Japanese institute signs software development contract

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

Croquet is a new open-source software technology and peer-to-peer network architecture that supports online interaction and resource sharing among large numbers of 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) at UW–Madison. “Our Japanese colleagues are interested in working with us to develop new ways for all of us to interact with network-deliverable information.”

The agreement with NiCT follows an 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.

Early adopters of the Croquet software-development environment include more than 20 higher-education institutions both in the United States and abroad.

For more information, visit the Croquet Project Web site.