Business Idea Entrepreneur Life ShowMeDo £5 App MeetMarch 28, 2007

£5 App – Great Inaugral night :-)

By Ian

Great stuff! Our first £5 App night ran smoothly, we had 22 people listening to our two £5 App talks. We’ve been planning this for exactly a month now and it was great to see it run so well. It seems that the free beer was a hit and the building itself lent itself beautifully to the event 🙂

John spoke for 30 minutes on Chrss (html slides) and fielded questions on TurboGears. I spoke on ShowMeDo (html slides)- the latter half of my talk was a reflection on our experiences aimed at others who want to build their own £5 App.

Matthew kicked off an interesting thread – should you run lots of £5 Apps in parallel or just concentrate on the one? Kyran and I say Stick With The One That Works lest you split your time too many ways and you become ineffective. Matthew suggested building lots of apps and letting time work in your favour – one of them is bound to win out. Interesting thoughts…anyone care to comment?

Great to see John, Jane, Richard, Simon, Matt, Kev, Colin, Kyran, Manuela, Dan, Emmet and the usual suspects. Thanks to Danny and Ben at HoboInternet for the great venue. ShardCore brought along 4 pieces of neat geek art, you’ll see them in the photos (to come).

Danny and I got talking in the pub about running a workshop on this – more of an interactive session (and less presentational) where those-that-have-done-it can talk to those-that-want-to-do-it. More on this once we’ve had a think about it.

Pictures and presentations to follow. Two more events are planned, a fourth is tentative, we’re open to suggestions for speakers. Note – the slides for both presentations were made with the excellent and free S5.

[Update – John has photos and Danny has a whole stack in Flickr.]

[Update – Jane has a whole set of photos over at Flickr.]

12 Comments

  • Danny Hope
    Yay! http://www.flickr.com/photos/yandle/tags/upcoming%3Aevent%3D163252/
  • kennon
    I wish I had been there! I think it's probably best to focus on one app for development purposes, but obviously with the 5 quid app idea you're going to need more than one to get by. I'm currently developing several apps in parallel (mostly for contract), and there is a ton of stuff I learn that I can immediately apply to the other apps.
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  • John Montgomery
    My chrss presentation is online here: http://littlespikeyland.com/chrss-presentation/
  • Ian
    Kennon - that all depends...ShowMeDo is a "£5 App That Grew Up", just as Pleonast is for you. A £5 App doesn't have to stay in the realms of earning a few pounds, to me (well, me at least) it just means that it is an app that can be thrown-up and tested quickly. The upside is unlimited, it is the risk/testing that is down-to-earth. Just my take, I think we're still trying to figure out what a £5 App really is :-) Ian.
  • Clive Walker
    Despite my late arrival, it was good to hear yourself and John's experiences. The discussions about the £5 App, web development frameworks, and making money from web apps were great. Thanks for organising the meeting.
  • Ian
    Hi Clive. Glad you liked it :-) The next event is a definite too, the date is probably Tuesday April 24th (last Tuesday of the month). Alan and Raj will be speaking on their Social Apps from start to where they are now. Ian.
  • Jane
    April 24th is the next girl geek dinners night - so if you could avoid that it'd be great :-) Just uploaded the photos - find them at http://www.flickr.com/photos/janed/sets/72157600033108624/ Thanks for organising a great evening.
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