We launched our first product Wedding Tales a few weeks ago, and this week, we featured in The Newcastle Journal (and in hats too!)

We’ve been pretty quiet here on the MemoryMerge blog because we’ve been hard at work coding!

It would seem our timing is bang-on though, because - as we prep our first product, WeddingTales.co.uk, for launch (early next month) - the internet is on fire with new and exciting photo-sharing solutions.

This week, Color.com announced their stonking investment (congratulations guys) and the new Path release resulted in tweets like this little beauty.

Clearly people love sharing their photos - but it raises a lot of novel issues.

Over the last few years we’ve been throwing our content online - sharing with the world, and sharing a whole host of things without much thought about the repercussions.

From people being exposed as bigamists through their Facebook profiles to the dangers of unwittingly giving out your location, sharing blindly with the world clearly has its problems.

Your wedding is one such situation. You really don’t want to make your wedding photos public, but you probably do want to share all the great photos your guests took.

That’s why we built WeddingTales.co.uk.

We make it really easy for all your guests to upload and share the photos of your big day from their own digital cameras and smartphones. There’s no need to ‘friend everybody’, you’re all there for the same reason. There’s no need to join yet another site. If your guests have the magic code then they’re straight in!

We gather all the photos, keep them safe online, and make it very easy for you to download them all. Handy, huh? Oh, and we’ve hooked up with printers, so you can order great prints of your most awesome photos (as taken by your awesome friends).

So why should you be using WeddingTales, and not Path, Color or another mobile sharing solution?

They’re wicked, they really are, but have you got mobile reception at the country house where you’re getting married, and is your gran packing an iPhone?

No, thought not!

Your guest will most likely have digital cameras with them, so what are you going to do, ask them to post CDs?

If you’re getting married in the next few months, then sign yourself up for more info about our launch.

After much ado in the world of CodeIgniter over that few months, 2.0 was released, and looks awesome.  Loads of bug fixes, slight reworking of the structure, some new classes- it looks like a seriously impressive piece of kit.  We figured now was a good time to move our codebase across.  It turned out to be reasonably painless too…

• Fresh install of Code Igniter Reactor 2.0.0, downloaded from codeigniter.com
• Take note that the application folder is now outside of system, making future upgrades easier.
• Move your .htaccess across if you’re using it
• Move across the details for your config/database.php file, watch for the extra new settings.
• Move across the details in your config/routes.php file, watching for the new line about 404 and losing the scaffolding lines.
• Move across all of your custom config files from config.
• Move in all of your Controllers, Models and Views into the appropriate directories.
• Edit each of the Controllers to replace “extends Controller” with “extends CI_Controller” and swap the initialisation function with public function __construct() { parent::__construct() }
• Do the same with Models, replacing “extends Model” with “extends CI_Model” and adding in constructor.
• Move across any Libraries and Helpers you were using (plug-ins have gone, but we weren’t using any).

At this point we fired up the site and it almost worked.  There were a few kinks to be ironed out, namely…

• Replacing $this->input->xss_clean with $this->security->xss_clean()
• Moving in our custom “work out which host I’m on and adopt the right base names and connection string” hack, though I believe that this is now part of the core of CI2.

And that was it. We were up and running, and have yet to find any errors.  It would have been cool to run a test suite, but we’re still building it.

Some handy references: official release notes, all you need to know about CodeIgniter 2.0 by Phil Sturgeon,  some note notes on migrating the weirder bits.

James and Oli from MemoryMerge attended the SuperMondays Re-Flash talks, a lightening talk night with 7 minutes per presentation. Tweets from the night have been curated by @coldclimate 

Peter Bull — Zunecardr
 
Peter presented a Windows Phone 7 app, Zunecardr, which he’s ported from his desktop app. It uses Silverlight, pulls in stylings from the Zune Player and brings across the social music functionality missed out by Microsoft.
 
The default UI (Metro) is pretty, but it remains to be seen whether Windows Phone can bite a decent chunk of a saturated market.

