HackLDN idea - Bring Back Beckham

29 Jun 2012


I'm attending Hackathon London this weekend. Normally I help each team at the event but don't get too involved in individual projects. This time things might be different.

In 2006 David Beckham was dropped from the England squad by Steve McClaren. This wasn't a footballing decision, it was to try and stamp his authority on the team and show he was his own man. It massively backfired.

I saw this an an opportunity and created Bring Back Beckham. I created the site in a night and after 4 days it had received over 30,000 hits and over 10,000 people had voted for Beckham's inclusion in the England squad. The site had radio and newspaper media coverage and much more - you can read more about it here.

Now, 6 years later David Beckham is again dividing opinion. This time he has been left out of the Team GB football squad for the 2012 Olympics. This is another big opportunity to create an application to gather comment and opinion on this massively hot topic. Here's my pitch - which I did at 5am this morning.

If you are interested in building a realtime web application using HTML5 technologies, and trying to achieve similar success over a weekend (lots of buzz and let's aim for 10,000 hits) then this will most definitely be a fun project to get involved with.

  • Pusher - for realtime interaction, comments and voting
  • Responsive design - to ensure the application works on different form factors; desktop browser, tablet and mobile
  • Progressive enhancement - to make sure all browsers are supported

Whilst this isn't directly a startup, the ability to quickly create high impact, interactive applications which gain big traction could certainly be a service offering that would be of big interest to lots of other brands and companies.

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