« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »
July 05, 2007
Climate dating
So there I was, working for a biotechnology company, generally enjoying the work but with this sneaking feeling that things were getting out of hand. Unfixed bugs, one big project, tech support issues, mandatory replacement of "out of license compliance" software, a multitude of enhancement requests for existing software. And me and one part time consultant to do it all. I won't hear a word said against either of the part time consultants (for once there were two), they are both at the top of their game, really nice lads, and highly competent. But one day per week is not really enough to make a difference. The fact is that Nuevolution is the longest I have ever been employed for one company (4 years and 1 month) and things had absolutely not worked out there as I had hoped and expected.
The upshot is that when I got an email from a former colleague from Nuevolution, who'd started up his own company, asking me if I'd be interested in joining him, I jumped at the chance.
So, here I am, now working for a company called ByPilot. The idea for the company was originally to create a product which allowed mobile phone users to arrange to meet each other at certain locations. There was a powerful web front end for creating users, locations and events, using DotNetNuke and Google Maps, and an equally powerful Java application running under J2ME for mobile phones. All written by one man, Johannes Dolberg (founder and CEO of ByPilot). But Johannes realised he'd created a bit of a monster! So in order to simplify development and get a first version of the product in front of people, he focussed on mobile dating as a specific application. The result, DatePilot, is a cut-down version of the full ByPilot application, and has many of the features of ByPilot (locations and users, specifically) but lacks events. On the other hand, it allows for matching of user profiles - and you can send SMS messages to those profiles that match your search criteria.
Now, it turns out that this dating (matchmaking) model is generally applicable to other situations where two or more individuals or groups want to meet at short notice, for example, during business conferences. And lo and behold, Copenhagen is playing host to the UN Climate Summit in 2009, which should replace the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. There will be some 10,000 delegates, many of whom will wish to arrange to meet each other at short notice ...
So it was especially fitting that JD, Martin Stokbro and I (the three partners of ByPilot now!) joined a number of other companies and some senior politicians at the first press conference for the Copenhagen Climate Network 2009, a network of companies, politicans and organisations whose businesses and needs will be driven by the Summit and the (proposed) attendant activities surrounding 2009 as the "year of the environment".
ByPilot's system for arranging these meetings has been referred to as "klima dating" ("climate dating") which seems to be a term that will stick from now on!
So I am currently working on extending the database and some of the software to include categorisations to broaden the search criteria ...
Exciting times ...
Posted by daen at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)