On Wednesday night we ran our music-themed £5 App Xmas Special (fivepoundapp.com).

It was fab!  John and I had a fab time organising things and watching the night run so down-to-earthly – it seems that many others did too.  I particularly like:

“I bloomin’ love £5 app! The event that’s happy to be itself, and is more rewarding for all as a result. Here with @ribot & @lastminute teams” – ribotminimus

“Home from #fivepoundapp, letting the awesomeness sink in.” – j4mie

Get to the end of the very last video and you’ll hear a special £5 App rendition of Jingle Bells.

Note: I want photos!  Email me links to flickr’d images please.  I also want your blog write-ups, mail them to me or comment down below.

Particular thanks for our sponsors Alan Newman (Sensible Development) and Paul Silver (PaulSilver.co.uk) along with John (psychicorigami) and my ProCasts for putting up cash to fund a few hours of free beer.  Also super-huge thanks to the Ribots for supplying piles of mince pies (yummy!) and John for baking a batch of crunchy cookies.

The event was organised through Philip and Declan of PlayGroup, they use Hector’s House for arts and science gigs (thanks BuildBrighton for the connection!).  Cheers chaps, it was exactly the space we needed!

“Seb’s Slightly Failed Music Career”

Seb spoke on the highs and lows of forming a band, showed previously-unseen footage and generally gave the lowdown on how it all works. Rick-rolling was included.  Seb has his own write-up.

Sadly Seb’s hard-drive died after the talk taking all his transcoded footage but on the flip-side Seb inspired Simon to share footage from his old cover band.

Here’s the 60 minute video of Seb’s talk:

£5 App #20 “Seb’s Slightly Failed Music Career” for the 2009 Xmas Special from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

We were absolutely honoured that Seb and Jenny unveiled their new Xmas song tonight, see it here and share it around:

“Toby Cole – Zero to Theremin in 20 days” (with demo)

Toby Cole shows the ThereThing constructed through BuildBrighton and unveiled at a live gig the previous month.

Paul Silver took a video of the ThereThing in action:

Sadly the ThereThing is slightly out of shot during the video of the talk but you can hear Toby and see the screen just fine (and the ThereThing link shows it in detail).

£5 App #20 “Toby Cole – Zero to Theremin in 20 days” for the 2009 Xmas Special from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

“Jim – Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar-mounted iPhone ableton live interface”

Jim Purbrick showed Mrmr, the LiveAPI guitar mounted iPhone Ableton live interface.  Jim’s also the head of Second Life (UK) and is known for building robots.

£5 App #20 “Jim Purbrick – Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar mounted ableton live interface” for the 2009 Xmas Special from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

“Lastminute.com Lab’s with Bottle-Rock-It” (with an additional proper demo video)

Richard, Sam and Mathias (LastMinute.com Labs) came down from London (thanks guys!) to demo Bottle-Rock-It, a group iPhone musical instrument.

The background talk gives loads of detail, sadly the demo went a bit sideways so we sang Jingle Bells as a loud (and slightly tipsy) group instead.

Check this BBC News story to see Bottle Rock It in action.

£5 App #20 “Lastminute.com’s Bottle-Rock-It” for the 2009 Xmas Special from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

100 Robots (band)

After the talks finished Jim Purbrick and Max went on to play live n’loud as 100 Robots.

2010 and beyond…

If you want to keep in touch with future £5 App events then join the £5 App Google Group – it is very low volume and is mostly there just for the announces.

We’ll probably run some more competitions next year, the 5k competition went very well and John wants to do more around that idea and I want to play with some open-source A.I. kits.  Details to follow.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

John and I are very pleased to announce our upcoming music-themed £5 App Christmas Special on Wednesday 2nd December, 8-11pm at Hector’s House in collaboration with the lovely Playgroup guys.  Please do the usual – sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to brew for you all.  If you don’t know what this is then see last year’s Xmas Special write-up and details of all the previous events (with videos).

We want 40-60 of you along this year so please spread the word – Tweets and blog posts would be hugely appreciated!

Outline:

• Seb Lee-Delisle – “My life as a wannabe rock star at the birth of the internet music boom” – full description below
• Toby Cole – “Zero to Theremin in 20 days” – How BuildBrighton built a feature rich, ultrasonic, laser etched MIDI controller in under three weeks”
• Tom Hume – “You’re all an orchestra, get over it” – Bluetooth devices will interact with the audience to create changing ambient music, created by Future Platforms for a Music Hack Day
• Jim Purbrick – “A short talk on the Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar mounted iPhone ableton live interface by the head of Second Life Europe and later a demo with 100Robots”
• lastminute.com labs – Bottle-Rock-It, a music game for n iPhones where (with any luck) n > 3 (Richard, Russ, Sam, Mathias)
• 100Robots – Jim and Max Williams play live and loud for us

Seb has the main talk, his full blurb is:

“Before Seb Lee-Delisle was peddling his digital creations, he had an entirely different life. He spent most of his 20s setting up Solar Records and promoting his band Stargirl (later Laine). Investing over £50,000 of their own money, they released their own CDs, made it onto the radio and TV, played in front of 30,000 people, recorded at George Martin’s Air Studios and had full page spreads in the nationals.

