Intohand

Last week Intohand attended and presented at OpenMIC8 in Brighton. This was a lively event with a lot of debate in the morning about the relative merits of native versus mobile web applications – and the hybrids in between. Stuart gave a presentation on the topic and Kieran followed up with a seat on the Developer panel. The afternoon barcamp sessions included an opportunity to get hands on with Windows Phone 7 devices, kindly brought by Mike Ormond as well as a Samsung Galaxy Tab from Rich Spence‘s device armoury.

The debate raged on regarding the relative merits of techniques to put material on mobile, spilling over into a bar discussion and latterly a trip to the pub. Good OpenMIC once again, well done to the Bookmeister and the support of DCKTN and University of Bath – looking forward to OpenMIC9 in Oxford!

This week I represented Intohand at an awards day for the Millenium Development Award from Unltd and Nominet that Kieran and I were awarded last September at the Over The Air conference in London. The app we hacked together was an interface for Freecycle/Freegle groups called Freeuse.me. Kieran made an iPhone app that geocoded and uploaded a photo, and i made an Android app that allows you to save keywords to match against incoming emails and places these offers on a map by parsing the location. I then made my (first ever) Keynote presentation and presented the idea.

Unltd Award Winners (Elliot is on the left)

UnLtd, a trust that funds “social entrepreneurs” was impressed by the idea and how it had the potential to improve social inclusion, as well as improve environmental conditions by promoting the freecycle model to more people, and awarded us with a £2500 investment to take the project forward. As a result, Intohand has taken on the idea as a project, and we have planned out the project and i have begun putting together the back end.

The awards day was a good opportunity to meet about 30 other entrepreneurs, working on some really interesting projects. A few of them were working on mobile apps too so we found some good synergies. When discussing the project with people there, i was gratified to see that like most people i speak to, they universally agree on the need for something like what we’re doing. Unfortunately I don’t have a working prototype to show them but it shouldn’t be too long now. Once i have something it will be useful to have a network of forward thinking people to help us get the word out!

Last night we had Kieran and myself present to an audience at Bristol College, as part of a series of lectures on mobile app development. Amongst those listening were developers, business owners and founders, as well as coders from various disciplines looking to get some more views on the world of application development.

We split the presentation into two parts, and in sharing our experiences we talked about the key things that should be considered commercially ahead of investing in the tools, SDKs, equipment and necessary paraphernalia required for app development. A review of the economics of application development sparked a lot of debate in the formal and informal sessions, which was really valuable.

In talking about the nitty-gritty of the technology, Kieran delivered a broad summary of the available platforms, their pros and cons, and re-capped some of the ‘gotchas’ associated with each of the target platforms. This was also well received, with Kieran approached after the event to discuss these topics further.

This event was really good – we enjoyed the interactions from a really interested and diverse audience. With two more interesting events in the series it’s worth going if you can be in Bristol over the coming days.

Stuart presented at the University of Bath on the 8th February. The Apps Crunch event was all about getting groups of competing students to bring their business and creative skills together, as part of a mobile apps development competition.

Fellow presenters Richard and Adam of iPrinciples, helped to subject the attendees to an intensive download of information concerned with everything from business case, through platform choice to how to set about designing and developing an app. Adam even showed a Windows SDK in action to articulate how easy developing for this platform can be. Once you have his skillset, of course!

Mixing with the students afterwards there were some really good ideas floating around, and it looks like the earlier presentations didn’t put too many people off. The entries will be judged prior to the big Cross Media Lab event at the Innovation Centre next month.