The times they are a-changin’

I’m pleased to announce that I’m changing jobs to work in a new department being formed at British Telecom, starting on 23 July. I’m sad to be leaving LBi, which has been a huge amount of fun, but the time is right for a new challenge.

My good friend and former CTO-type colleague (not to mention good old fashioned geek), Jeremy Ruston, has formed a one man company over the past few years called Osmosoft. This company and Jeremy’s services have been bought by BT, and it is this team I am joining at the end of July.

It’s a hugely exciting challenge. The team (now known as BT Osmosoft) will develop several Web 2.0 applications that will employ and showcase BT’s powerful new 21st Century Network.

One of the applications will be based on Jeremy’s rather clever TiddlyWiki product. And almost all of our output will work with the splendid Software Development Kit (SDK) which BT have opened up to developers. There are a number of powerful services made available for free to developers, including those based on SMS, conference calls, location, authentication and presence, with more to come. Our products will use these services, and help other developers to do the same.

Still with me? Good! This blog is read by non-geeks as well, so please forgive me for using straightforward language!

We’ll be working closely with the open source community, and everything we produce will be open source. That means all the code will be available for anyone to download, amend and re-use, however they see fit. Nobody owns it, Everyone can use it, Anyone can improve it.

My role in all of this is project-manager-cum-comms-guy. I’ll be blogging about the work we’re doing, helping run the forums and showcasing products at conferences. We’ll have a number of customers to consider – open source developers, end-users, BT and others – who will have different expectations. We will be as transparent as possible.

Anyway, that’s all for now – more later!