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The 5th iPhone and Smartphone Publisher and Developer Meet-Up took place on Monday the 28th September 2009.
Due to growing demand - 40 people at the first Meet-Up, 140 at the fifth - we switched venues from the Horse and Groom, which is close to being my favourite pub in London, to 24 on Kingly Street, which was kindly lent to us for the night by the good guys at Yuza Mobile. With its interactive walls and tables, it certainly looked the part as a venue for a high-tech meet-up.
Disco:24 has a concept like no other night-club in London and is without doubt the first fully interactive bar in the world. Created with bespoke tailoring in mind, you can hire your own area and surround yourself with your own personalised back-drop.
Chief Organiser Jason Dunne had just one speaker lined up, but this is living proof of quality, not quantity: Luke Johnson, the Chairman of Channel 4, gave a 15 minute pep talk for all the would-be entrepreneurs in the audience. The message was simple - give it a go. There is great satisfaction to be had in making your own decisions, in choosing your own path, and if a particular idea proves unsustainable, there are worse things than failing. The internet has brought a golden age for start-ups, offering a lower barrier to entry than there has ever been, with the added advantage that if you fail, chances are no one will notice. After the talk, I nattered to umpteen people, half of whom were setting out on their own using the iPhone or the Smartphone as their platform, and it was clear they were each rallied by Luke's words of encouragement.
I ran a competition to win Programming the iPhone User Experience, which was won by Ross Sleight, who had remembered from the very first iPhone Meet-Up that the bestselling computing book of 2008 was the iPhone App of iPhone Missing Manual. Ross, you're a marvel!
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