It lives!

The top-secret project I've been working on since moving down to London at the end of October had a still-quite-secret launch late last week and now we're ready to tell a few more people. Without further ado, I present Gottabet.com! Gottabet.com is a social networking site where people exchange challenges and bets on any event they can think of, from "I bet it'll be a white Christmas this year" to "Nobody can catch a pigeon" (thanks to my brother, Christian for posting those two). I say a 'still-quite-secret' launch last week, but only in as much as it was limited to a small number of people. The launch itself was far from secret, held in a pub where we got drunk people to take part in silly bets and dares. The result was a set of photos that I've added to flickr under a new Gottabet-specific account. There are some pretty funny pictures (especially the two people racing to fit the most Maltesers in their mouth), so check 'em out. On a more techy note of possible interest, the site has been developed entirely in Ruby on Rails by a team of 5 developers (including me, though I've worked much more on the HTML/CSS side of things). The site was built in around 6 months, which is even more impressive when you find out that for the first few months there was only one developer (Peter) working on it. The other three (Rich, Ken and Phil) joined within a few weeks of each other around September time and I joined at the very end of October. The team is completed by (and indeed started with) two Belgians: the founders Wim Vernaeve and Bertrand Bodson. They came up with the idea around a year ago and have gone from simple idea to launched website in that time. There's a team photo on the 'about Gottabet.com' page. Mini-profiles of each of us will be added soon too. To get you started, have a look at my latest bet: I bet at least one of the presents I've ordered won't arrive in time. It's just for peanuts, no money needed ;)