Actually, the design is from Satoshi and Matt did most of the implementation work last year during a Google internship. Though I ended up doing a lot of work on it too. We actually got pretty far: there was Android UI for it and a couple of apps we coded up. I wish we could have pushed it over the finishing line and got real world usage. Hopefully we can return to it someday soon.

I think the hub/spoke concept was invented by goldsmiths in 16th century Italy, as they started handing pieces of paper across their benches, or bancos in Italian   :-)