Yesterday I attended Fragments that flow: Information design and “web 2.0? presenatation held by Dopplr guys; CTO Matt Biddulph and Lead designer Matt Jones.  It was a fascinating talk that gave me a vivd insight into how an idea developed as a hobby in spare time can be transformed into a viable business service.  these guys through their own personal working experiences and were able to identify:

• a need/gap in the market

not only this but in creating their site they also were able to define

• a way of designing the product  – agile method
• a way of testing the product – testing on the live site, using meta tags to seperate new features from the production data and live users
• a unique style as to the look of the site – creatively
• a vision for the way in which to drive their product forward.

They also touched upon the Web 2.0 concept of the website.  They see Dopplr as a service of data rather than a static website of information.  Users are under no obligation to go tothe website to access their data.  The data is portable and every effort is made to help share it out to users’ other social networking solutions.

They made a big play on the fact that they invite the user to add data to the service (travel plans, contacts) and they add value to that data which is handed back to the user.

It was an eye opening presentation and gave me some interesting thoughts on how to develop a personal project