#ifko

This could be the guy that changes the way we say things online.

For months now Ulpian Morina, programmer and CEO of Gurrop has had news and rumors spinning around the London tech scene among all sorts of people involved in the tech community with a game-changing startups and a controversial library called efpa. Reason for the talks is because of Gurrop. There have been some serious investors involved and there is talk that social media wizard/investor and #140 conf founder; Jeff Pulver,  interested in the startup, is now part of it yet we cannot confirm, Ulpian's response was "I cannot make a statement on Jeff's involvement in this right now".

So why talk about it? I hear you ask. Well because the startup, Gurrop, is in the social communications space and is said to have the potential to disrupt the space entirely. With big players such as facebook, twitter, Google and nearly all the Silicon Valley giants involved one way or the other it makes Gurrop one exciting startup to look out for because of the implications that could arise.

Another reason is because of a new php-based library recently released called efpa which aims to make the facebook api simpler and faster in production especially for first time developers. The problem is that there are rumours that Glenn Mangham(who was imprisoned for hacking the facebook source code) had given Ulpian the source code which was used to build efpa.

Ulpian himself has come into the London tech scene pretty quickly. He is only 20 years old but has some serious people talking to him about Gurrop and some of his other ideas which include a new startup called "getr" and a php library called efpa. He runs a team stating they are "close friends that are as addicted to work as I am", in London and hates to use the word company describing his organisation, he prefers "hacker space". Meeting him in London we had a chance to put some questions forward; Can you tell us a little about your background? Where are you from and how did you get into tech and why do you call your team a hacker space? Sure, I was born in Prizren, Albania* yet I have spent nearly all my life in London. I have always been interested in things like computers I think there are certain moments I can handpick as instrumental in getting me interested in computing.

However the person most instrumental, by far, was my father and he still is, most of the difficult ideas that I have, I discuss with him and most often the primary factor for starting a project or solving a problem derives directly from my discussions with him, they are not "lightweight" discussions, they are really deep and detailed and this is a real catalyst for being able to break from the single angle of approaching problems.

I am not a fan of traditional business at all, never been. When I started thinking about setting up a team I thought about how I would organise this "company" and I wanted to really create a "close hub" of smart guys that worked on solving problems and inventing new ideas, the selling came second. So for me; I'm really running a "hacker space" just one that creates products that we release on markets and people sometimes pay for.

Can you better define Gurrop, what does it do? When will you launch it? Gurrop is in the social communications space. It's all about how we communicate and how other people perceive what you have communicated. Now we are starting to build a good "calculator-of-data-communication" aka the "computer" yet we are really behind in terms of the software to organize and better understand this communication.

So the project was really about making communication as easy and fast as possible. We have changed the visual way that we see communication(updates, posts, images, video) so you can totally expect that it will not be a list of updates like you see on facebook or twitter. There is an enormous amount of work going on in the background to make communication as natural to us as possible. Gurrop's current state is such that I cannot discuss it further but it will be available quite soon, I cannot however give a precise launch date. What can you tell us about the efpa library? There are rumours stating that you are in some way involved with the hacking of the facebook source code which you used to build efpa. At the current moment I cannot make any statements towards this. Reasons for this are the legal issues firstly and that there are a lot of rumors right now and I will not try to go around and respond to every rumour that springs forth. All I can state is that I do not hold the facebook source code, I never met Glenn Mangham and certainly never used facebook source code to build efpa, I simply wouldn't need the source code to build it.

I am willing to work with facebook on this because efpa's sole purpose is to simplify the facebook api so that development of facebook web apps is faster and easier. You can find efpa at (http://labs.gurron.com/projects.php?proj=efpa) What projects are you currently working on and what is there set for the future? I am currently working on "getr" for which I am really excited about, I really think it is going to make a whole load of people's life much easier and interesting online. It will be launching really really soon which is why I do not want to explain what it does but there are facebook and G+ pages you can find.

Ivaljo Danev, a really close friend and a core part of the team in all projects, is doing an amazing job on the interface; fleshing out the look and feel of getr, he is a really smart and talented guy. I am currently testing the getrEngine which is the engine that runs the processes. There is a whole team working on this right now.

I really enjoy my stays over at @ikoif (ifko)'s place at Hatfield (a uni town in the country just above London), love listening to the legendary moving rock songs, Pink Floyd (yes a whole different dep), reggae, pizza, beer and "Zeppelin" ;)

But it was put forward by Ifko himself that we should run a hackathon. Stop right there! A hackathon with only 2 guys doing the above? Does that even pass as a hackthon and if so, if others do the same, if it catches on... could be like a social thing? thousands or more developers staying over other developers places and doing social hackathons for fun...

Personally how better would the world be if everyone did, so many solutions to so many problems not done over some boring cubicle or board meetings but at the uni towns and cities at night, yes let's admit that the room will be a pizza/beer smelling Gorillaz sounding sauna but that's what it's all about.

So we have decided that we will host a 2 man web hackathon 2 nights and one day as a social fun event. The subject is still blurry and will be decided on the afternoon that it begins.

We will be posting news and updates through-out our twitter accounts, our hashtag for the event will be #ulpifkohackathon so follow up on there for live tweets and also we'll be sharing our convo with others throught this hashtag so if anyone has any cool ideas, anything they would like to see done then post on that hashtag :) also there will be a page of the project on http://labs.gurron.com/whatever_we_name_the_app including a twitter feed from the hashtag #ulpifkohackathon