On the evening of Tuesday July 8th (upcoming) we’re having a Demo Camp in Brighton as the new format for our regular £5 App hack/story evenings.  Everyone is welcome, we normally have 20-40 people, London Python folk are especially welcome.

The current 6 talks (2 for Python - woot!) are:

• ‘Google Maps + GPS + Python + Series 60 + giant pencil == live biking location demo’, Tristan Roddis (CogApp)
• Google App Engine ’stuff’, Simon Willison & Natalie Downe
• Evolvable flight-paths for crash-resistant landing vectors at a major airport, Matt Sarjent
• ‘Pistach.io: a cracking idea!’, Aral Balkan and Dave Stone
• ‘Inuda’s first public app… after two years of ‘Innovating’ alongside client work’, Jon Markwell and Kev The Dev
• ‘Arduino - Beyond Blink’ - Making cool stuff with LEDs, Seb Lee-Delisle

Do you have something to demo?  Get in contact (ian AT ianozsvald.com), maybe we can fit you into this event or maybe the next one.  The next event may well have more of a start-up focus (if you’re running a start-up and you’d like a demo spot please do get in touch!).

The location is a bus-ride along Western Road, it’ll take about 20 minutes from Brighton station (see the upcoming page for maps).  The evening is free, it’ll be bring-your-own-beer (and I’ll aim to bring some spare beer and a hat-for-cash for those who forget).

Ribot was kind enough to video the last event, take a look to get an idea of what to expect (at this event we were trying to figure out the format for 2008’s talks).

We’re trying a new format for the next £5 App event, it’ll be an evening Demo Camp (barcamp.org) where 6 people get to demo something cool or start-upy.

We’re looking for an even split between neat-geek and new-startup (preferably bootstrapped or angeled startups, no shiny-suits for sure).

Mark you attendance in Upcoming as usual (and un-attend if you can’t make it to leave space for others). We had 40 people last time, do reserve your seat sooner rather than later.

We have 6 confirmed speakers:

• ‘Google Maps + GPS + Python + Series 60 + giant pencil == live biking location demo’, Tristan Roddis (CogApp)
• Google App Engine ’stuff’, Simon Willison & Natalie Downe
• Evolvable flight-paths for crash-resistant landing vectors at a major airport, Matt Sarjent
• ‘Pistach.io: a cracking idea!’, Aral Balkan and Dave Stone
• ‘Inuda’s first public app… after two years of ‘Innovating’ alongside client work’, Jon Markwell and Kev The Dev
• ‘Arduino - Beyond Blink’ - Making cool stuff with LEDs, Seb Lee-Delisle

If you’d like to present at our next Demo Camp then get in contact with me (ian AT ianozsvald com) or John (demo AT fivepoundapp com).

Mr. Ribot has offered to Qik live-video the event (as he did last time), we’ll have beer and cake as usual and then we’ll be off to the pub.

OMG. I remember Ribot sitting there with his Nokia doing some live video stuff at our last £5 App by Madgex co-founder Glenn but I didn’t really pay it much heed…until now when I’ve found the videos. One the one hand - very cool, on the other - my privacy gene is doing somersaults.

‘Glenn Jones on building Madgex pt 1‘ (26 mins), ‘Glen Jones pt 2‘ (5 mins with long comment train) - Glenn opens the evening with the main talk on how he and 4 others grew Madgex from their humble beginnings to now where they’re one of Brighton’s larger tech employers.

‘Simon Willison talks Walrss‘ (16 minutes) - Simon did a 2nd talk after Glenn, in association with ClearLeft, on Walrss - a natty little Python app for reading website content via RSS streams on an iPhone.

‘The Future of £5 Apps‘ (22 minutes) - after Simon both John and I led a short session asking our 41-strong crowd what we should focus on for future events in the summer. We’ve had a ‘year of success stories’ which have been great, now we want to run workshops aimed at getting everyone to take their bootstrapped startup or project and move it a step forwards.

Sitting here now watching the talks (and seeing me speak) is just plain odd, but kinda cool at the same time. The long comment train here is interesting too - the event was being broadcast by Mr Ribot on his Nokia phone (neat zoom too!), via wi-fi, to Qik, then back out live (or delayed like now) to the world.

Thanks Ribot!

