Local startup initiatives have been growing by leaps and bounds worldwide, attracting the attention of power players like the United States to collaborate with them. This can result in big companies buying out the new organizations, or simply in recognition and encouragement helping the movement.

A proposal known as Project Panama is gaining a lot of support on the Internet by way of an open-source Java mailing list. The effort would provide Java programmers the ability to access non-Java application programming interfaces, including other popular interfaces used by C/C++ programmers.

At the Agile Development/Better Software Conference West, James Whittaker presented a keynote on the future of web-based data. When we want information, we still use searches and filter through results, as hunters. Whittaker says we should become gatherers and let context-based data come to us.