So what’s been happening in the last 6 months?

Sporting

Well, I admit I’ve spent far too much time on http://www.runsaturday.com which is now a 2500+ member site with lots of useful features for runners, cyclists, windsurfers and beyond. I’ve also had some commercial approaches on this site - but none that have made it anywhere significant yet. I’m not worried about this - runsaturday was never designed to be a commercial project - I created it for two purposes:

  • to provide a genuinely useful service
  • to improve my technical skills

Both of these are fully achieved - so I’m happy!

Connecting

I’ve continued to develop quite a lot of Facebook Connect technology - and also dabbled with Twitter oAuth and with Google Friends Connect.

These areas are still very interesting to me - and one of my latest projects has involved RPX - http://www.rpxnow.com - which is a great middleware service with an interesting freemium business model.

Meetups

I’ve not been to as many of these in the last few months - mainly because of time pressures.

The most interesting meetups I’ve been to are:

  • A meetup of local small tech businesses with our local MP - Vince Cable - it was amazing (but not surprising) how political it got. It was also interesting how much people wanted to talk about big issues rather than small local issues.
  • The Microsoft BizSpark launch where there were interesting sessions especially from Dragon’s Den James Caan - his story was much more interesting than I had expected - and from Moo.com founder, Richard Moross - very interesting to hear about the first painful two years of pleasurecards.com (what a name!)

Shopping

Recently I’ve completed a contract based around the nopcommerce .Net ecommerce software.
This has been quite an interesting development for me, involving a lot of customisation of the C# business logic for a very specific ecommerce purpose.

As an extension of this, I’ve also now launched my first ever codeplex project - a small payment provider for SagePay for nop - http://nopsage.codeplex.com/

BizSparking

Finally, I’ve also joined Microsoft’s BizSpark programme. So far I’ve just used this as a route to “free” software - but I am hopeful this will also be a useful networking platform in the future.

Forwards

I’ve found the last 6 months interesting

  • I’ve continued to develop my own technologies
  • I’ve got some income from the Facebook Connect product I launched for DotNetNuke - and from contracts linked to it
  • I’ve got a bit more income from specific contracts - still within .Net technologies

I’d quite like to continue this balance moving forwards - I feel it’s important (essential!) to continue to collect some income as well as to grow technologies.