Steve Shinn

From early January I’ll be moving on from my role at NHS Choices to work on some other Government projects.

I’m woking on the business model and design ideas for a new site to enable people to send tasks to each other. More to follow soon, with a pencilled launch date of April 2010.

I’m pleased to say that myself and a new associate, Cuan Mulligan of Konolabs working on a new platform to run a number of sites which will operate on domains which I have owned for some time. The first (our proof of concept) will be parkingmanchester.com.

The software platform which powers the site will be able to publish availability of airport parking, hotels and other kinds of virtual stock under referral agreements with a number of online booking companies. We plan to launch the first site in late February 2010, and 10 subsequent sites when we have refined the business model and technology.

The second version OfficeCarpet.co.uk is currently in development for launch in late December. There are over 15000 searches per month in Google for businesses looking for new or replacement office carpet.

shortrent.co.uk is currently in development with my friend Tobin Harris of EngineRoom. The business will provide a service which enables landlords to add their own properties for let on a short term basis.  We will also be aggregating serviced apartments and providing a booking service. Over 750,000 people use Google each month to search for the terms ’short rent’ and ’short term rent’

We plan to launch in January 2010.

Locallycompared.com, and the 200 sites the platform operates are ranking well in Google. Around 20 businesses a day are signing up and we are receiving over 5000 unique visitors per day across the sites.