Collaboration - Promotion of open collaboration
One policy stance of Media Technology Labs is "open collaboration." Instead of isolating ourselves within the company, under this concept we seek to accelerate innovation through open information exchange and collaboration even with people outside. Below are some of our initiatives for promoting such collaboration.
Mashup Awards
The Mashup Awards are given in Japan's largest web application development contest.
In 2006, Recruit began releasing internally held data as APIs (application programming interfaces). This was a period when considerable attention was being focused on the so-called "mashup" technique of building original services by combining services and data provided as an API. Jointly with Sun Microsystems, Recruit started the Mashup Awards, a contest with open solicitation of mashup entries from developers outside the company.
With the "open Web" concept spreading among Japanese companies along with the key term "Web 2.0," beginning with the second Mashup Awards held the following year, the scope was expanded to include not only API provided by Recruit but also the API for data and services of other Web-industry companies.
Being held for the 7th time in 2011, the Mashup Awards have grown into an event that is considered a kind of annual festival for Web developers. Entries are now being solicited in a wide range of genres, including not only PC websites, but also smartphone and tablet applications and works that go beyond the PC to utilize furniture, devices, etc. The Mashup Awards attract strong attention as a contest where the given year's Web technology evolution can be seen and understood.
ATND
MTL released the event support tool ATND (pronounced "attend") in September 2008. It is being widely used as an event announcement and participation management system, especially for IT and net technology seminars.
The precursor of ATND was the participant registration form developed for "The JUI 2008 Tokyo" JavaScript user interface technology conference held by MTL in May of that year. MTL had to start with the development of a participant registration form because at that time there weren't any free services enabling company-sponsored event participant management to be done with minimum collection of personal information.
The system was originally developed for use by our own events, but there were a growing number of technical seminars being held so, anticipating that other organizations had similar needs, ATND was born by opening the tool to general use.
At MTL, we have also developed and released event tools other than ATND.