John and I will have more news on the future of our £5 App over the coming weeks - we have a wiki in production so we can discuss the long list of requests from the end of the night. We’ll probably do a coffee-chat soon so we can discuss which events to hold first and who helps to run them, we’ll probably also put up a google group for low-volume chat.

Next week’s £5 App event is on April 8th at 13 Brunswick Square - this event marks the end of a ‘year of stories’ and from here we move to a workshop-style set of sessions.

First we showed that you can build a business or project without funding during our 11 great talks over the last year (see talk listings at the base of the page), now we want to concentrate on building up the skills that you require so everyone can take their next steps forward.

As always the event is free, I provide the beer and wine, John will bake a cake.

For this event Glenn Jones of Madgex will talk about the early days of the company and its formation and then some of the folk at ClearLeft will talk after the break on their new project.

After this John and I will discuss what we want to achieve in the new sessions and we’ll solicit ideas from you for the topics we need to cover.

This event marks a watershed in our approach and the plans we make could have a very positive effect on your own projects over the coming year. We’d welcome your ideas and input - please Attend on Upcoming to let us know how much beer we need to buy (and UnAttend if you can’t make it so I have sensible numbers for catering!).

2008’s first £5 App will be held on 12th February with Rupert Loman (founder of EuroGamer) talking on how he built the company from humble beginnings. As usual please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to buy and cake to bake.

I’m also happy to say I’ve written my first article on ProjectBrighton discussing last night’s Cafà Scientifique talk in Kempown. The neuroscience talk was great and the turnout was amazing - close to 100 people!

John and I have decided to organise a Python pub meeting here in Brighton, the date is the somewhat-distant Feb 20th.

Why? We want to figure out how many Python programmers are down here and find out what people are working on.

Personally I’m also interested in receiving some feedback on which Python topics we ought to be covering inside ShowMeDo and knowing who else knows TurboGears (and Django too).  Sign-up on Upcoming and come drink with us!

I’m working with Rosie and a few others on the new Project Brighton idea to review and encourage geek activity in Brighton.

To kick-off my involvement I have reviewed our £5 App Xmas Special and Ivan’s WidgetyGoodness. Earlier Rosie reviewed Mikel’s OpenStreetMap Brighton launch.

My review for WidgetyGoodness was a difficult one - I had some issues with the conference but at the same time I didn’t want to be negative - Ivan+team did a great job of bringing a new conference to the area.

How do you write-up your thoughts without wishing to offend? I did my best to be clear about my position and background as the preface to the review and I’m glad that Will weighed in with his own thoughts.

What else will happen at ProjectBrighton? We’re brain-storming later in the week. One driving theme is to encourage more geeks to work in Brighton so we have more opportunities right here on our door-step. More on this when we’ve had a think.

Hot damn - we’ve just been reviewed by ex-pat Automatic Romantic and our £5 App meets get a stunning write-up:

“Then again, I look at their Flickr stream and the general feeling of lash-up : Projecting onto a whiteboard in a room that looks like it’s either in the throes of serious refurbishment or spiraling down into dereliction (and taking some beautiful antique plaster ceiling roses with it), the beer drinking and eating cake out of foil, the hair, the art, the air of bonhomie and the realization comes to me that it’s not making do at all, it’s Rock n’ Roll.” [Ian's emphasis]

John and I were raising beers to each other last night off of this and we’ll be dining out on it for some time to come.

Related - old friend Simon Hammond is mulling the idea of exporting £5 Apps to Birmingham. I say go for it!

Take the meme and run with it, embrace quick experiments, low cost-of-failure, fail-fast approaches to testing business (and non-business) ideas…just Get On With It. See where it takes you and have a ball on the way (oh, and link back here and let us know how you fare!).

Do join us for a Xmas Special on Tuesday 4th December with a pro-consumer talk followed by Shardcore on the highs and lows of dot-com-boom Beenz.com.

Dear all, this is a quick pre-announce that the fandabbydosious Xmas Special for the £5 App will be on Tuesday 4th December (about 3 weeks time) at The Quadrant pub in the centre of town.

John has arranged private use of the newly refurbished upstairs room for us. I’ll also arrange some sponsored (free!) beer and the pub has agreed to do us a bit of a deal on beer for later. This xmas special will be popular so mark yourself as Attending (we do have limited nbrs).

