So I went to Charity Hack and as promised have put together a video of the event.

The Event

It was a great event (again) with the standard of apps even better than last year. John Lunn has done a write up of the event with videos of all the winning hacks.

There is also a great write up by Ben Matthews about all 18 entries which is well worth a read to get a overall feel of the event. http://benrmatthews.posterous.com/28520434

There is also a great photo stream here of the event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_88/with/5004083392/

Our App

We created a Windows Phone 7 app which used a number of API’s provided by JustGiving and PayPal to collect the donations from users. We only had a limited time to learn what the development tools for Windows Phone 7 could do but it was really easy to pickup and get something doing pretty complex api calls in a very short time. It does an number of restful web service calls in the background which was made even easier with the http://restsharp.org/ library. We were really pleased with the outcome so please enjoy the video!

This article is about my experience at LeWeb and the range of emotions I felt there as an entrepreneur who has invested all the money I have into my own Internet start-up which is yet to make a profit. There were a lot of things that were sweet but also something that left me with a slight bitter taste. I started with high hopes, then taking the rose tinted glasses off and having doubts about the wisdom of what I’m doing, feeling a bit let down until my spirit was re-invigorated by a raw and inspirational talk by one of the LeWeb speakers.

It was a big week for my company’s websites. My whole team have worked really hard over the last year to create them and we had the honour to be invited by PayPal to demonstrate our http://www.tcbooker.com website, a market place for training courses in the UK, which uses PayPal’s new Adaptive Payments API on their stand at LeWeb..(we’re using Chained Payments if anyone is interested!).

The first thing to mention is how many big name personalities and companies there were at the event. It was opened with a ‘Fireside chat’ with Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. Here is a guy who’s service is currently changing the world and is what every aspiring tech entrepreneur wants to be. He talked about how he created the first version of Twitter back in 2000 using an email dropbox to get messages [more] to the service but he was the only person in the world using it and his friends thought he was nuts. It wasn’t until many years later with mobile phone SMS becoming popular that the same idea was re-visited and Twitter was born. His advice was if you believe in the idea then you should just keep going, even if your friends think you are nuts. I was feeling inspired at this point.

The venue was packed and there were lots of big names in the tech world there to speak and present their wares. I was fortunate to dine with the ‘uber blogger’ Om Malik the night before the event which was fantastic. There was a start-up competition with a number of start-ups pitching for investment. Cloudsplit was of particular interest to me as it allows real-time usage monitoring of Amazon Web Services, which is something my website use. It was really interesting speaking to Joe about it and I can definitely see why it would be useful. We talked about the pro’s and con’s of AWS and Microsoft Azure like proper techies. Just as I said goodbye and walked off I heard Joe half joke to the next person he spoke to ‘I was hoping you were going to offer me some investment’. I felt a little un-nerved, here was a start-up with a great product, who had been selected above many other companies, to come to the final at LeWeb for funding but still seemed worried about securing its future. I started thinking about the future of my company which will need some funding soon, if I don’t get it, what then?, will I loose everything I have put into it?

On the way back to ‘man the stand’ and demo PayPal’s adaptive payments in action in my website I decided to drop into the Microsoft Bizspark booth which was in the next room. As one of the very earliest members of the Microsoft Bizspark programme I was interested to meet the people running it. It has been vey useful to be given licences for all Microsoft products for my business but that is about the most I have managed to get out of the scheme so far. I was introduced to the person responsible for Bizspark UK, unfortunately they were in the middle of writing an e-mail but would pop by to see my demo and learn a little more about what I am up to when that was finished. I felt pleased I was going to have the opportunity to show off all the hard work of the last year.

Back on the PayPal stand I was doing a brisk trade of demo’s of how to pay for courses on http://www.tcbooker.com and explaining the legal, financial and time benefits I get by using PayPal’s adaptive payments. Heather Taylor from PayPal interviewed me and also recorded a demo of the website, these have been uploaded to YouTube and will be published on the PayPal Talk website. I was also introduced to Osama Bedier, Vice President of PayPal Platform, who had flown in from ‘The Bay’. He took a real interest in how I had implemented the new PayPal API and as well as taking interest in my Skillbook idea. This enables people to upload electronic files (pictures of certificate, video’s of job references etc) to prove they have the skills they say they have and publish them in a Skillbook. Osama said ‘every CV should have a Skillbook to back it up’ what was a fantastic endorsement. I felt great, I felt our hard work was appreciated and an important tech person saw value in it.

Later in the afternoon I went and watched ‘Best of Europe Roundtable’. He were some of the most successful tech people in Europe and the companies they have founded are worth 100’s of millions of Euros each. it was interesting to hear their thoughts on why America dominates tech and how it is much more difficult to succeed in Europe because of things like cultural differences and laws making it risky for Entrepreneurs to take a risk with a start-up. This made me feel a little cautious but please to see 100’s of millions of Euros out their for the taking. I did wonder if I would find it easier if I was in America though.

