Of specific interest to us at Consumer Focus Labs though was a project put together called Open Companies House, a remaking of the government’s rather dated Companies House website.

What’s the big deal though? Isn’t the data already available? Well yes. But what the RewiredState project does is provide a single url for each company along with a computer readable XML version. This will let other people build services on top of the data for free for the first time. An example from the day was linking it with information on which companies pay to lobby the government and are also government contractors. But it could equally be linked with carbon offset data, or food miles information, or government subsidy payments.

If you can think of an idea of how we could use the data here, go add it to our call for ideas.

We’ll be running a call for proposals via this website to gather some of the best ideas for online tools to help people in their dealings with companies, organisations and products.

The call for proposals will be launching in a week or so and we’ll be taking the best of those ideas and bringing them to life. To make sure we don’t immediately get bogged down in one large project, over our first 6 months we are aiming to target small simple projects before tackling a couple of bigger ones later on (which will hopefully make use of much of the earlier work).

Some of this might change as we get going, but this is the plan for now.

For people interested in what’s needed to set up a micro in-house startup like CFLabs, below is a list of the technology we’ve used to get things going. This has been about getting the things we need (hosting, version control, project management etc) up and running quickly and reliably, mostly using 3rd party services, so we have less administration to worry about and can get on with the business of building things instead.

So, we have a basic hosting account with Slice Host running Ubuntu that should be able to handle anything we build in our first few months, as well as an in house development server for testing and developing. And we are working on a customised version of Capistrano for deploying code to our servers.

For version control we are using Wush.net so we don’t have to worry about running our own source code server. And for project management we are using the fantastic Basecamp.

This website was put together quickly using WordPress, an open source blogging tool, and the TDO Mini Forms plugin for the Your Ideas section (thanks to Phil Gyford for the suggestion).

Please let us know if we’ve missed any tricks here. What else should be have in place for rapid development?