Lastminute development 'guru' joins Huddle

Online collaboration website Huddle.net has headhunted Lastminute.com's director of software development, Jonathan Howell, to head up its technology practice as chief technical officer.

Huddle.net combines collaboration, project management and document sharing using social-networking principles. The company says its service is broad enough to be suitable for individual users, SMEs and business users.

Howell's appointment comes at a time when commentators are becoming increasingly interested in Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. He will be responsible for overseeing the opening up of the site's application programming interface (API) to the global development community to encourage the creation of mashups and extensions to current software.

According to Alastair Mitchell, Huddle.net chief executive and co-founder, Howell's vision for Huddle will help open it up to developers across the globe, make it a more feature-rich product and help the company drive usage of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.

Free for charities and individuals using up to 1GB of storage space, the Huddle.net site allows users to "instantly" create a network of collaborative team workspaces. Users can then add the Huddle Workspace application to their Facebook profile and can manage projects while checking out friends' profiles.

"Huddle's offer came out of the blue, but its pitch as a 'Facebook meets SharePoint' certainly got my attention," said Howell. "My next task is to launch Huddle's API to other developers, helping them to create new apps on top of our platform and integrate Huddle into other services."