Project Brighton

On Tuesday John and I ran our 9th £5 App - our Xmas Special. We had a grand turn-out of 39 people situated with beer in the Quadrant Pub in the heart of Brighton (pictures - thanks Jane, John and the rest).

First up Annesley talked about his DaoConsumer IE plugin - it lets users learn about the ethical-ness (or badness) of large organisations.

Annesley chose the ninja approach of bringing a GPRS laptop and allowing anyone to specify a price-comparison website for a live demo.

His GPRS did the business (if a tad slow) and his demo showed us just how evil all the laptop manufacturers are. Annesley is encouraging more feedback via the local BNM and BrightonDigital lists.

Next up artist-in-residence ShardCore and friend-Martin talked about their early days as tech founders of the dot-com boom ‘internet currency’ Beenz.com.

I believe that the fight-club rule ‘what goes on in the pub stays in the pub’ applies to their talk…some of the hi-jinks they revealed might make you blush. Suffice to say that everyone enjoyed the talk…now just how did that $86 million get spent on growth from 3 to 300 (to 3) people again?

Richard Vahrman of LocoMatrix stood-up for 2 minutes to talk about his GPS-based mobile phone ‘real world’ gaming start-up. Mikel Maron also spoke briefly about the launch of OpenStreetMap 1.0 and handed out some lovely full-colour maps.

Mark Kirby has provided a review of the night too. Shardcore sent me a fitting YouTube music video about boom and bubbles.

Thanks to: Tom Hume @ FuturePlatforms for sponsoring our break-time beer and Karl for the lend of his VGA->NTSC box of tricks (via Paul Silver’s Brighton Farm - thanks Paul).

We will be picking up again in February - with luck we’ll have both Madgex and Spannerworks talk on their bedrooms->big company growth along with the usual small-developer spots.

Ian Ozsvald.