 Sam Harrison — Animmersion
 
3D seems to be this year’s “new black”- and it’s appearing everywhere from tellies to the cinema. Historically, there’s been a high technical barrier to getting started (since the early days of POVray and DKBtrace in the early 90s), but it looks like this has changed significantly.
 
Sam showed off some of the interesting projects that Animmersion have developed. It’s easy to write of online 3D as a gimmick, but as Sam pointed out, the 3D map on Teesside University’s website is their highest used feature.
 
They aim to break down time and cost barriers by providing training environments for medical training. They’re interesting in hooking up with AS3 developers in the area.
 
Follow them to find out more.
 
 Audrius Jankauskas – Web CMSs and Related Technologies 
 
Audrius walked us though the ImpressPages CMS, currently being developed on The Difference Engine. ImpressPages aims to lower the barrier to managing your site as far as possible, with a drag and drop interface and a hosted version in development.
 
One of their example slides caused a little stir. Interested parties should check out “The Scent of Lithuania”.
 
You can follow them on Twitter.

Ross Dargan — An Introduction to FlexRAID

Storage at any scale bigger than one disc is hard. With the massive increase in the amount of data people are storing at home, solutions such as disc arrays, SANs, NASs may become a feature of every living room, but they’re not easy (or cheap).

Ross introduced a software solution, FlexRAID - a one man project which allows you to set up RAID-like redundant and resilient storage based on folders rather than discs.  By spreading your data across multiple discs (including network drives) you protect yourself against accidental deletion and other such nightmares.

Due to the parity configuration, it’s suited to growth storage rather than data that changes frequently.

Aidan Garnish — An Introduction to the Concept of Time Banking

Benjamin Franklin said “Time is money”, but to Aidan, time is time- and time banking is the concept of using time as currency. Rather than a straight swap, where you paint my walls for the same amount of time as I program your database, 65hours.com lets you bank time spent, to be redeemed later with other suppliers- so I can program your database, but get Jeff to paint my walls.

65hours.com is an interesting project, and in these times of austerity might be a sound option for small companies and bootstrappers alike.

Note should be made of the amazing design work by @grabbins - one of the most beautiful sites we’ve seen recently.

Bobby Paterson — happie.st

Bobby ran through the social aspects of the Happie.st app, which aims to help you manage your emotional welfare. These days it’s very easy to become focused on work and put quality of life on the back-burner. Can Bobby’s principles of happiness help us all?

Happie.st is a company borne from the Codeworks DEV program and embraces the agile methodology set, something a lot of people in the room would be keen to know more about- their ongoing development helped raise sign-ups from 57% to 90%+ over one day.

Happie.st is shortly to launch their beta version.

Follow their latest happy news on Twitter.

Adrià Mercader — Customised Web Maps

We all default to using Google Maps because it’s easy, and those who have worked with multi-layered geospatial data know that it must be fearsomely complex under the hood.

Adrià pointed us to a good selection of open source projects out there offering the full stack, from geospatial DB, thought tiling, right up the display layer.  Links on his site http://amercader.net

We can’t help wondering what the architecture behind www.police.uk is (and we can’t find out because the site is down).

Derek Frost — Development Using the Spring Framework

Despite having more than 10+ years of Java, I never think to use it for web-based projects. That’s because I’m an eejit. The Spring framework has been around for nearly ten years and powers wedges of large-scale public sector websites (especially in collaboration with Oracle and OC4J)

Derek ran us though some of the benefits of Spring - an alien-looking stack for the Ruby/PHP crowd. He demoed his work on a charity site.

Notices

ToonCon information security group are meeting in Newcastle on 4th February.

Construqtive are looking for a local FLEX developer with UX experience. Please contact Oli for details.

Orange Bus are looking for staff and freelancers immediately.

Our business cards arrived this week ahead of schedule, and they’re super sultry.

Excellent work on the printing, Moo. We would heartily recommend you!

(NB Codegoat is a toy, not a full size animal).

The good folk from Codeworks visited the B.I.C. to meet the teams. Here’s our interview.

The Space Invaders gave me my inspiration to start programming.

I studied Psychology and Artificial Intelligence in Edinburgh.

