Interactive catering menu quoting system

We’ve just gone live with a new approach for caterers to work through menus with their customers.

Say you want to cater a function. Go online to the website and answer three quick questions .. how many people? what sort of function? what style of food?

Then, we present you with a menu. Now you have an ajax-based menu planner where you can add new dishes, change them, remove them, mess with the quantities of dishes until you are happy. Browsing and Searching for dishes and ingredients is supported. There are over 100 dishes to choose from, so it give the function planner a lot of flexibility to get their favourites in there.

Once you’ve made a menu, then three more simple questions. Name, date for the function and a phone number. You’re done. Catering staff then call to go through the details.

And we’ve simplified things a lot in this. Go back to the site after you’ve planned a menu and you get your menu back again.

The menu and photos are all held in a SQL database and there’s an admin system to control menu planning, adding dishes and photographs.

Best of all, this is fun to play with, though it does tend to make you a bit hungry.

The live system is for Fingerfood Catering of Perth, Western Australia. Please go and have a look, but don’t commit orders unless you mean to order catering and live in Perth.

Huge Kudos to Bret Treasure of Free Beer for marketing/coordination and concept, and Emma Broe for design.

Technology: I used Python, Myghty, SQLAlchemy, MySQL and JavaScript with JSON to make it all work.

Sussex Digital

Sussex Digital is a new focus for the digital community in Brighton, Hove and surrounding Sussex.   It is beginning with a focus on local events.  We are so lucky here in Brighton. We have a geek event on almost every day or night of the week, making it a very vibrant place for web startups to develop.

Google Developer Day

Today I’m heading into London to join in the fun at the 2007 Google Developer Day.

Pretty much all the day is going to be focussed on getting the most out of Google’s APIs. I’m most familiar with youtube’s APIs at this point, but I’m pretty intrigued with what is going on in the mapping and mobile areas.

The Digg Revolt: turning point for DRM

It is starting to look like the Digg Revolt will be the next step in the turning tide against Digital Rights Management. And what a day for people power. But it does raise some interesting questions that will be played out over the coming weeks.

It all started when Digg responded to a DMCA takedown notice issued by the MPAA and AACS Licensing Authority, the body responsible for managing the DVD-HD rights managment system. Digg administrators deleted the offending posts, a fairly normal operation, in line with Digg’s terms and conditions. All ok so far.

[Read more]

The second act

In the first act, I spent most of my time working in the city of London for an investment bank, which meant my time here was rather limited.

Well, that all changes as of today, 1 May, when the second act begins. There’s a bit to decide on just which direction to take, but it will involve working on new and different web applications, especially our growing Scouta.com, and expanding into some new consulting and project directions.

More on that as it evolves. For now, it is vision and planning time. I’m going to start with a few mind maps and take it from there.

Scouta in Australian Anthill

There’s great article about our Scouta in the latest Australian Anthill.

Net Neutrality is Important

The Internet as we know it, a delicious, creative free-for-all, is under threat. ISPs and Telcos want to start having a say in what traffic is carried on their networks and how much they can charge for it.

Watch Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality and why it is important

Geek day/night/dinner in London

I’m going to head into London next Saturday June 17th for the @media Social and then stay on the for the Geek Dinner. Om Malik is also talking about doing something in London that day. So, will have to try and fit it all into the one afternoon.

[Update Fri 16/6:  Just planning my day tomorrow; it looks like the Geek Dinner and Om Malik event are indeed separate and both on tomorrow evening.  The Om event, codenamed Londom, is happening at at the Princess Louise (Holborn) from 7pm onwards, while the Geek dinner is scheduled for 6pm onwards at The Livery, 130 Wood Street, in the City of London, EC2V 6DL. Maybe the plan is to @media social first, catch the Geek dinner then head over to the Princess Louise later.  i'm sure the plan will evolve...]

What is happening down at the Labs?

It has been a bit quiet here on the blog. What’s been happening down at Presence Labs? Well here’s the list that makes up for a month of blog entries:

• We’ve almost completed moving to the UK, with most things firmly nailed down. We’ve set up in Brighton (new contact details here) and apart from another cubic yard of required paperwork and a 20ft container full of furniture, we are, as they say, sorted.
• We are working in partnership with Richard Giles’ Clique Communications developing a very exciting, new (and thus currently secret) web and media application that we hope to bring fully to life this year. More on that as we can talk about it, probably when we get to a public beta or something. The concept is exciting and as we develop and test more of the components of the whole, it gets more and more exciting.
• There’s a bit of action emerging here in the UK for us to help with architecture and development for new web applications. It’ll be interesting to see just what happens here.
• Given the interest in new web applications, I’m putting a bit of thought into a methodology specific to the creation and development of new web applications from the innovation at the beginning to the operation at the end. Philosophically I’m fairly close to the 37 Signals Getting Real way of thinking, but I do like development to be a bit more controlled, at least based around a strong and up to date roadmap. Anyway, I’ll post that when I get it slightly more organised and hopefully can develop with others.
• I’m working with a group doing interesting things for business in Second Life. The part of this I’m really interested in is forging links between Second Life and the rest of the internet, to make Second Life connected rather than a somewhat-disconnected island application.

That sounds like a lot, but there’s room for more. We are looking for like minded people to work with on new web applications. So, if you have an idea and some funding, come and have a chat, let’s see if we can make your dream real.

Presence Labs Limited

A subtle little change has just happened here at Presence Labs.  Presence Labs is now a UK Company, fully titled Presence Labs Limited. Registered in England.  Company No: 578 4049.

This means we are pretty much fully set up for business in the UK, ready for our arrival there on the 16th of May.

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