Notes from the Playground

It’s been a couple of weeks since the inaugural Simpleweb Playground, our fortnightly delve into the minds of our team and the ideas therein.

Here at Simpleweb we invest in people and ideas so the Simpleweb Playground gives our team members the opportunity to work on something cool or learn something new, preferably both at the same time. We get to see a lot of pitches from startups, but we don’t all get chance to pitch ourselves, so what better way of putting apprehension aside and pitching to your own friendly bunch of colleagues.

So, as the team wound down for the first bank holiday weekend of the year with a beer (or a soft drink) and a giddy excitement, it was time for two fresh ideas from two, relative newbie, team members.Only our second week into our new office home and very much still in the unpacking phase, it was a snug (if slightly overspilling) fit into our makeshift breakout space as developers Mike and Ollie firstly filled us in on the progress and goals reached for their personal social media aggregator app. So far they’ve been able to build a chronological Facebook feed using the (surprisingly still updated) WAP version of Facebook (more on that in a future blog post)!

‘A doctor for your data’

Alice from our content team thought it was about time we had a user-friendly app to tell us what companies are doing with our data and how ethical they are. That way, Alice told us, we’ll have the knowledge we need to help us decide whether or not a company deserves our data or not. There were questions from some sceptical team members asking if companies could just try and find a way to cheat the system. Quite possibly but Alice, with some technical advice from developer Andy, thinks that through building an efficient scraper tool and using machine learning, they’ll be on the right track.

As has become customary, the team cast their votes anonymously using our bespoke voting tool. Votes are cast on sliding scales for innovation, collaboration, usefulness, coolness, ‘blogability’, resource and learning opportunity.

The boy who cried wolf

Next up, project manager Simon pitched his idea based on the imminent reintroduction of wolves into the Lake District (major news that seemed to have bypassed most of us in the room).
In parts of Cumbria where the wild wolves will roam, Simon’s idea was that families could get involved in a game inspired by a recent wolf reintroduction programme. Using publicly available data, the game will allow people to track wolves and upload their photos which will help in generating a greater understanding of this aloof species. Simon allayed concerns about safety by suggesting that the wolves would be far too timid to pose a threat, unfortunately, the ethical side of Simon’s idea needed some more attention.

Overall voting swung in favour of Alice’s idea, tentatively titled ‘Data Z’, so we’ll leave you with this hypnotic gif from Alice’s pitch deck.More from the Playground soon!