Saskatoon, SK, January 28, 2010 – Today, Social Connections announces the release of MashedIn.com (www.mashedin.com), an application that allows people to discover mutual connections across multiple social networks. MashedIn provides the user a widget that can be added to a website or blog where visitors can authenticate with either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to reveal common connections to the widget owner.

People have different groups of friends or connections on different social networks they use.  Being able to see mutual connections across multiple networks increases the chance you’ll find common linkages.  Mashedin provides a great value to businesses and business professionals. People can visit a business web presence or profile and be able to see if anyone they know is connected. For the business, it is like receiving a warm introduction to someone who is otherwise completely anonymous. Each connection you uncover provides more context for the visitor.

“MashedIn, like life, is really all about who you know and who they know,” says CEO Brendan King. “MashedIn allows people to leverage their investments in social networks like Faceboook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. People use these networks to connect with weak ties – people they didn’t, until now, communicate with all that often. MashedIn lets you profit from the experience and knowledge of your close friends, weak ties, and everybody those people know – without explicit communication. It does this by building trust, which is attained by discovering common ground and mutual connections. After all, let’s face it, recommendations from people you know trump all other types.”

The MashedIn team overcame considerable technical obstacles to make the application a possibility. “MashedIn is deployed entirely in the cloud on Google App Engine,” notes CTO Jason Collins. “This framework, combined with MashedIn’s parallel processing extensions, allows us to query social networks in a massively parallel manner and traverse large graphs of social connections. This approach allows for relevant, meaningful social connections and recommendations to be presented to the user almost instantaneously, despite having to gather and process large amounts of data from a number of third-party sources.”

Social Connections, (www.socialconnections.com) based in Saskatoon, Canada, develops software to leverage social networks and improve trust. The first solution released by the company in early 2009 was a reputation management tookit for small businesses called StepRep. MashedIn is designed to have broader applicability for people to improve trust and identity through social connections.

Social Connections is a wholly owned subsidiary of VendAsta Technologies, which raised $3 million in the summer of 2008.

For the last couple months there have been murmurs around the office that one of our developers, Kevin Pierce, was up to something pretty amazing. Those of us who don’t know JavaScript from a jack-in-the-box were kind of left in the dark, but we were told his project had something to do with dramatically improving page load times for our application MyFrontSteps.

MyFrontSteps, to put it simply, lets you share your list of trusted home service experts with your friends. Say you’re friends with a bunch of people, and each of those people trusts a number of experts. Every time MyFrontSteps shows you a list of the experts you trust, it also needs to retrieve the list of your friends, and cross-check the friends against the experts:

• Friend A trusts experts X, Y, and Z.
• Friend B trusts experts X and Y.
• Friend C trusts experts Y and Z.
• Friend D doesn’t trust anyone.
• Friend E trusts…

Now, each of these cross-checks only takes a fraction of a second, but if you’ve got a page requiring hundreds of cross-checks, those fractions can add up. By the time they’re all done, the user has spent a non-fractional number of seconds waiting for the page to load.

These cross-checks take forever when they have to be done serially – one after another. Obviously things would go much more quickly if you could conduct these operations in parallel – all at the same time. Kevin’s simple task was to find a way to make that possible.

And so he…uh…well, maybe I’d better let Jason describe what Kevin did next:

He started poking around the gory depths of the App Engine source and discovered that all of the API calls stub out in MakeSyncCall. This inevitably led to the discovery of the partner MakeCall which yields an RPC object that you can wait on. Of course, if I can wait on one RPC object, I can also wait on many of them.

What this means is…well, I really have no idea what it means. The gist is that MyFrontSteps can now do a hundred things all at once instead of painstakingly, one after the other. As a result, we can now present information in a way that it wasn’t realistically possible to do it before.

Kevin’s possibility-expanding solution has now been made available to other developers. It’s known as asynctools, and if you’re looking for a way to execute Google App Engine API calls in parallel, you’re welcome to it – it’s open source.

Because asynctools utilizes the Google App Engine API in ways that it hadn’t been utilized before, it’s drawn a little attention from the Google team. Here’s what they had to say about it on the Google App Engine Blog:

asynctools is a rather nifty toolkit that allows you to execute datastore queries in parallel in the Python runtime. The interface is slightly more involved than using standard queries, but the ability to execute multiple queries in parallel can substantially reduce the render time for a page where you need to execute multiple independent queries.

