I found out about 6rounds because they use Twitter as a promotional platform. I happened to notice that this company was following me and clicked on the link.
6rounds started out as an outgrowth of a speed dating website, and the application was initially designed for people to use while waiting for speed dating sessions. According to the 6rounds website FAQ's, "6rounds is a live meeting point, offering users a variety of experiences that they enjoy together using a combination of webcams, real-time games, social activities and media engagements."
Since I'm a happily married middle-aged woman, I'm not sure 6rounds is up my alley. I think social singles, college students, and others who don't mind flashing their faces through a webcam would like it.
If I had time, I might like to play around with GixOO, the opensource API that underpins 6rounds. GixOO has the potential for developers to develop games and activities. The application allows the users to track each other as they move their mice, and also enables people to see the same things as their friends as they interact online.
6rounds looks like it might provide possibilities for collaborative projects in education, but I won't be sure until I give it a try.
So what is 6rounds?
FOR THE TECH-CURIOUS
The following information was quoted from the Openomics blog from Sun Microsystem's ISV Engineering:
"6rounds is the first product built on the GixOO live social platform, initially developped on the LAMP stack. As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program, GixOO connected with Sun's ISV Engineering team to test the scalability of their platform on SAMP --the Solaris-based AMP stack, available in an integrated and optimized package from Sun, the Sun Glassfish Web Stack f.k.a. CoolStack. At the time, we ran the benchmark on a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server --featuring the 64-way CoolThreads processor UltraSPARC T2-- running Solaris 10 and CoolStack 1.3. GixOO loved the DTrace kernel instrumentation of Solaris 10 --DTrace gives unique insights into how the application performs, live on a production system-- and the Containers technology a.k.a. Zones --this light-weigth virtualization layer of Solaris allows multiple applications to run in isolation from each other on the same physical hardware--, and quickly adopted them for their internal use.
"At GixOO, we use Sun SPARC-based server, powered by Solaris 10 for our R&D environment. The system gives us the required flexibility and components isolation that we need. Thanks to SPARC's great SMP abilities, we achieve high performance for many development environments running on one single 1U server.Somewhat Related
Solaris Zones are very comfortable and simple to configure, and allow the full utilization of the great power hidden in this small machine, which makes Solaris 10 an excellent choice for system administrators. We are using Sun MySQL Server which gives our application high speed data storage solution, and in the future we might migrate to the MySQL Cluster solution to get even faster results."
Dmitry Shestak, CTO, GixOO"
2/26/10: Oracle bought Sun in 2009. Here were the latest results when I did a search to get more information:
Not Really Related
*For those new to this blog, I'm a school psychologist who returned to her day job full time a year and 1/2 ago, when the economy was taking a nosedive. Before that, I was working part-time and taking computer and technology classes, initially to learn how to create interactive multimedia applications and games.
Since some of the kids and teens I work with have a range of abilities and disabilities, including autism, I developed an interest in accessibility. How can universal design principles be applied to games and emerging interactive technologies? I'm also fascinated by interactive displays and surfaces of all sizes, especially ubiquitous systems that support cognition, collaboration and communication.
One of my pet projects:
My vision? A collaborative multimedia, multi-modal interactive time-line might help us to understand complex, interrelated factors and events more effectively. It would provide an opportunity for the inquisitive to view things from a broad perspective, and also explore things in rich detail. Ideally, the time-line would support multi-touch, multi-user interaction on larger displays and interactive whiteboards, and allow for people who are remotely located to participate in the process.
Now that one of my schools will be getting a multi-touch SMARTTable, I'd like to experiment with time-line concepts and interactions on a table surface. I'd also like to figure out how this can work seamlessly with the existing SMARTBoard that is in the classroom. Of course, this would have to take place during after work hours!
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