London, 3 April, 2008 - Jonathan Howell, former Director, Software Development at lastminute.com (part of Sabre Holdings) has joined Huddle.net as Chief Technical Officer (CTO). Jonathan is tasked with leading the development of Huddle.net, an application that combines online collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles. He will also be responsible for opening up its API to the global development community.

At lastminute.com Jonathan led one of the largest IT projects within Sabre Holdings. He was responsible for converging hotel inventory systems globally, delivering a single technology platform that met the requirements of all Sabre businesses (Sabre Travel Network, Travelocity, lastminute.com, Zuji and others).

Prior to that he ran all online software development for the lastminute.com sites across Europe. Jonathan has built and led teams ranging from 15 to 100 people, distributed across the US, UK, Europe, India and Argentina.

“It’s fantastic having Jonathan on board. He has got an amazing track record of building great web applications and providing the technology that underpins one of the leading global brands. His breadth of experience and Agile expertise is exactly what Huddle needs now to succeed,” said Alastair Mitchell, co-founder and CEO, Huddle.net.

Alastair continued: “At the same time, Jonathan’s vision for Huddle will help open it up to developers across the globe, make it an even better, feature-rich product and help us lead the drive of Web 2.0 technologies into the Enterprise.”

“Huddle’s offer came out of the blue, but its pitch as a ‘Facebook meets Sharepoint’ certainly got my attention,” said Jonathan Howell, CTO, Huddle.net. “We have a great team here, full of enthusiasm, dedication and truly open to our users’ suggestions. 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. This will create really exciting opportunities for everyone.”