to the MIX09 show here as well as more than 75 high school students. "We went to some of the top design schools in the country and we flew 153 college students here," he said. "And we decided we wanted to get some high school students here as well, so we flew in 77 high school students."

The push to attract students is part of Microsoft's DPE group's overall mission, which is "to make sure we keep the developer ecosystem happy and make sure the ecosystem continues to grow," Abu-Hadba said. "That is why Microsoft cares. We believe that for the IT industry to continue to grow we need more and more students coming in. It's incumbent upon Microsoft and all of the big technology companies to expand the IT ecosystem. We have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, but we also have a social responsibility to the industry. In the US the universities will graduate only one-half of the IT people the industry needs over the few years."

Abu-Hadba said there are three core elements to Microsoft's strategy to appeal to students. One is awareness. "We try to catch them at early stages of their lives to show them that IT can be a great place for them," he said. The second element is to enable the students free and easy access to tools and technology, and the third is to impact the educators and influence the curriculum for students.

"You'll see us have multiple programs that target students from high school and college, to DreamSpark and even BizSpark once they graduate," Abu-Hadba said. Through DreamSpark, Microsoft is giving students access to its latest technology at no cost. The program is available to more than 35 college students around the world. Microsoft also holds its annual Imagine Cup competition where it awards college students for creating innovative projects with the company's technology. And the BizSpark program helps startups that base their business on Microsoft technology, to get off the ground. Meanwhile Microsoft also offers certifications to students as well.

In addition, at MIX09, Microsoft honored a group of teenagers who were participants and winners of the "Microsoft Bliink" web design contest. The contest, which was piloted in Las Vegas and is being rolled out n Los Angeles and Sacramento, California., and in New Mexico this spring, provides teens with hands-on experience creating web sites and engages them in exploring careers in technology.

Indeed, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, despite the recession, more than 300,000 technology-related jobs remain unfilled due to a lack of qualified workers. And only five percent of US college undergraduates are today pursuing degrees in computer science or engineering, compared to 42 percent of university students in countries like China and India.

However, despite the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates of technical talent shortfalls, technology companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Sun and others have been laying off portions of their workforce as the recession has taken hold.

Yet, "Our nation's need for skilled technology workers presents a valuable opportunity for young people to hone their technical skills at an early age and increase their chances to secure interesting jobs in the US workforce when they graduate from high school or college," said Carla Faini, K-12 Academic Programs Manager at Microsoft. "We strive to create exciting project-based learning opportunities, such as the Microsoft Bliink contest, to provide teens with access to the latest technology and inspire them to realize their full potential."

The Microsoft Bliink competition, which was piloted in Clark County, NV, challenged high school students to design and develop Web sites that aligned to the theme, "I Imagine My Future" by using the Microsoft Expression suite of software tools. Participating schools received free subscriptions to the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance (MSDN AA), which included the Expression software. The Expression suite of software includes the same graphic design and web design tools used by professional designers.

Students were allowed to install this software onto their home computers at no charge. Additionally, Microsoft hired educators to create free tutorials and curriculum units, with the goal of allowing any beginner to create a potentially winning site. The web design materials are available to anyone at: http://expression.microsoft.com/education.

"Ensuring that students have the resources and tools they need to be prepared for the toughest job market in years is a top priority for Microsoft," said Lisa Brummel, senior vice president of human resources at Microsoft. "We know that the areas of growth and opportunity going forward will be in technology. The great thing about helping students develop skills in this area, is that technology is pervasive to all industries. Teens that come out of high school and college with solid technical skills can follow their passions and have robust careers in the fields that capture their imaginations.

Source: http://www.eweek.com/

Microsoft Improves Web Development Tools

Microsoft showed off improved Web development and design software Wednesday at its Mix Web developer conference, including a rapid Web application prototyping feature in Expression Blend and a browser compatibility feature in Expression Web.

Expression Web 3, the next version of Microsoft's Web development software, will include a feature called SuperPreview, which allows Web developers to see how their Web pages look in multiple browsers, even ones they don't currently have installed. Super Preview uses a cloud service to help with that, and can therefore show developers writing Web pages on Windows what their sites will look like in various Mac browsers as well.

SuperPreview will support at least Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer, as the demonstration Wednesday showed. It will potentially compete with an application Adobe has under development called Meer Meer.

In SuperPreview -- a standalone version of which that supports only Internet Explorer is available now -- developers can overlay different browser views over the control version of their layout to immediately identify any differences. In the overlay, developers will be able to see key information on site elements to help them diagnose problems. However, user interaction will not show up in SuperPreview because the preview is static. That could limit SuperPreview's usability in a day where more and more Web sites are becoming highly dynamic. Expression Web 3 also will add support for PHP and better CSS diagnostics.

Expression Blend 3, Microsoft's rich Web application design software, includes a feature called SketchFlow that allows Web designers to rapidly prototype rich Web applications. Specifically, SketchFlow lets designers create sketches and even working mock-ups of application workflows and behaviors without doing any coding.

That way, clients, business managers and others can see what a site will look like and how it will act earlier in the development process than in the past, while developers and designers can experiment with different ideas and bounce them off clients throughout the development process.

"SketchFlow fundamentally shifts the way you build apps, and the way the agency and the designer collaborate," Brian Goldfarb, director of developer platform and tools at Microsoft, said in an interview. "Today, the prototyping process starts with ideation and to completion, there are about six steps in between. This actually combines those middle steps into a cohesive unit."

For now, SketchFlow will only be available as part of Expression Blend, though clients will be able to view prototypes without Expression software. That limits its use to .Net and Silverlight apps. Goldfarb racked this up to the fact that designers tend to prototype richer experiences more often than HTML, but if that were the case, SketchFlow also appears to be a feature that Flash and Ajax designers could appreciate.

The next version of Expression Blend will also allow designers to import Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files and will add XAML, C# and Visual Basic IntelliSense support for those who want to do some heavier coding.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/