App school: The chosen one

56 entries later, we’ve finally chosen the lucky application and it’s owner who we’ll be taking to App School: James Kennedy. James came to us with a solid idea to develop an application that scratches an itch for him and his business partner. What we liked most about James’ idea was that it would produce a tangible application we could launch on Friday, with customers already lined-up to use it.

The idea

In a nutshell, James’ application is a productivity tool that facilitates a technique taught by business coach Darryl O’ Dee to hundreds of entrepreneurs around Ireland. We’ll talk more about the tool itself on Monday. James didn’t think we’d go for it, but we really liked the idea:

I saw App School competition posted via Des’s tweet. I immediately knew what idea to submit. I run monthly workshops on developing business ideas and I thought the whole App School idea was genius. If I’m honest, I didn’t rate my chances and when Eoghan rang to say I was being considered I nearly fell off my chair. At the same time, I knew the guys were damn good at what they did and I couldn’t help but get my hopes up. I guess the pressure is on all of us to delver the goods now.

Thanks

We want to extend a huge thanks to all our well-wishers and to everyone who sent us their ideas. We’d love to build them all, but we’d also love to stay in business! We hope you understand. Extra thanks to Stephen McCarron from Hosting 365 who are offering to host the winning application on their top-of-the-range servers for free for the first year.

Get Ready

So, App School starts this Monday. We’ll be posting deliverables and updates here and on Twitter as often as possible. It’ll be an intense and stressful 5 days, but but hopefully a lot of fun too. Wish us luck!