Copacetic

Here are three books I always recommend to people who ask for advice on how to do software project managment,

• The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks: Fred literally wrote the book on project management and while you might not recognise the hardware referred to in the book, everything else he wrote is a relevant today as it was 40 years ago.
• Rapid Development, Steve McConnell: Steve actually presages much of the Extreme Programming community in this seminal work on modern software project management. He taught me that convergence to a date was more important that hitting a date.
• Extreme Programming Explained : Embrace Change, Kent Beck: XP is probably one of the most important programming developments of the past ten years. Putting the customer at the centre of development is probably the most important precept.

I watched Ripple Software win the €10,000 prize at the Dockland Innovation Awards last night.

Ripple provide a market analysis and strategy selling engine for the top 100 Ebay sellers (interesting fact: 40% of sales on Ebay are generated by the top 1% of sellers). There USP was the ability to analyse trades on Ebay using multi-lingual analysis of the trades on all the localised Ebay sites around Europe.

They beat off strong competition from Paydaq (low cost western union style money transfer targetting Eastern Europe) and Webtalk (VOIP for businesses).

There were also some “commended” awards and I was particularily taken by DataKraft who have a Rapid Application Development Environment for .NET that takes up where Access leaves off.