That's great news! Finally, Berlin realized how much potential all these new IT start-ups and companies have, popping up like mushrooms, growing fast, and transforming Berlin to an internationally recognized IT capital.

"You can achieve whatever you envision. With IT. In Berlin." A new marketing campaign is initiated by the Berlin state initiative Project Future and with numerous other partners taking part in the project.
The positioning worked out for Berlin can be summed-up in a single sentence: "This is where the IT, research and creative industries come together to reinvent the digital world". finnlabs is proud to become partner of this campaign redefine the possible. login. berlin.

The campaign appeals to IT decision makers, companies, specialists and investors to play an active role in the development of the IT location. This will create even better conditions for companies to grow, attract new employees, and make the city as a whole more attractive and successful.
Berlin – the place to be.

Once again, finnlabs participated in the HPI-Connect, the networking event of HPI students and IT companies, organised by the Hasso-Plattner-Institut. Thanks to all HPI students for the interesting conversations.

The contact to HPI is very close since one of the founders, Wieland Lindenthal, as well as the majority of finnlabs' software engineers and working students graduated from HPI or are still studying.
The finnlabs team is looking for new full-time employees as well as working students to support the team.

Check out the career site to find out more about the job offerings.

OpenProject is an open source web-based project management platform. Yes, yet another platform, but it will make a difference. finnlabs is proud to become a member of the OpenProject Foundation (OPF). The OPF actively supports the development of the software and provides official guidance to the community. Various companies, organisations as well as individuals contribute not only program code but also requirements, designs, and their opinions and ideas.

Why another project collaboration platform? What is the difference to other open source projects, i.e. Redmine or ChiliProject?
Most of the existing open source collaboration projects and their communities focus on individuals, participating as a spare time project. OpenProject also includes companies and organisations and considers their requirements and ideas to improve the software, e.g. in terms of data privacy, security, usability and accessability. OpenProject provides a place to collaborate, exchange ideas, best practices and new requirements for companies, such as finnlabs, as well as individuals.

Therefore, finnlabs is very keen on the developments of OpenProject.

Open for innovation. finnlabs presented OpenProject as a success story to Berlin's "Projekt Zukunft", made to create.


The article gives a short summary of the motivation behind OpenProject and presents Niels Lindenthal, founder of finnlabs, and his view on Berlin's Open Source community.

Read the article here .

This week we hosted the FunClub’s August session at finnlabs.

While everyone enjoyed free pizza and drinks our Tim Felgentreff talked about fexprs and how this one construct is (almost) everything you need to define a complete programming language. His talk was inspired by a great blog post, which you should definitely check out if you want to learn more. Also all the code can be found at Tim’s github repository.

finnlabs presents success story "before" - Beta-Test-Center for Deutsche Telekom at meet & greet mit open source berlin: Problem gelöst! Dank Freier Software. - Problem solved! Thanks to open source software.

Early feedback from customers to new product ideas is essential for the future success of the product. finnlabs has developed a Beta-Test-Center for Deutsche Telekom, based on the Open Source software ChiliProject.

The platform https://before.telekom.de was launched in December 2011.
It includes features, such as

• test management via projects
• bug reporting via tickets
• roles: admin, test manager, tester
• user maintenance and selection
• news, forums
• user profiles
• community
• surveys
• incentives
• wireframes

Development teams can regularly present new features or products to their test group. The customer gets access to new interesting projects and can actively steer the development of the product by reporting bugs and discuss new features.

We have released two new plugins which where developed during a client project. We think they will also be useful for the public, so we are sending them out into the wild.

ChiliProject Activity Module

Activity Module is a simple plugin, that solves one problem. We were using ChiliProject for more than just project management and issue tracking. One particular project e.g. is used as a knowledge-base with FAQs and training material available for all users. Since its main purpose is to provide the content buried in the wiki and forums, we wanted to deactivate the Activity tab within the project menu. It was of no use for the given project and simply occupied space, that could be used for other things.

So ChiliProject Activity Module simply allows you to deactivate that tab in the project menu. Or in other words: Activity becomes a project module, just like Issue Tracking and Wiki.