They were at the forefront internet music boom of the late 90s. The future was looking rosy for this group of dynamic 20-somethings. So come and find out what it was like, how the hell they got the £50K, and why their plans didn’t quite reach fruition…”

Beer – several of us who are doing well this year will put up some bar-money (Alan of SensibleDevelopment, Paul Silver of Brighton Farm and my ProCasts so far, several more to come, get in contact if you want to share the love).

Food – maybe nibbles.

Next, please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to provide and tweet/post about the event to help us spread the word.  Cheers!

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Jay, Jon and co. ran another excellent BarCamp Brighton this weekend which followed dConstruct09.  There’s a long, good write-up here.

I’m not entirely sure of the right tag for flickr – it seems that ‘bcb4′ (which I’d thought was official) conflicts with BarCamp Bangalore and BarCamp Boston…ho hum.  Anyhow, here’s one of mine:

My session was a 30 minute workshop on ‘Screencasting in 7 minutes with Jing‘ (now picked up by TechSmith – thanks Betsy!), I signed-up 7 new people to screencasting including freelancers and a Thales employee so I consider that a Win.  The link has a break-down of what was covered, a video of the session and the resulting screencast by Jez via my machine.

In the session I covered the following as examples of how screencasts are used by others:

• Jay’s Gibraltar Software screencast produced in 3 days with Camtasia on Windows (via my friendly critique)
• Google Chrome screencasts for examples of 10-20 second feature tours
• DropBox intro screencast which shows two computers syncing (via a virtual Windows instance) – see the Windows desktop about 1/6th of the way into the video
• ShowMeDo’s OpenStreetMap videos for open-source tutorials
• MailChimp’s homepage video as a warning – lots of style (it is quite pretty) but very little informative content!

Musical entertainment was provided by 100 Robots (Jim of SecondLife and Max, Alex was absent so we had Jim loudly on the vocals), the foundation of the Old Music Library shook nicely:

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Last night’s £5 App went very well, below are the videos for Tony the electronics inventor, Seb the guaranteed-to-lose-money website creator for IWillPayYourParkingTicket and Rosie the flash-mob-tester via SoftwareTestingClub.

£5 App #19 Tony Ellis as Electronics Inventor from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

£5 App #19 Seb and Jamie with I Will Pay Your Parking Ticket from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

£5 App #19 Rosie on FlashMobTesting from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

The 19th £5 App will feature a new fab speaker talking about his career as inventor, followed by Seb and Raul.  This will be our last £5 App for probably 2 months (due to conferences and John’s wedding), we’ll probably return in November.

The next event is Toy Maker – from Employee to Inventor, it’ll run on Tuesday 11th August at The Skiff, from 8pm until late. Please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to buy and cake to bake.

I’ll copy the blurb from the site:

Tony Ellis will be speaking about moving from being an employee to an inventor, successfully licensing 45 electronic inventions. Tony spoke at an earlier RobotBrighton on his robots and toys, now he’ll give the story about how he jumped from a career in electronics to running his own company, figuring everything out on his journey to licensing 45 toys and games to large distributors like Mattel and Radica.

Next Seb – Flash Guru and previous 5K App winner – will be talking about a new project called IWillPayYourParkingTicket he is working on with Jamie Matthews.

Finally Raul will give a talk titled “Language and design: we write too much, we design too predictably”.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Next week’s £5 App night is shaping up nicely, we’re mixing A.I., clean energy production, geo-urls and a safety-training start-up in 3 talks by new speakers.  I’ve cribbed the following from the 18th event description, sign-up on Upcoming to give us an idea of numbers please:

Allister Furey will be talking about applying ‘bio-inspired’ AI techniques to the next generation of wind energy technology which uses tethered wings (that’s kites to you and me) to drive electrical generators. He’ll show some:

… examples of where these techniques; genetic algorithms and neural networks, have been used in other applications, sometimes in combination with physics simulation. Hopefully demystifying some of these techniques and show how they can be relatively simple to implement, including how to program a genetic algorithm in one line of code and how to let a physics model build itself.

Next up there’ll be Jamie Matthews on hereit.is:

a simple web app which lets you create and share short urls for geographical locations. As well as explaining what it is and how it works, he’ll be taking you on a whistle-stop tour of MVC architectures, REST APIs, CSS3 magic, the Google Maps API, and anything else he can squeeze into twenty minutes.