Resident Artist Shardcore will be speaking on ‘The £50 Million App’ or ‘how he and Martin blew tons of cash during the dot-com boom on various start-ups including beenz.com. Martin is a past co-worker of shardcore, he also spoke on ‘The $30 Apps - life as a Mac Indie‘ a few months back.

Note that ShardCore’s art (a regular feature of our talks) is available for public view at the Tin Drum (Kemptown).

Quick plug - I’ll be speaking on Tues Nov 20th during Danny’s week of skillswaps on how to Master the Art of Screencasting - attend to learn why you should screencast, how you can do it in 5 minutes without installing any software and where you can host the videos for free afterwards.

Saturday’s £5 App Day went very well - during the day we had over 30 people attending the various talks (a similar turn-out to our regular £5 App evening meetings but without the free beer!).Most attendees were programmers and freelancers, some were ‘business types’ - most from Brighton but a few from out as far as Guildford, London and Birmingham (!).

See some photos (more) - thanks for those we have uploaded them! John was the main organiser with Matt Weston in the background and me on some publicity.

Things I learned during the day:

• Social media: Google’s OpenSocial standard isn’t ready yet (despite the hype)
• Social media: Writing a Facebook application is easy
• Copy-writing: How to write web-copy from the perspective of my target audience
• SEO: How many more in-bound links I need to get on the frontpage of Google for targetted terms

Allan and I opened the day with talks on boot-strapping. My Perils of Boot-strapping is online. My main points were:

• Boot-strapping is a valid (if slow) way to start a new company
• Boot-strapping is inherently low-risk towards money and commitment
• Harmonising with your day-job, so your reputation and experience grow hand-in-hand, is preferable

Allan covered how he created his successful Java software consultancy company (SensibleDevelopment) by growing organically which grew from his fantasy-footy game (EffEffElle). Allan spent time explaining the various ways that new companies can get funding and support in Brighton - his presentation (forthcoming) lists all of the possibilities. If you want to ask questions about this - join us on the BrightonDigital mail list.

Sadly Raj couldn’t attend through illness. He had a good talk lined up on ‘growth after boot-strapping’ including statistics from his Kwiqq.com - he has uploaded the presentation which is pretty self-contained.

Next John and Neil discussed ‘how to grow a £5 App’ covering: inspiration, ease of coding, language choice, source control, unit tests and having fun.

After lunch Premasagar and Madhava discussed Dharmafly which is their ethical web consultancy. The did a fab presentation (with Annesley) on how they built a Facebook application (including RSS feed) in several days and how they used this as a way to further broadcast their new ThoughtsOf.PRSarkar. The ThoughtsOf site is a WordPress site with some simple theming, they used the dated post-ahead feature to build a set of posts which are published each week.

Jon Markwell (Inuda) continued the theme of social media and discussed Google’s new OpenSocial. Importantly he explained why it isn’t ready for use yet - I found this talk to be extremely useful as I’d only heard the hype and not the sober inside story. Jon also talked us through Facebook’s new advertising platform and showed how he’d created a Brighton-targetted advertising solution for Inuda.

Paul Silver and David Rosam gave a short presentation on the key points of search engine optimisation. Following the presentation they used their SEO Analysis Tool (the ’site clinic’) to give us feedback on a couple of our sites. I have a print-out of my results and I’ll use the analysis to guide my own SEO for ShowMeDo. Do contact Paul and David (WebPositioningCentre.co.uk) if you’d like expert SEO advice and implementation.

To cap off a brilliant day Ellen de Vries gave us an excellent and very interactive talk on writing copy for the web. We had to work in groups to first explain our own websites ‘to our mum’ - i.e. using plain language and clear concepts. We worked through several more exercises and ended up explaining what we do ‘to our clients’ and along the way we all learned some new Copy skills. Thanks Ellen! Do contact Ellen if you’d like custom web-copy or advice.

Naturally at the end of the day we headed off to the pub to unwind. It looks as though several collaborations have begun as a result of the day and the ‘£5 App Meme’ will be travelling to Birmingham (thanks Simon!) to start a new group in Brum. Woot!

Upcoming events: OpenCoffeeSussex meets next Thursday in the Sussex Innovation Centre, Master Screencasting on Tues 20th for the Week of SkillSwaps, the £5 App Christmas Special (title: The £50 Million App) is on December 4th.