CHEESE-ROLLING

Which do you think is the world’s most ‘cheesy’ nation (read ‘cheese-lovers’)? The French? The Dutch? The Italians? Nope. Apparently the English. What makes me think so? Well, check the video below.

The annual event that has been held for hundreds of year at the Cooper Hill in Gloucestershire involves rolling a round of Double Gloucester cheese off the top of the hill and…chasing it. You can imagine that since the cheese gets a head start and reaches speeds of over 70 mph, this is not an easy feat. Thus, rather than having to catch the cheese in mid-run, it’s the first person to get to the bottom of the 200m-long hillside that wins (and gets the cheese!)

As you can imagine, the activity, as any other, is usually accompanied with occassional, minor injuries…no, seriously, people end up with broken bones and sprained ankles here. And the runaway cheese can easily knock off a spectator, too. OK, here’s the promised video. Judge for yourself:

Gloucester Cheese Rolling 2009

What else than love for cheese would make you even consider doing this??

One more fact probably not worth remembering is that, due to the food rationing in the UK, between 1941-1954 cheese-rolling was ‘played’ with a big round of wood that had a small piece of cheese inside.

Anyway, if you don’t feel like breaking your neck to get your daily amount of protein, check Sportmeets for some more conventional but perhaps equally entertaining sporting options in your area!

For those who wonder whether we actually know what we’re talking about with regard to sport, here’s the answer: we don’t just talk sport – we do it! Read a bit about my latest success with our very own GU volleyball club.

Sheffield is the place to be in on the second weekend in March if you play university sport. It’s the highlight of the season for most participants and also a great chance to spend a few days with your teammates. I already had a chance to represent Glasgow Uni at the BUCS Championships last year but this year it was even better! A gold medal in the Trophy tournament with the guys team and a silver one with the girls’ team as the coach are a nice end to my ‘undergraduate volleyball career’ here at Glasgow! Add to it some incredibly nice March weather, a company of great teammates and some well-priced beer and food at the local Wetherspoon pub, and you have a great experience that is exactly what makes it worth to play sport.

OK, and now a big hand for the GUVC – well done everybody!

Sports Leaders with Sportmeets: Promote sport, get a great work experience and earn extra cash!

Enjoy playing sports? Then we want to hear from you!

If playing sports and socializing is a regular part of your free time, why not turn it into a valuable work experience as well? Become a Sports Leader with Sportmeets and work in a unique position in a grassroots marketing campaign that will boost your CV, develop your employability skills, and may earn you quite a bit of cash, too.

A great opportunity with Sportmeets.

Sportmeets is a young growing company providing an innovative web application for an easy management of recreational sporting groups and events, ideal for students and young people. We offer to several UK university students the opportunity to represent Sportmeets in their city and to spread the word among fellow students and friends, sporting groups and teams, or student clubs and societies.

Your contribution makes a difference.

As a successful candidate you will communicate with sporting venue administrators, bloggers, or media to promote Sportmeets to the local sporting community. You will be in touch with other Sports Leaders to share support, ideas and advice. We will guide you when you need it, and let you a free hand when you know your way. In the end, it is your city and you will know best how to achieve the results.

A real business experience.

Your role will help Sportmeets succeed in creating an engaging sporting community that allows players of any ability to meet and play sports easier and more often. In return, as a Sports leader you will gain great business-sector work experience that involves enthusiasm, planning, creativity and communication skills, together with a commission-based reward scheme and an official recognition of your performance that will increase your graduate employment prospects.

Interested?

Then you should

• be familiar with the social life on campus
• have a passion for sports and be involved in the local sporting community
• be a self-starter, good communicator, motivated, creative and well-organized
• enjoy using social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter
• be knowledgeable of social media and able to spread message
• be able to commit for 10-15 hours per week for approx. 10 weeks (April – May/June)

We offer:

• a unique opportunity to be in charge of promoting an innovative service on your campus and within your city
• a revenue-sharing payment scheme: the more people you engage, the greater your reward can be
• a certificate of achievement stating your tasks and how well you performed
• professional references upon request
• possible on-going cooperation if we like what you do
• a prize of £200 for the best performing ambassador across the UK

Still interested? Great!

