Kevin Prince

theLab powered by O₂

Since June 2011 I have been working in theLab, an innovation team at the heart of O₂. The team is responsible for building proof of concepts and beta's for O₂'s customers.

In this role I have been responsible for supporting the delivery of several beta products to customers and championed innovation & digital literacy throughout O₂. I have also been heavily involved in mentoring our junior developers and apprentices.

Main Projects:

#blue

My first project at O₂ involved bringing one of the teams first products back in-house after it was developed by an external agency. The project provided many challenges including understanding the issues using MongoDB and how the GSM network works. We are currently in the process of closing #blue.

JetSetMe Developer API

JetSetMe allows developers to build applications on top of O₂'s roaming platform. The project involved integrating with the O₂ network to receive the updates, building a queuing and filtering system in RabbitMQ to support several hundred thousand transactions a day and finally the developer API.

Community Engagement

As a visible member of theLab team, I spend a great deal of time publicly speaking to developers about the products being developed and supporting issues with our products including developer API's.

I also organised BarCamp Berkshire at O₂'s headquarter's in July 2012 and have supported the setting up of two youth projects being run by O₂ to encourage kids into careers in technology.

O₂ Engagement

I have co-led the internal engagement effort within O₂ for our team. This has included running events to help explain why the team exists, what it does and to teach digital skills. These sessions have been run throughout the business for our call centre staff, managers and graduates.

Geeks of London

Since January 2009, I have been part of Geeks of London and as part of the management team have run:

• BarCamp London 6, 7, 8, 9
• BarCamp Berkshire & BarCamp MediaCity
• HackCamp @ Google
• LinkedGov Data HackCamp @ LBi
• The GeekTrip 2011 & 2012

The events are typically developer or geek facing. BarCamps bring together developers, designers and other geeks for a 36 hours in a building for shorts talks on everything from "Advanced uses of Git" to "How to make the best cupcakes". HackCamps bring together developers together with APIs, datasets, sugar and caffeine to build interesting hacks in a single night.

My role within the team is to oversee the the event planning and budgets however the most important role I share with my directors - is to bring together friends, strangers and institutions to give attendees an amazing experience.

NBC Universal

During my time at NBC Universal I supported the delivery of thirty website in eight languages covering every timezone using Drupal. During the contract I oversaw the frontend development in conjunction with the design agency of five brand, designed and built an automated site creation tool and implemented a system for displaying contextual content using Solr.

Coding Futures - Leeds

As a co-founder of Coding Futures, I set up the company and worked on several projects for clients including the United Nations.

The National Strategies

Working on a short contract at HM Government's Department for Children, Schools and Families. I worked on integrating markup from the front-end team with Drupal.

Mobcast

During my short spell at MobCast, I worked on building the audio ingestion process for converting CD based audiobooks into various digital formats.

First Conferences

A graduate position after university in which I spent two years working in a small IT department in a growing conference company building websites, an onsite event management system and supporting day to day operations.

When I was younger:

During the my university years, I had a wide array of jobs including: Apple Support Specialist, Computer Lab Assistant at the University of South Florida, Lead Developer for Club Skill - a once popular website and community - and a bouncy castle operator

BA Hons International Business - (University of Glamorgan, Cardiff)

During my four years at the University of Glamorgan, I studied a wide range of business areas; including accountancy, economics, product development, business law and marketing. I graduated July 2007 with Honours.

BA Hons International Business - (University of South Florida, Tampa)

As part of my degree program, I spent a year studying at the University of South Florida. During this time I also minored in Computer Science.