Google has invited developers to a hackathon that will give them a chance to learn more about the Google Glass platform. The company sent invitations on Wednesday to an event scheduled for Nov. 19 and 20 at Google’s San Francisco Basecamp, where eager developers will hear about the next phase of the Glass Developer Platform. Google will be reaching out to more developers in the coming months.

Valve Software has announced the Steam Controller, the third part of its trio of initiatives designed to bring Linux-based gaming to the living room. Valve dubbed the controller “a different kind of gamepad.” It features dual circulator trackpads driven by the player’s thumbs. Each has a high-resolution haptic pad at its base, which is clickable, allowing the entire surface to act as a button.

Politics may make for strange bedfellows, but there’s no comparison to the match-ups that occur in the business world. Consider this: Mozilla, which has been flexing its muscles of late and pushing into the smartphone business and foreign markets, has teamed up with the flailing and failing BlackBerry, which is hemorrhaging market share, to conduct research on bugs in browsers.

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that “free stuff.” Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux. On the software development side of the computing industry, however, open source is known for much different reasons.

OpenGamma is the developer of the first open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Its products help companies explore flexible open source alternatives to conventional and costly risk analytics tools. The OpenGamma Platform is a unified system for front office and risk calculations for financial services firms.

eScholar’s only business is helping state and local education agencies get the best bang for their buck from collecting and using educational data to drive better school performance results. That sometimes involves helping its customers work with data gleaned from a variety of commercial and open source enterprise databases.

In 1996, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a unique search engine called “BackRub” that ran on the school’s server. After one year, BackRub’s bandwidth outgrew the university’s needs. Its creators rebranded BackRub into Google, a respelled reference to “googol.” It is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

You could call Ian Sefferman’s initial rise to CEO of MobileDevHQ a bootstrap career move. Seeing the rapid growth of consumer interest in mobile apps, he jumped into an infant industry to learn what would push it forward. His interests fell on a gaping opportunity: how to help app developers become more successful.