Then let us know a bit about yourself and your ‘qualifications’ for the role of a Sports Leader at peter@sportmeets.com and we will be in touch with more details on the next steps to take.

Every day we’re a bit closer to the long-expected ‘D’ day when Sportmeets will finally go live. We have come a long way over the last year trying shape the initial idea to its current form – from a student hobby project to a full-time dedicated work. We have engaged many people to help make Sportmeets reality, in places as far apart as Glasgow, Prague and Athens, and we have already known it under 3 different names, too! Whether Usporter, Crawdout or Sportmeets, we’ve got to like them all a lot.

There’s one thing, though, that has been pretty much the same ever since we started working on this – and that’s the concept behind Sportmeets.  Well, I guess it is about time to tell the story that lies behind Sportmeets to make it clearer why we are here, and why we ever thought of creating an application that will make life easier for anyone involved in recreational sports. I will divide it in several parts, each describing one interesting experience of Sportmeets’ founders. The first one is about how Miro met Joe.

The story starts in the lovely city of Glasgow, Scotland. Having just moved here from Los Angeles, CA, to continue his studies, Miro (the then Sportmeets-chief-to-be) discovered an unpleasant fact. Are you not sure what can be unpleasant about a West-coast Scottish city at a latitude equivalent to that of Moscow? Well, put simply, if one of your interests back in California was to play beach volleyball every now and then, you might as well forget it here in Glasgow. The weather is for the most of the year generally unsupportive of any outdoor activities that involve even partial nudity. For Miro there was not much choice but to find some other sport that would more reflect the reality of his new surroundings, i.e. it had to be played indoors! Football was one option.

There used to be these weekly football games organized by Joe, a Glasgow Uni student, in which a bunch of guys from all over the university would participate. Joe has always been a nice guy – he had to be, in order to keep this football thing running. He would wake up early on a Wednesday morning to get down to the sports centre to book the activity hall for next Wednesday as this had to be done in person and if you came a bit late, the slot would already have been taken. After paying for the booking, Joe would send out an email with the time of the game, asking people to sign up to which they would respond if they wanted to play. Joe would then send another email to confirm who was coming to the game and they would all have a nice game of football the next week. So far so good. But sometimes the things turned out to be more complicated than this. If you ever tried to get a bunch of people to one place to do an activity, you will know what is involved. In addition to the weekly morning trip to the sports hall, Joe would have to go through all the RSVPs and write down who’s coming. After the game he would collect the money: with 60p per person it would usually amount to a pile of change or worse, nobody would have anything smaller than a tenner. Due to some strange Murphy Law, there would therefore usually be either too much change or not enough. Now, that already was quite some work to do just to have a game of football. Imagine then that somebody would sent an email that they cannot make it just a day before the game – another email had to be sent out again. Sometimes people did not turn up at all and there would not be enough players. Another time somebody would forget to pay their 60p before going home. It was Joe that had to deal with all these inconveniences and carry around all the loose change and he did so bravely.

Well, Miro was a part of this football group, too. And he thought that there must be many ‘Joes’ around, organizing all kinds of activities and sports, but perhaps some of them are not willing to spend so much time to do it. Can something be done about this to help the guy in charge enjoy the game as much as the others do?  That’s where the idea to make sports organization as smooth as possible came from and it now lies at the core of Sportmeets. And now we also know that the answer is yes – it can!

Is this all about making the life of  the organizer easier then? Nope. We know well enough that there’s more to doing sport than that.  But I’ll tell you more in the next part of the Sportmeets story.

Yup, exactly as the title says: Crawdout is now Sportmeets. But hey, let’s be clear about this. We haven’t been taken over by a huge corporation with a name you’ve never heard of! We’ve  just changed the name and added a shiny, brand new logo on the top!  While Sportmeets will be about crowds and people around you as much as Crawdout was, we just like the sporting side of it too much to keep it out of  the name. And of course, meeting for a sport is as much fun as getting your crowd out, right?

