It is project ran by Bitmain, well Bitmain_Rob is who announced it - he was the creator of snowball.io, now Hashnest. (Bitmain respond to their official Connect ANN on their own forum - https://enforum.bitmain.com/bbs/topics/4027)

I would actually like to use the APP to replace a slack channel but it would need to be opensourced before I even consider that, guess we're just their beta testers - atleast I got paid with luckypackets, where's the next bunch for me to claim