General: Launch48

Through various people I found out about Launch48. This is essentially a gathering of entrepreneurs, working together to launch a project in 48 hours. At first I was a little against the idea of turning up and handing over my ideas, then working for free - but I figured it would be a good opportunity and I'm glad I decided to come along.

It's primary sponsor is Dennis Publishing, which as you know I have strong ties with, having written for several of their publications since 2000. In fact, I'm still writing for IT Pro, Custom PC and Bit-Tech, all of which are owned by Dennis.

The event is actually being held in Dennis Towers, so it's nice to be on turf I know well. There are a number of "mentors" which are basically people who are successful people in the industry. Hugh Chappell sticks out, as I worked with him for my time at Trusted Reviews as well as Julian Lloyd-Evans who I've known ever since Spode's Abode was a fully fledged hardware review site.

Initially I wasn't going to pitch an idea, but one came to me on the train that I thought was simple enough that it would be possibly to do in 48 hours. The idea was/is to have a site called "Celebrities Have Their Say" or "Confirm Nor Deny". This would be a celebrity gossip site with a twist. The primary content would of course be celebrity gossip, pulled in from various other sites via RSS feeds or user submitted links. Then, through a verification system (possibly twitter authentication) the celebs themselves could write their side to the news story, without having to be quoted out of context. Because this is targetted at the mass user demographics, the pay per click Google Ads model would work.

Celebrity as a whole has been watered down so much that there would be several that wouldn't see it as below them to use a service such as this. Already, many have personal blogs were they rant and respond to things in the news - but who reads it?

It's a simple idea that is ideal to launch in 48 hours and after launch would require very little input. Unfortunately, despite some encouraging applause, I didn't get enough votes to go through. I feel if I'd had the next 2 minute slot and been able to answer questions, I could have persuaded people around.

Instead, many ideas got through to the next stage that people liked the idea of, but simply didn't process it in their heads. Many were flawed, or simply far too complex to do in 48 hours. As a developer of experience, I know how long you can waste on the simplest of features.

In the end, I joined the team for a project for "Decisions Decisions", which, in a nut shell, is a site where you post your dilemma and through crowd-sourcing a decision is come to for you. A simple idea with a good brand that can be easily built upon, but with enough caveats to keep us busy. The chap who came up with the idea, one Shed Simove, seemed like a really interesting guy to work with and tipped the balance between working on this and another project.

What is frustrating, is that I had to leave before they went to the pub where all the brainstorming was happening (something I enjoy) and I can't be there on Saturday because of Britain's Got Talent. Hopefully, they will be including me in on the development via e-mail and Google Documents and I will try and work on it while waiting around in the BGT studios. Then I can come in on Sunday to finish off what we've begun.

Check out my twitter feed for updates on Launch48 and check on the thinkbikes feed for updates on BGT!

After a rather disappointing Britain's Got Talent result, I worked my way over to Dennis Publishing to catch the last 30 minutes of Saturday's developments. At this point I really must add – 9:30? 9:30??? Anyone launching a business in 48 hours would not stop working at 9:30 – especially not the developers.

However, in 30 minutes, I was bought up to speed on the project I was working on, before heading to the pub for a drink and some brainstorming.

I turned up the next day, with a Starbucks coffee and almond croissant (over the years I've discovered that Dennis' Coffee is not the most pleasant of blends) and got stuck in to the day's events.

When I first signed up, I wasn't sure if I should join the developers or marketing. Knowing that I could only make it for one day I felt I should probably not develop, but the sigh of relief that I heard when I mentioned that I was a PHP developer could have been heard from every floor. Despite this, I didn't touch a single piece of PHP code throughout the day.

If there is one thing I openly admit is that I'm not the best designer. Yet, I spent most of the day inside GIMP, creating images, backgrounds, recolouring logos and such. I also worked on CSS, helped with overall strategy, UI, and fixed Apache rewrite rules.

The point is, when working in a team such as I did – it's not necessarily what you're best at – but what task needs doing. They had nobody manning the design and I was the closest they had to a designer. That's saying something!

The end outcome was DecisionsDecisions.com, which just about works! Another 12-24 hours and not only would we have everything working perfectly – we'd have most of the extra features working too. We're meeting up again on March 20th and hopefully by then we'd have solved most of the main issues.

The event was a really good experience. Firstly – 48 hours is not a long time, so you can throw selfishness to one side. Secondly, it was a chance to work with a lot of really interesting people from differing backgrounds – something that is difficult to do as a freelance. But what was most interesting was exactly how productive a small team could be in the time frame we had.

Despite the miniature eco-system, the patterns shown were reflective of the world's problems as a whole. Firstly, there weren't enough developers – something that our ICT, rather than IT education is perpetuating. Secondly, there were way too many self-professed, self-important business peeps. It's only natural that if you organise an event for self-starters, you're going to get a lot of strong willed, overly confident people – but there really was quite a clash at various points and it did a good job of reminding me why I'll never work a full-time job again.

I get asked to help develop on start-ups all the time and I'm always very cagey about it. But this is ideal – you only lose a weekend and you get so much more done because you've motivated by who you're surrounded by. I'm seriously considering using a similar approach to get some of my other ideas off the ground – starting with some of the contacts I made this weekend.

Thanks to Dan for this picture, taken at the celebratory meal at Pizza Express.

nice try babyyyyyyyyy

wow! a spammer offering YOU money? anyone else think that's weird?

and I like the way he forced you to keep reading by not using any punctuation.

and john, you should put far less graphics and video on your homepage. far too cluttered and far too large.

sorry, got no on topic comment to make, just had to get those things said.