You may find the sources and detailed installation instructions at the plugin’s GitHub page.

ChiliProject Wiki Tabs

Wiki Tabs was developed for the very same project. We wanted to have multiple wiki sections, so to say. With ChiliProject Wiki Tabs you are able to add tabs to the project menu, which point to certain wiki pages. These settings can be configured per project and you can have as many tabs as you like. To support the feeling of separate wiki sections, Wiki Tabs also manages the currently highlighted tab. So whenever you are on a wiki page, that is configured to be a tab in the project menu or on a child page, the right tab will be highlighted in the menu.

Again, you may find the sources and detailed installation instructions at the plugin’s GitHub page.

See also, www.finn.de/chiliproject/features/wiki for further description.

During the last few weeks finnlabs has worked on a new design for ChiliProject. We didn’t start from scratch. Eric Davis had already spent a lot of effort in this area. It was already a major improvement and a great starting point for our initiative.

You can see the latest results on ux.finn.de. Everyone is invited to create an account in this installation and play around. We will continuously deploy new versions in the next couple of weeks. I am quite happy with the first results, however there still is a long way to go.

The focus of our first sprint were the following design components:

• ChiliProject logo (first shot)
• Header, including a new project menu with search and autocompletion
• The project menu (previously the project tabs) on the left

The code is published in the finnlabs repository on GitHub.

Our goals for the next sprint are:

• Integration of your contributions and comments
• Project home page redesign
• Wiki redesign

Thanks to Holger Just and Felix Schäfer for their helpful advice and guidance.

If anyone in the ChiliProject community is interested in helping out, please send us your contributions and comments, for example on the associated forum thread on chiliproject.org.

On Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 www.TEDxBodensee.de offers outstanding people a platform:
Innovation. Inspiration. Ideas and talents on the lake! - new approaches for green technologies, ecological agriculture, innovative and social projects.

Dr. Klaus Reichert, Innovation Consultancy & Business Coaching , highly appreciated member of our advisory board, is initiator of the TEDx Bodensee. finnlabs will be a sponsor of the independently organised non-profit event which is based on the Californian concept www.TED.com. Many "big ones" and "enthusiastics" in this world have already presented their ideas and projects here. Participants are mostly students, entrepreneurs, but also everyone else experiences stunning talks and an exchange of new ideas and experiences.

Guest speakers will be

• the founder of DeinBus.de from Friedrichshafen
• Rolf Kunisch, "Mr. Nivea", from Überlingen
• the Poetry Slammer Matze B from Kreuzlingen
• Christoph Gräf from the foundation Liebenau
• Andreas Huber from DESERTEC, Tuttlingen
• Max Pohl, ZU Graduate and Co-Founder of Sahay Solar from Winterthur
• Karsten Uitz, Entrepreneur for energy from Argenbühl

> more on http://www.tedxbodensee.de/

Come and participate!
Tickets on www.TEDxBodensee.de/teilnehmen

“Berlins Zukunft ist offen!” / “Berlin’s future is open!” is the title of the Open Source/Open Standards Award for ideas and best practices from the TSB Innovationsagentur Berlin and the Berlin senate initative Projekt Zukunft. finnlabs was awarded first prize in the “best practice” category for “OpenProject – Project collaboration and agile development with ChiliProject”.

The solution already proved itself since the ChiliProject-based project collaboration platform was successfully introduced at major enterprises such as Siemens, congstar and Deutsche Telekom. The software provides project management functionalities as well as agile processes and methods (scrum), e.g. project and milestone planning, issue tracking, document management, product and sprint backlog and much more.

finnlabs is especially proud that Sven Hinderlich, project lead from Deutsche Telekom – Products & Innovation for MyProject (this is how the tool is called at Deutsche Telekom – Products & Innovation), was able to participate in the presentation of awards. He emphasized the decision for this open source solution for Deutsche Telekom: “We were looking for a project collaboration tool and the solution finnlabs offered was the best”.

The prize money will be donated to the ChiliProject community to help the current rework of the layout and design of the software.

Details to the winning projects will also soon be available on open it berlin – the Berlin website around Open Source and Open Standards.