5 Pound App *Day* on Saturday 10th 10am-6pm

For the Digital Festival we’re having a whole day (sign up->Upcoming.org) of £5 App Goodness aimed at moving your project forward:

  • When: Saturday 10th November, 10am-6pm
  • Where: North Laines, see Upcoming
  • Cost: Free
  • Food/Drink: You supply your own, shops nearby
  • Wifi? Yes, laptops welcome
  • Sponsor: Alan Newman of SensibleDevelopment (plug: talk to Alan for bespoke Java web solutions) – thanks Alan for providing the location!

We’re holding a whole day of £5 Appness to help move everyone a step forward with their respective start-ups and projects. We have 5 great sessions each with 1-3 speakers, each session is interactive, we want everyone to get something productive out of the day.

Programme for the day:

10am-11.30am The Perils of Bootstrapping (Ian Ozsvald, Alan Newman, Raj Anand)
I’ll give some feedback on the problems associated with bootstrapping borne of practical experience growing ShowMeDo and Services over the last 2.5 years. Alan will speak on related problems for EffEffElle and Sensible Development, Raj will cover fund-raising for growth past boot-strapping. Questions will be encouraged, war-stories will be told.

11.30am-1pm Developing your £5 App (John Montgomery plus others)
John and assistant(s) will cover some of the tools and techniques that will help you start a boot-strapped project quickly and keep it growing at a sustainable rate. Some things are key (e.g. source control, test frameworks) but are often ignored. The talk will include stories from the coal-face.

2pm-3.20pm A simple example of Social Media Marketing (Madhava and Premasagar, Jon Markwell)
In part continuing from Tom Nixon’s talk on Social Media at Vine Networking, Madhava and Premasagar (DharmaFly.com) will give a £5-App Talk on how they use Social Media for low-cost yet high-impact marketing for their clients. Topics will include building a Facebook App, MySpace, Flickr and Blogs. John Markwel will join the talk discussing Google’s new OpenSocial platform along with Facebook application development.

3.20pm-4.40pm SEO (Paul Silver)
Paul will continue his talk from BarCamp and give us the low-down on easy and successful ways to improve your rank in search-engines. Paul can give practical advice during the session, we want to kick-off SEO improvements for a few of you during the day. Paul offers SEO as a commercial service – you’ll receive expert advice for free by attending.

4.40pm-6pm A guide to successful Copy-writing (Ellen de Vries)
Ellen is a professional and experienced web-copy-writer who is little known (yet…but that will change soon!) in the geek scene. She plans to run a very hands-on session where we learn copy-writing by deconstructing each other’s web sites. Ellen offers copy-writing as a professional service – you’ll receive expert advice for free by attending.

If you want to move your project forwards on Saturday November 10th then mark yourself as Attending.

Paul Silver’s Hack Day on Nov 17th is a related event.