Finally David Hawes will discuss how a knee operation in July 2008 and hence an unexpected chunk of “down time” allowed him to finish a decent version of www.safetytrainingnetwork.co.uk, through the haze of various painkillers, in time for a launch at the Focus on First Aid conference:

The launch was well received and so he decided to quit his safe job at Avanade, in the depths of the recession, to pursue his own ideas full-time. Eight months later he released the first subscriptions for www.trainingcoursebooker.com enabling small Safety Training Providers to manage their businesses and sell courses. David will talk about what he has learnt and why he is glad he has done it after working at large companies for the last 5 years.

You might also want to see videos from last month’s event which include Darren Fell on Crunch, ChatBadge, Taykt and a human memory hack.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’m looking forward to this Thursday evening’s RobotBrighton night @ The Skiff.  Tony Ellis (AKA ToyMaker), creator of 45 licensed toys and electronic games, will talk on his boot-strapped history (note the £5 App connection to my excitement?) with some details about his latest project.

Amongst other things he’s the creator of the rather cool voice-controlled Daleks:

Whilst the night will be videod and uploaded, some parts will be edited out due to commercial sensitivity so to get the full story you’ll have to attend in person.  Here’s the blurb:

“Tony Ellis (Toymaker) is a maker of Toys and founder of Conceptioneering. As well as being behind some of most popular toys on the market today including Cube World, Tony has been a roboticist for many, many years.

On 25th June he will be coming along to talk about some of the robots that he has built and about AIMEC:3, his current robot that many of you may have seen photos of posted on the website. Tony will talk about some of the features that the robot possesses and about some of the things he has learned in his many years of robotics.

Tony is completely self taught and has spent his life inventing cool toys like Cube World and building robots, including AIMEC:3 a humanoid robot and voice activated Daleks. His latest venture is a commercial robotics company building low cost, highly intelligent, accessible robotics. He is a fascinating guy and really worth coming to listen to. I highly recommend coming along to hear him talk and he may even let us play with a robot or two!”

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

We had a fab £5 App last night – sorry to those who tuned in looking for the live broadcast.  We had some itty-bitty bandwidth issues and uStream wouldn’t play ball so I had to record off-line.  Vimeo serves the videos just fine now.  Thanks to Jon and The Skiff for hosting us.  See photos here.

We had:

1. Darren Fell telling the story of Pure360’s birth and sale followed by his second start-up Crunch.co.uk
2. Andy Gill on the launch of ChatBadge.com – see Andy’s write-up
3. Richard Dallaway on the launch of Taykt.com
4. Ben Sauer on the super-memory techniques used in Anki

Five Pound App #17 – Darren Fell on Crunch from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

Five Pound App #17 – Andy Gill on ChatBadge from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

Five Pound App #17 – Richard Dallaway (taykt.com) and Ben Sauer (Anki) from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Our next £5 App night is next Thursday 8pm at The Skiff.  For our 17th event we have three speakers each talking about their new start-ups.  As usual beer and cake are provided, beer is now kindly provided by Jon and The Skiff rather than out of my pocket, co-founder John will bake the cake.

Darren Fell will be talking about founding Pure and his new venture Crunch, which is a web service that offers: “Ridiculously Easy Accounting for Freelancers, Contractors and Consultants”

Andrew Gill will also be along to talk about ChatBadge: “… a new web-based chat service purpose-built to help convert website visitors into customers and support existing customers better”

Richard Dallaway will be talking about Taykt, a web site that let’s you use SMS short codes for…well, whatever you like, really. He’ll explain what it is, why it was built, and what they’ve discovered from building a product for themselves, rather than a client.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’m joing Matt Weston and co. on Saturday morning (9am @ Brighton Station) for the Slack Space (Guardian, Ivan, BeeKeeper) survey there are probably better ways of doing it than this.

Slack Space is all about re-purposing empty buildings so we can do something better with them than let them sit vacant.  The first step is to survey where the empty buildings are…

Matt has suggested using a camera, pen and paper to build a list of locations powered by bikes.  I figured with my iPhone I can go one better – I can take photos, upload with GPS locations to flickr and then expose the location info for easy mapping.  Coupled with the flickr tag SlackSpaceBrighton we can easily aggregate all the locationed-photos on a map.

There is one configuration step required to get the location data into flickr (it could be done on the day as long as you have web access).  Go to Your Account in flickr and then visit Privacy and Permissions and make sure:

1. Hide your EXIF data is No (I think this is the default anyway)
2. Import EXIF location data is Yes (you MUST set this one)

If Import EXIF location data is left to No (the default) then you’ll lose location data when the pictures are uploaded.

Flickr asked me for one more privacy setting when I flicked Import EXIF location data to Yes, I think it was ‘who can see the location in your photos?’ and I left it at the default of ‘Everyone’.

Hope to see you along on Saturday

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.