On Day 2  I attended some interesting talks in the morning, I was particularly interested in Jeremiah Owyang’s talk about “When Real-Time Isn’t Fast Enough’. Osama Bedier from PayPal was interviewed on stage by Om Malik, Osama went into a good amount of detail about how PayPal are looking to support and encourage developers to use the PayPal API’s to help move people from paper money to digital money. He alluded to enabling people being able to pay just $0.10 cents at a time on the web, this has got me wondering what announcements PayPal will make in 2010 to make this happen. A big part of PayPal’s developer engagement the the creation of the www.x.com website. This website is building a developer community to help share ideas, experiences and best practice in a way us techies like it, probably because it is run by techies. I truly believe that PayPal are committed to engaging developers as this has been consistently proved by their actions in the last year and I am please to be able to work with them.“

Every CV should have a Skillbook to back it up” – Osama Bedier, Vice President of PayPal Platform and Emerging Technology

As LeWeb drew to a close people started heading home, Osama came and personally said goodbye, thanked me for coming and wished me luck with everything, that felt great. I said bye to the PayPal UK contingent as they headed home, they had all been great and I had enjoyed their company. Special thanks to John Lunn for inviting me along. I decided to go as well, I noticed the person at the Bizspark stand writing another email as I left, they hadn’t come an seen what I had been up to and had managed to get a stand at LeWeb, even though I had bumped into them a few times during the event and the promise to come over was repeated. I had got the picture of where I ranked in their priorities, which left a slightly bitter taste. I have not had the best Bizspark experience in the last year, a cancelled event with a promises of notification when it was re-scheduled which never came only to discover it had been re-scheduled any no one had told me, an un-answered email a few months back and just a general feeling of not being involved and important to them. Bizspark is a great program but to get the most out of it I think you need to know how to play the game and I haven’t learnt the rules yet. This unfortunately put me on a bit of a down as I left.

Just as I was leaving on a bit of a low, a guy I didn’t know, Gary Vaynerchuk, was going on the main stage, for some reason I decided to stay and listen to him talk. I loved this guy, and I felt out of all the speakers I saw he was the one that gave the most relevant advice. He said that was hard building a new business and that people have become soft and expected things to be given to them. If you want to succeed you should put the hours in and work hard and things will eventually happen. This struck a chord with me, I have worked hard the last year and had made it to a stand at LeWeb. I should not be disheartened that one person on the Bizspark programme hasn’t helped as much as I would have liked, I should make my own luck and be building my own business. I have to keep to my plan and keep up my work ethic, I left feeling like I had fire in my belly and was up for the challenge to succeed.

It was a great experience and it was great to be there. I wish there had been more opportunities to network, perhaps some king of speed networking event on the first day. However I did meet some great people and got some good advice which is helping me decide what to do with my business going into 2010. It was good to hear other peoples experiences but the reality is it will boil down to putting more hard work in. I would love to do it again and it has got me fired up for pushing my business forward!

I signed up for this Paypal event 5 weeks ago when I first saw it on Twitter - CharityHack. I thought it was going to be a couple of days of workshops where Paypal show developers how to use their new Adaptive Payments API…. how wrong was I!

The penny only dropped [more] about what the event was really going to be like last Thursday morning, 2 days before the event. I was reading their website and reading the “What to bring” section and it included a sleeping bag, I had never been to a workshop like this before.

See PayPals lets talk page for a more detailed run down (plus a video which I get a couple of seconds in!)

The event was in fact an opportunity for Paypal, JustGiving and MissionFish to talk to developers about their new APIs then us developers were given 24hours to create an application that could raise money for charity (preferably using the APIs we had been told about).

The idea I came up with in the hour after the penny dropped was to create an application that local volunteers can log their expenses when doing charity work on a website. The charity that they work for would then approve the expenses and they become visible to the public to pay on the charities behalf. If at the end of the month the expense had not been paid then the charity would have to settle up as they are obliged to do.

A member of the public would be able to donate with just a few easy steps:

1. Search for volunteers in their area with a postcode / radius search
2. Select the volunteers they want to pay
3. Click “Donate” and make a single payment to the charity for the amount.

Using the new Paypal adaptive payment API it is possible to split the donation behind the scenes and distribute it to the individual volunteers automatically, which is really cool. This is called a “Chained Payment”.

Our team name –

Redbull and Coffee

I teamed up with one of the only other .Net developers in the room of over 100. His name was Lee Mallon and immediately struck up a great working relationship. Lee has a great idea as well around allowing skilled professionals to donate their time to charity, however after discussing it further we felt that idea was just too big for a 24hour effort.

The Paypal venue was great and the Paypal team kept everyone very well fed and watered through the 24hours. There were lots of ideas being developed and a really nice feel to the whole event. Lee and myself were on a roll and before we knew it we had spent 16hours straight working on the application and it sort of worked! Other attendees were also hard at work, the LovePie team had even resorted to getting their sweatbands out.

Lee and I then spent another 7 hours making it look sort of presentable and testing that it all worked. After 23hours and 30mins we had finished out “Local Volunteers” charity application! We were very very chuffed.

I must state again how great the Paypal team where. The had flown their key personnel over from the American who were on hand through the night to help when we had questions and even helped me debug a rather tricky error which turned out to be a copy and paste error by me :s (sorry Rob – it was 2.30am). There were also techies from JustGiving and MissionFish on hand as well.

After 24hours all the teams were invited to present what they had achieved in the previous 24hours. There were many ideas which can be found on the Charity Hack wiki. I got a particular buzz when Musaab At-Taras, the Director of PayPal Platform commented that we had done “a really great job”.

There was one team that had worked on a particularly good idea, called CharityFrag, which I feel will have great appeal to a largely untapped community by charities. It was a mod for a First Person Shooter game. Players pledged money to charity before entering the game and picked their own charity. When they killed someone in game they took some of that persons money for their charity, equally when they were killed some of their money went to their opponents charity. This was all fed to a website keeping a real-time tracking on who had donated what charities – it is a truly great idea I hope their prize of a trip for San Fran to attend the Paypal conference there is the springboard required to get this idea into a production quality solution.

Lee and I were told we came a close second and got a special mention for our effort, which means a lot. Talking to Lee afterwards we both agreed that the best team had won.

So my hacking weekend cherry is broken and I would strongly recommend developers should seek out and got to these sort of events – it is a great social event and you can learn lots of new skills. My goal is to do one every 6 months.

I also plan to get our Local Volunteers application live in the next 3 weeks and hope that it will be a useful tool for raising money.