So, let’s hear it for Crawdout then as it leaves the pitch, and welcome Sportmeets instead – young, strong, and ready for the ‘big game’ that starts very soon!

We are looking for a smart and experienced PHP developer to contribute greatly to the build and future growth of our innovative web application. Talent and personality are important to us, so we are looking for someone who gets excited about building great and useful consumer web applications. The ideal person takes initiative at devising solutions as (s)he will have a major impact on the product’s overall back end architecture.

What we offer:

• Work on an interesting project that solves a real world problem
• As one of the first employees you will have a major impact on the product’s direction
• Work with a team of driven founders and advisors from various areas of expertise
• Everyone on the team works (mostly) from home, and sets their own schedule, so there is a great flexibility – (we prefer someone local to Prague, Czech Republic to meet up 2 days/week to collaborate, but for the right person we can work around this)
• We are looking for someone for a long term cooperation

Requirements:

• Can-do attitude and amazing work ethic, responsibility, enthusiasm and technical awesome-ness
• Good English communication skills and sweet internet connection are a must
• Practical experience in software development – ideally a consumer (web) product
• Willingness to learn new technologies
• PHP 5 & OOP — with experience in CakePHP and MVC, Smarty templates, MySQL, Ajax handling, XHTML, Javascript libraries (Prototype)
• Competence with the LAMP stack and Linux shell
• Code optimization, debugging (xdebug) and profiling experience is a great way to show your technical skills
• Points for showing interest/collaboration on Open Source projects
• Points for knowledge of Facebook & Twitter APIs
• Points for sys admin skills

Although we are building a web app for sport enthusiasts, you are not required to be a sporter :) So, to apply for this position, please describe your past experience and tell us why you would be a suitable person in more details at miro@sportmeets.com. We’ll be excited to speak to you while we appreciate applications specific to this position rather than generic CV emails.

Saturday 21 Nov was a great day for Miro, Peter and Sportmeets. This was surprisingly not only because of the so-not-Glaswegian warm and sunny weather that welcomed them in the Athens (actually, other things, too, had welcomed us the night before on our way from Omonia Square to the hotel). The real big thing was the successful presentation of the Sportmeets concept in front of the OpenFund executive committee and a bunch of online-biz-savvy investors and their tricky questions. This concluded the 2-month-long effort (sprint, dash, scramble) following the application and the outcome sure is worth it! Sportmeets will receive seed investment and will cooperate closely with a number of advisors to get y’all crowding in a big way soon!

Now a bit about the other projects that have made it as well. And yes – they were interesting!

YouScan is a social media monitoring and reputation management service aimed at Ukrainian and Russian market. Very useful, the Russians like to gossip :)

Listiki is an innovative service for organizing and prioritizing online real time data – creating lists. Everybody likes lists, right?

Fashinating is a platform for providing insights around fashion trends and generating data for the fashion industry. Good ol’ window shopping made rain-friendly and couch-compatible.

Crawdout has been selected as one of the candidates for one of final 4 spots in the Startup Competition at Webexpo 2009 – Czech Republic’s largest technology conference.
This is the first competition we have applied for while we are still in process of tweaking the site for the real public beta launch.

Whatever “out there” might mean for you and your friends, Crawdout will help you manage your sporting crowd easily online, saving you from all the “joys” of being the organizer: group emails and out-of-date mailing lists, too many or too few people turning up, wallet full of ridiculously small coins after each match and frequent late-if-ever payments that just make you bear the cost of booking yourself.

Well, whether you’ve been put in charge of the regular twice-weekly football kickabouts with your colleagues, or you’re making sure that everybody has a sleeping bag for a week-long hiking trip, or you want to find someone to complete the line-up for a crazy two-man beer run, Crawdout will let you manage your teams, payments, membership, results or ladders, as well as allow the members to communicate and allow new people to discover and contact your group. All this with the ultimate objective of less hassle online and more time spent offline, doing what you like.

It is just so much more than practical.

So, is your Crowd OUT enough?