£5 App Meet December 2, 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).

This years Christmas special £5app will be held at Hector's House and has a music theme (much like the gaming theme of last year's Christmas special (http://fivepoundapp.com/meetup/14/) ).

We've got quite a busy line-up, so we expect everything to run for a bit longer than usual:

* Seb Lee-Delisle (http://sebleedelisle.com/) – "My life as a wannabe rock star at the birth of the internet music boom"
* Toby Cole (http://www.55th.co.uk/) – "Zero to Theremin in 20 days" – How BuildBrighton built a feature rich, ultrasonic, laser etched MIDI controller in under three weeks
* Tom Hume (http://tomhume.org/) – "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 Hack Day
* lastminute.com labs (http://www.lastminute.com/site/labs) present Bottle-Rock-It, a music game for n iPhones where (with any luck) n > 3.
* Jim Purbrick (http://jimpurbrick.com/) – 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)
* 100Robots (http://www.myspace.com/onehundredrobots) – Jim and Max Williams (http://webcrisps.wordpress.com/) play live and loud for us

Seb has the main talk:

"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 (http://www.sensibledevelopment.com/) and Ian's ProCasts (http://procasts.co.uk/) so far, several more to come, get in contact if you want to share the love). We may also get mulled wine if we're lucky.

Food – maybe nibbles. Hopefully either cake or cookies too.

Official Website: http://fivepoundapp.com/meetup/21/