1 Global Bike tours

Global Bike Tours is an exciting project we've been developing for a social enterprise. It's fantastic on two levels: Firstly, it's a global directory of motorbike tours with an integrated social network of enthusiastic bikers. Secondly, Global Bike Tours employs out of work young people to run the site, enabling them to learn new skills, gain experience and improve their chances of future employment.

2 Sector Solutions

Here's another innovative project which exploits the Yoomee online social tools. This project is all about creating an online collaborative platform for a diverse range of third sector support organisations to help them win contracts together. A whole load of strategy work was done up front during our scoping process to help the client explore and develop the approach for delivering the service online. Design work also involved making sure the bespoke tools are as easy-to-use as possible; these include a member database, contracts area, document sharing, message boards, blogs and forums. Watch this space for more info about this exciting development.

3 Conferences

A couple of weeks ago I thoroughly enjoyed attending SHINE, the UK's biggest unconference for social entrepreneurs. Over three days it offered a mini-business school with all the elements social entrepreneurs need to grow fast: practical support, inspiration, services, tools and connections. I picked up some great contacts, and some great project ideas which we are in the process of discussing and hope to work on soon (One example is the excellent Spots Of Time from Anna Pearson)

4 Developing new tools

Back at base, the rest of the Yoomee team have been taking the opportunity to code the next generation of our social tools - mainly so that we can improve the user experience and kick Drupal's lousy ass. We're also working with Engine Yard's Cloud and adding full email integration so our clients can run email campaigns direct from their social network. More about this later.

5 Lots of pitching

The rest of my time was gobbled up with meeting new contacts and preparing proposals for various organisations (BBC, Parliament, NAVCA, Ultimate Trip, Aston Business School to name but a few). Hopefully we'll bring you some good news about these next month.