App School 2008

This month, Contrast are taking one lucky idea to App School. We’ll pick an idea submitted by an Irish startup, charity, non-profit or individual and teach it how to be a fully-grown app. We’ll build it in one week and we’ll show everyone how we do it. And, we’ll cover 95% of the cost.

Why?

Why not? In a nutshell, we just want to make cool stuff and have some fun. But it’s also a great opportunity to collaborate with someone interesting and demonstrate our services.

Who?

Anyone with an interesting idea for an app, based in (the island of) Ireland and matching any of these criteria:

• small startup,
• charity,
• individual with startup ambitions or
• non-profit.

We’re not likely to pick you if we know you could afford to pay for it yourself; we want to give everyone else a chance. Also, if we know you’re in a position to promote the app and make it work after we’re done, we’ll be more attracted to working with you. But having said that, I’d encourage everyone interested to send us something; you never know, we might just fall in love with your idea.

When?

The project will start with a short workshop at 9am on the Monday of the week. We’ll start development that morning and will be in constant contact throughout the week. We’ll meet again on Thursday to review progress and make final decisions. The app will go live on the night of the Friday at the end of the week.

Submissions

Submissions must get to us by Thursday, 16 October 2008. We’ll announce our choice the next day. All contact will be completely confidential and we’ll only ever share the idea of the choosen submission.

Send one, short paragraph about the app you want to build to hello@contrast.ie. Please include contact details, including phone number too. We’ll respond to every mail and request more details as we need them.

Terms and conditions

These terms are to make sure we both get the most out of the week:

• you must pay 5% (€865) of the development costs up-front; this is to make sure you’re serious about the app,
• you’ll need to pay any associated costs (fonts, images, domains, hosting and so on); these will most likely be very small,
• we’ll keep 5% ownership of the app,
• the app must go live on the night of the Friday and stay online for at least one year,
• we’ll publicise every single detail of the project, we won’t engage in non-disclosure agreements,
• we’ll make all technology decisions (for example, we’ll be using Ruby on Rails) and design decisions.

Let’s do it!

We’re enormously excited about this and have been waiting for the opportunity to build another one-week app. Our last one, a prototype for Dublin-based IGOpeople, was a massive success. CEO, Campbell Scott said:

The one week project worked extremely well to help us demonstrate the IGOpeople concept to customers and investors. The approach was quick and pragmatic. This helped us to realise our concept with the best value for money approach. I look forward to working with the talented Contrast team on other aspects of our development.

So tell your friends and colleagues and anyone that wants to build a great app and watch this space for updates on how our first App School goes.