£5 App Meet July 14, 2009

A meet-up for programmers, web developers and designers to discuss and showcase their "£5 apps" - lightweight software created by one or two people who take a simple idea and run with it.

The discussion will range from technical (what tools/languages were used during development) to business (building communities, spreading the word, costs and rewards).

Allister Furey (http://www.afurey.com/) 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 (http://www.j4mie.org/) on http://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 (http://blog.davehawes.com/) 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 http://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 http://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."

Official Website: http://fivepoundapp.com/meetup/18/