I presented my dissertation in Sydney.

I worked on a high profile videogame.

I’ve worked as a web development/design freelancer for seven years.

I can’t wire a plug without a cheat sheet.

I like quirky versions of popular songs.

Specialities

Design, feel, experience, code, code architecture.

Find me

Twitter (DesignNewcastle).

Yet more SAAS tools and companies that we’re using to boot strap the business (part one of the list is here)

MailChimp provide all of our mailing list services and because we’re happy to have their branding on the bottom of our mails, is free until we sign up 1,000 people.

BitBucket is our Mercurial repository in the sky.  We’re currently using their free plan, but would have no hesitation about paying in the future if we needed more repositories.

Tumblr powers our blog so we don’t have to spend time maintaining Yet Another Wordpress Install.  (Wordpress rocks too by the way, but security patching is very something we don’t want to have to spend time doing at the moment)

Twitter, is well, Twitter.

Moo.com make beautiful business cards and their small run length means we can change the design/information as the company evolves.  5000 business cards with static details on them will stop you from pivoting if you need to.

There are probably a lot more, and we’re planning a couple of posts about the tech tools we’re using to build the MemoryMerge product too.

Starting a limited company in the UK is reasonably easy these days, but one big barrier to entry previously has been the cost of getting started. By the time you added up a couple of computers, desktop software, phone lines, fax line (in the 90’s anyway), a small office server, an email provider, a website and business cards you’d probably spent several thousand pounds just to look like “a real company”.

Luckily, those days are long gone.  You can boot-strap a business very cheaply, and very quickly too.  There might be no surprises in this list for those who live and breath online businesses, but hopefully there’s something for everybody.

These are the tools and companies we’re used so far to get up and running….

FreeAgent - keeping track of your money is hard and important.  Oli has used FreeAgent for all accounting, invoicing and payments in another business and FreeAgent have kindly agreed to support MemoryMerge for it’s first year.

Google Apps for Domains runs all of our email and calendars.  It replaces the need for a central server, and is flexible to cope with our multi-OS setup (one Windows laptop, one Linux laptop, one old Mac laptop and a linux server), and even talks to all of our phones and desktop software.  It’s cheap and reliable.

Google Docs provide online collaborative wordprocessing and spreadsheet functionality, meaning we don’t have to buy desktop software (we use Open Office offline).  Being able to edit the same document at the same time means turns out to be slightly spooky, but very very handy for collaborative note taking.

Dropbox replaces the need for an internal file sharing server.  With local network syncing it’s super quick, and at 50Gb for $100 it’s super cheap.  Being able to make certain documents public quickly is a god send too.  (Use this link and we’ll both receive up 250MB free too)

Pivotal Tracker is an agile project management tool which ties up nicely with some of the DSDM MoSCoW requirements techniques really well.

CoTweet means we can both access and use our @memorymerge twitter account without getting on each others toes and sharing passwords.  As we grow we can invite and delegate too.

This week kicked off with an internal ‘Presentation Day’ - each of the ten teams explained their idea (with a five minute ideal duration) before taking questions and suggestions.

We’re pleased to confirm there are some great ideas in the TDE melting pot- there are still a couple that we don’t fully understand… though we expect they’ll become clear over the coming weeks. Stay tuned here for info from the other teams in our guest spot posts!

Tuesday and Wednesday were both Mentor Days - we’re thankful to Richard, Steve, Julian, Mike and Olav for their time. Again, some confirmation of our idea, some probing questions to be answered and some excellent steer.

We had a social on Wednesday night in Newcastle with last year’s TDE graduates (a.k.a. TDE1). Many thanks to them for their generosity- a very enjoyable meal, great chat and some drinking that our heads regretted on Thursday (though probably not as much as the Love Your Larder boys, who bravely/foolishly took on Paul R’s drinking might).

We tweaked our website on Thursday to launch on Friday morning. Pistons are starting to fire in our PR machine- across this blog and Twitter. We’re initially hoping to appeal to those interested in the tech side and TDE- we’ll be posting info we think you’ll be interested in, and will be grateful for your suggestions and help as we build!