As a warm up to a BT show and tell, we decided to go back to the time of tapes and answer phones. To celebrate the ‘I’m not here speak after the beep’ message that was once a mainstay of every boozy bachelor pad that has now been replaced by that annoying voice from your network operator.

Cue a challenge; create an answer phone message for 3 celebrities, picked at random. Somehow we managed to select the recently departed Michael Jackson, the entertainer Boris Johnson and that annoying band Raygun, who had their own viral pulled by their record company. And yes on reflection we could have picked a better selection.

Michael Jackson
Night creatures call, your butt is mine, your talk is cheap
Something whispers in my ear and no message could be clear-er
I’m bad
Answer right now
If you don’t like what I’m saying just beat it!
It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white
Whoo hoo!
You’re out of time

Raygun
Sorry we can’t get to the phone right now, we’re probably drinking cocktails in the morning or something equally outrageous so please leave a message and we’ll get back to you
To leave a hate message, dial 1
To return a recently bought album, dial 2
If you’re our annoyed record label boss dial 3
Or hold and our manager will be with you shortly

Boris Johnson
I can’t get to the phone right now as I’m probably relaxing in my new summer house enjoying a drink with my best mate Dave, laughing at the former mayors expense…
[ Crashing sound of shed being demolished ]
This number is no longer available hahahaha [in the voice of Ken Livingstone]

Marcelo Calbucci worked for Microsoft as a development manager for 7 years when he decided to leave to start up his own company. In March 2005 after securing $1.3M fundings from VCs he started Sampa.com a ‘personal homepage service’ which allowed you to upload photos, video etc with the idea of sharing it with your friends and family. Now, unfortunately for Marcelo there were a couple of other similar startups on the horison namely Facebook and MySpace and last month after battling for 4 years Sampa.com folded.

Now Marcelo has written a series of 8 short blogs about his experience at Sampa.com where he details his good and bad decisions (http://blog.calbucci.com/marcelo-calbucci/brave-tech-world/Anything-and-Everything-About-Sa.htm). It makes for interesting reading and alot of it is very relevent to us as we help our clients breathe life into new propositions.Here is a small sample of the type of insights he relays:

For about 6-9 months into Sampa I was very much in love with the code and the platform I’ve built. But after the first Alpha and getting users asking some basic “how do I do this?” kind of question I quickly learned that your consumers and your partners couldn’t care less about your code. They didn’t care if it had 10,000 or 300,000 lines of code, if it was open source, if it complied w/ XHTML standards, if it used Tables or not on the HTML. They didn’t give a shit. No one gives a shit about this except developers. But we pat ourselves on the back every time we write well-documented, well-architectured and standard-compliant code.

So after that 6-9 months I just abandon my code and focused on how can I do feature X in the most efficient manner and please users. That takes a 90-degree turn in your thinking. When you care about users, you stop thinking like a geek and you start thinking about short and long term value. Don’t take me the wrong way, I still wrote shared libraries and well-compartmentalized code when I felt we would reuse it in a short period of time, otherwise I would just make the thing work. Later I learned that a lot of those concepts are called “Agile Development”.

LBi was proud to host the UK Umbraco meetup on 6th August 2009, organised by consultant and Umbraco enthusiast, Darren Ferguson, and attracted a 55+ people crowd enough to fill the auditorium. With a guest appearance with the man himself and Umbraco’s founder, Niels Hartvig, this was surely to be a great day.

So exactly what is Umbraco? Simply put, Umbraco is an open source .Net Content Management System (CMS), dubbed “The Friendly CMS”, with an ever growing dedicated community that are always willing to help.

Darren opened up the event with the days proceedings, with yours truly giving a warm LBi welcome and introduction into the wonderful things we do. Not wanting to hold-up the proceedings, we swiftly moved on with Niels giving a recap on this year’s Codegarden ‘09 back in June (the annual Umbraco developer conference), reporting on latest developments and milestones on the Umbraco roadmap.

The morning session continued with a presentation from Douglas Robar on “What I Wish I’d Known in my First 30 Days with Umbraco” - an extremely insightful look at best practises, techniques and concepts for all levels of Umbraco developers.

After lunch, Paul Marden gave his lively account of developing a multilingual website, followed by Niels and Darren building a ‘mystery’ application in Umbraco - a great live demonstration on building a package to export and import members from the attendees list. By creating a simple app that randomly selected attendees, swag was handed out to those lucky enough to be selected, a “Everybody loves Umbraco - Except Chuck Norris” t-shirt. Unfortunately, the LBi crew did not get chosen.

The rest of the afternoon consisted of an open mic session with presentations from Adam Shallcross, Chris Houston and Gregory Roekens. We finished off the serious part of the day with an open Q&A session with Niels, Doug and Gregory on the panel.

Then the fun began. We headed to the Vibe Bar just across the road at Brick Lane and, despite the rain, we discussed the joys of open source, XSLT, projects that we all deliver on time and on budget and much much more…

A big thank you to Marcus McDonnell, LBi Office Services Manager, for ensuring that everything went smooth; to Darren Fergusson, for his enthusiasm and hard work promoting the event; and to the speakers and participants.