I got lost after “rather nifty”, but that’s good enough for me. Kudos to Kevin and everyone else who chipped in on this rather nifty innovation!

Congrats to all at VendAsta Technologies who have helped create such an exciting and innovative company

MyFrontSteps, Homebook (for the hundreds of millions of Facebook and MySpace users), StepRep (for the millions of home service providers) are all exciting to see as they lift off

VendAsta’s consulting work has been immensely rewarding as we help big companies take advantage of modern technologies to solve today’s business challenges

As odd as that statement may sound, it’s exciting and motivating for the development team to hear feedback such as this.  Since the first days of VendAsta Technologies in early 2008, teams of dedicated software architects, designers, developers, testers, business analysts, integration specialists (and more) have been working diligently on several projects that have really come together nicely. Some are completed, some are well on their way, and some are in early stages.  All – in our opinion – are going well.  We attribute our early success to teams working closely together, dedication by each team member towards a common goal, and the execution and commitment to a disciplined agile approach in software development.

I hesitate to make this post sound like a sales pitch – cause we’re blogging folks! (forgive me if it does) We’ll call it “praise to the VendAsta team” … but if you’re a company that we’ve approached (or haven’t approached) and you’re interested in speaking to us about high quality consulting work – we’d like to talk with you.

This year, VendAsta’s very own CTO, Jason Collins has the honor of joining this elite group of presenters. Those of you that have been fortunate enough to have seen Jason speak before will know not to miss this presentation titled:

Code Free or Die Hard

Free content. Free application hosting. Unprecedented access to customers eager to use your application – and promote it to their social networks, for free. Multiple frameworks, APIs, and development tools jostling for your attention. Users are on the move, their phones know where they are and where they’ve been, they’re connected all the time – but their interactions with technology are faster, more fleeting, lighter on content but heavy with context. What does this all mean for developers? It means being able to operate in multiple environments simultaneously. It means writing smaller amounts of highly functional code. It means keeping pace with a consumer-facing software sector that is frantic, kinetic, and creatively destructive – now more than ever.

The event is open to all and is posted on the University of Saskatchewan’s website .

2008 P.G. Sorenson Distinguished Graduate Lecture

Code Free or Die Hard

Speaker: Jason Collins

Date: Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Time: 7:30 pm

Room: Arts 146

Everyone is welcome.

Congratulations to our very own Jason Collins – He’s kind of a big deal!

What does that mean, you might be asking yourself. Let me explain.

When we first discussed the idea of working on side projects I had a lot of fears.  Fears that we would lose focus, fears that it would be expensive, fears that the time would be “wasted”.  To alleviate those fears I wanted to impose restrictions.  Things like:  Projects need to be well thought out and documented, projects need to have some benefit to the company, or projects need to be in area of development we are already in.

Then, I thought about what it is that we  originally envisioned VendAsta to be.  To paraphrase, we wanted to work with super smart people we like on interesting stuff.  To achieve this, our attitudes, philosophies, environment and culture must reflect this.  Imposing rules overtop of JAM to alleviate fears is wrong, it is simply not what we are about.

On the face of it JAM is about allowing everyone to have an opportunity to work on ideas that are their own or ideas they personally and individually buy into.   But it is more than that. It is about providing people with the luxury of dreaming.  It is about giving our people a chance to turn some of their dreams into reality.

People at VendAsta work very hard.   When you hire the best and brightest you tend to get people that are ambitious and driven.  VendAstians are thinkers, innovators, and leaders full of their own ideas and driven by a strong competitive work ethic, healthy peer pressure, and pride.

JAM is about providing time, money and opportunity for anyone to sell their idea to the VendAsta team.  JAM is the mechanism to take something from a dream to an idea, from an idea to a plan, from a plan to a prototype, from a prototype to a product and from a product to a money maker.

JAM products will gain momentum through peer review, open discussion and debate and personal choice. JAM Product decisions will not be made by management and executives.  Products that gain JAM momentum will benefit from all the skill sets available; marketing, promotion, critical analysis, development and production environments, business development, testing, monetization, HCI and development.

JAM is also an opportunity to share in the profits and hedge your chances for success. The profits of products built and released via JAM will be shared in a very democratic way with all.

Most of all JAM is about making VendAsta a great place to work with super smart cool people building interesting stuff.