Sun announces Facebook app for Olympics

USA: Sun Microsystems Inc. has released a new social networking game for Facebook, allowing fans of the 2008 Beijing Summer Games to compete online, with their friends and for their country, by correctly predicting medal winners throughout this summer's events. Sun is not an official sponsor of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

The application, MyPicks Beijing 2008, allows participants to pick Gold, Silver and Bronze medal winners for each event during the Summer Games and win points for their country with each correct prediction. At the conclusion of the Games, the country with the highest point total will be declared the winner of the MyPicks Beijing 2008 Games. MyPicks Beijing 2008 is available on Facebook at: http://apps.facebook.com/mypicksbeijing/Home.

MyPicks Beijing 2008 was developed by Pramati Technologies using zembly, Sun's new browser-based social application development environment.

Released in private beta in June 2008, zembly is the world's first social programming environment specifically designed for creating and hosting social applications targeting the most popular platforms on the web including Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, the iPhone and more.

zembly utilizes Sun hardware on Network.com while taking advantage of Sun's software stack, the Solaris 10 Operating System, GlassFish application server and MySQL database.

“The spirit of the Games has always been about bringing the world closer together. So, it's fitting that social networking sites like Facebook, that easily connect people around the world, can be leveraged to create socially-driven applications such as MyPicks Beijing 2008,” said Todd Fast, CTO of the zembly project at Sun. “The zembly team is thrilled to work with Pramati technologies to enable new forms of applications for Facebook and demonstrate the exciting possibilities of zembly.”

“Pramati Technologies is incredibly happy to work with zembly to provide Facebook users around the globe with a simple, exciting way to celebrate the 2008 Summer Games,” said Vijay Pullur, Co-Founder & CTO, Pramati. “By providing a complete hosted environment for creating and scaling social applications, zembly has created a new way for developers of all skill levels to easily build Facebook applications without the cost and complexity of hosting and managing the application themselves.”