Using two of the planet's largest creative online communities -- World of Warcraft gamers and Etsy artists -- as their laboratory, two Indiana University Bloomington researchers hope to understand how the inner workings of such massive, networked collaborations could benefit scientists, corporations and the very IT designers who facilitated the success of the two online communities. "Massive communities of creativity like those represented by World of Warcraft (WoW) and Etsy have a structurally different model from the small teams of professionals working in the environments that major professional creative applications from Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft were designed for," said IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing Assistant Professor Jeffrey Bardzell. Full Story

Indiana University received a record $603.9 million in grants and awards for research and other sponsored programs during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, IU President Michael A. McRobbie announced in August. The new record amount surpasses the previous mark of $525.3 million set during the 2007-2008 fiscal year and includes new highs for amounts received from federal, state and non-profit sources (excluding foundations). Overall, income from grants and awards for research was up 28.7 percent over the $469.4 million IU received last year. Full Story

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund more work being done by an Indiana University Bloomington informaticist who is creating a sustainable initiative to create metrics for assessing scholarly impact from large-scale usage data. IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing Associate Professor Johan Bollen and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will share the Mellon Foundation grant designed to build upon the MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (MESUR) project that Bollen began in 2006 with earlier support from the foundation. Bollen is also a member of the IU School of Informatics and Computing's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) and the IU Cognitive Science Program faculty. Full Story

Davide Bolchini, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at the Indiana University School of Informatics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, was recently awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to identify and evaluate strategies that may help blind and visually-impaired users better navigate the web using their auditory senses. The project could also have implications for mobile device users when it may be inconvenient, distracting or even dangerous to look at a device's screen while engaged in another activity. Examples include use of a cell phone while walking or driving. Full Story

Indiana University Research & Technology Corp. announced a record-breaking fiscal year for 2010 (ending June 2010) as licensing revenues from commercializing IU technologies more than doubled from $6 million dollars in FY 2009 to $14.2 million dollars at the end of FY 2010. "Licensing revenue represents more than just a dollar amount. Increases in revenue show that IU inventions are progressing through the commercialization pipeline and reaching the public," stated Marie Kerbeshian, vice president of technology commercialization. "In addition, this revenue rewards IU inventors and funds additional research at IU, so that even more inventions can be made." Full Story

The Aug. 2, 2010, issue of IT Matters @ IU included an announcement of a formal agreement between three IU entities to provide affordable, quality information technology workshops to IU alumni and others. Also included in this month's edition is the announcement by IU's Research & Technology Corp. of the launch of a new website designed to speed the path to successful innovation for faculty and staff, a release unveiling a new service through IU and Cook Medical designed to streamline the process of matching inventors with companies looking for new commercial products, and an announcement by IU and Vai technology Inc. that they would form a new corporation to commercialize and create a portfolio of iris recognition technologies. Full Story