How we won ‘The Best Designed Product’ Award from The Prince’s Trust this week

Wow, I won an award this week!

Last year myself and a small group of enthusiastic consultants entered The Prince’s Trust Charity’s ‘Million Makers’ competition with the idea of developing a ‘private eBay’ application for companies to trade goods inside of private corporate networks. Unlike eBay the seller agrees to wave their proceeds and give them straight to charity.

The project manifested itself as Trusted Trade.

6 months later and guess what? We won an award this week at The Prince’s Trust Million Makers event. Here’s the blurb:

“Last night at the London & South East Prince’s Trust Million Makers final, Ed Laughrin and David Ferguson collected the ‘Best Designed Product’ award on behalf of the Shell Team.  Their Trusted Trade website, which enables people to donate goods for auction, raised a total of over £9,500 profit for the Trust.  Given the profit was made from £1,500 seed funding, that’s an incredible ROI of 633% in 6 months.”

Cool! It’s great to get some recognition for a pure charity project that took a lot of effort and time outside of ‘the day job’.

A big thanks to Edward Laughrin and David Ferguson for their commitment and drive on this project.

How I built TrustedTrade.org: The site is built on the excellent Ruby on Rails stack. MySQL database. Various plugins are used and it integrates with PayPal for payments.

I’m getting started in iPhone development

Having been a fledgling Rails developer for 3 years now I’m taking the plunge into the iPhone app world. Clearly everyone’s at it. With the announcement that Hulu will launch their own iphone app shortly how long before the BBC launch their own iPlayer app?

The app store has hit 1 billion downloads. Everyone’s loving it. Time to jump on the bandwagon too. Woohoo!

So I’m heading to the Apple Developer’s Wiki to get started. And I’m studying what apps didn’t make it to the app store and were rejected.