Japanese firm signs software development contract with UW-Madison

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NiCT) of Japan has signed a $200,000 contract with the UW to develop new educational uses for Croquet, an innovative open-source operating system made available to developers in October.

Croquet is an open-source software technology and peer-to-peer network architecture that supports online interaction and resource sharing among users.

“Private developers and now government agencies are beginning to take note of Croquet’s possibilities,” says Julian Lombardi, one of the principle architects of Croquet and director of the project at the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). “Our Japanese colleagues are interested in working with us to develop new ways for all of us to interact with network-deliverable information.”

The NiCT announcement comes on the heels of another announcement that 3Dsolve, a North Carolina-based technology company has begun developing commercial educational software using Croquet. Like 3Dsolve, NICT sees Croquet as a communications platform and service, available anytime, anywhere, from any device.

Croquet is designed to run on everything, from a PDA through a set-top box. Observers say it will change the way people think about software and computation, from today’s device-oriented perspective to a perspective of computation as a persistent, pervasive service.

The Croquet project is a joint software development effort involving DoIT, the University of Minnesota, Hewlett Packard Inc. and Viewpoints Research Institute Inc.

For more information on Croquet visit the Croquet project Web site.