Christian Heilmann

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Social Innovation Camp – turn your technical innovation skills into human benefits

Friday, February 15th, 2008

The last few years we’ve become increasingly better in building applications that make our life easier. May that be collaboration, day-to-day tasks like writing, converting or just managing our tasklists – a web app to make it smoother for us as end-users was always available with a minimum search effort.

Meanwhile, in the real world, social problems became worse and worse. This becomes even more problematic as there is a distinct lack of forward thinkers providing easy to use and apply solutions to existing problems. This is where the Social Innovation Camp wants to bridge the gap.

In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems.
Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.

Until then, the organizers are calling out to you for ideas:

For the next month, we’ll be accepting applications to come to the event via the website – www.sicamp.org. The plan is that people will fill in our ideas submission form with details of an idea they have for socially-beneficial web tools. This process will close on 7th March 2008 and we’ll choose the best to come and join us in April.

I’ll be one of the technical advisors on the panel and I am very much looking forward to seeing what web geeks can do to change the world around us rather than just the virtual ones.

The first PlugLondon is over – we came, we plugged, we talked

Monday, December 10th, 2007

PlugLondon Logo Idea #1

Yesterday the first ever PlugLondon event took place in the Skype offices off Tottenham Court Road in London, England. PlugLondon was the idea of Jonathan Gabbai of Ebay, Paul Amery and Antoine Bertout of Skype and me and we wanted to give London based developers a chance to show off what they have done and network in an environment devoid of HR, PR or other business lures or pressures.

The signs were bad: it was raining cats and dogs (the classic London rain that will get you from all sides and therefore is not stopable with a brolly), the tubes were overcrowded as there were also protest marches planned in the city and generally the westend was packed with shoppers trying to get their christmas presents.

Nevertheless about 40-50 people showed up and we consumed the pizza and drinks provided before heading off to the Bricklayer’s Arms for some more drinks.

So far all I heard was good feedback and some very good suggestions how to move the event forward. We’ll see what we can do for the next one, but I guess we’ll wait a while till the weather is better and people came back from holidays. I personally am off to a 8 day trip to Hongkong on Tuesday.

Sky is dishing out £10k for widgets using their RSS feeds

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

Well, in a competition, not just directly. I like the idea of Sky News’ Developer Competition where they offer all in all £10k in prize money for widget and badge implementations of the content of their RSS feeds.

Talented developers can use the feeds to create their own applications. The brains with the best ideas will be invited to a Dragons’ Den-style judgment day at the Sky News studios.

A bit of a shame is that they haven’t got an API yet, but I pointed them to Yahoo! Pipes to offer developers as a workaround to use the RSS feeds in an easier manner.

The deadline is 30th of November and the Dragon’s Den shootout is on the 20th of December in the Sky offices. So if you want to have a go, get coding :) Make also sure you check the Terms and Conditions of the competition.

PlugLondon – let there be talk, let there be beers and let there be London developers shape the event

Monday, November 5th, 2007

Once in a while you realize that a lot of people are like you. When I joined a big internet corporation a lot of people asked me if I will shut up about bad things on my blog or if I will become a company drone now. The joke never gets old and I told some other people in the same situation about it. Well, we drank some beers, chatted and now it is time to take action:

PlugLondon is a meetup for developers in London in December sponsored by ebay, Yahoo, Skype and Paypal.

The catch? All of the people involved agreed on leaving both HR and PR out the door and do the thing ourselves. So on the 8th of December we want all the London people who drive software innovation to show up, chat with us about their products, how they use our APIs, get info from our experts and of course have several beers and food.

We are planning on repeating the exercise every half year and basically want to show that London can be as cool as the Valley but not as annoying to get to for UK folks.

The event has no branding yet and we invite people to give us logo ideas. The audience at the first meetup will choose which is the best and we go from there.

So come around, check out the different parts:

See you there,

Chris