In the year 2006 Oliver Sommer and Wolfgang Huther decided to develop a small application to make the world wide web a better place. After having met with several software developers, designers and economists to discuss, brainstorm and try out different features, what was just an idea became bigger and bigger until it grew into a business case. They recived funding from german federal governement project (www.exist.de) and mashlab was awarded the status of an official research project of Ludwig Maximialians University (LMU, chair for software development) in 2007.