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!
12 Comments
Congratulations to James and I look forward to following how this progresses next week.
Posted by Oisin Prendiville at 6:43 pm on 17 October, 2008.
Darn it! Congratulations to James and I am super keen to see his idea unfold next week.
Posted by Keith Mander at 6:48 pm on 17 October, 2008.
good luck guys! eoghan told me about the 1 week to working idea, thought at first it was too good to be true, but seems you’ll all prove otherwise! good luck! kick some @sh!
Posted by karl deeter at 7:46 pm on 17 October, 2008.
Well done James ! I’m really looking forward to hearing how Des and the guys do the whole thing. I might have to even get a twitter a/c …. I’ve put it off thus far.
Paul
Posted by paul savage at 8:18 pm on 17 October, 2008.
Good luck with this lads. I’m sure it will be great. Sorry to miss out on beers.
Posted by Campbell Scott at 8:42 pm on 17 October, 2008.
Thanks for the wishes guys. I’m stoked and have been up since six getting my requirements together. I’m well up for this ‘open heart’ style of development and I’ll be documenting as much as I can as I go along. I have to admit, I’m aware that there were plenty of great ideas to chose from and I don’t want to waste the opportunity.
Posted by James at 11:30 am on 18 October, 2008.
Congratulations, and good luck to all involved!
Posted by David Horn at 10:10 am on 20 October, 2008.
the problem I find with competitions is that they tend to involve handing over a lot of ideas with nothing in the way of assurances on privacy etc. Whoever it is running the competition ends up with a bag of untraceable public domain ideas. For a studio to run a competition… might you not be tempted to rip off the ideas?
Posted by da bishop at 5:09 pm on 28 October, 2008.
I get a little hot under the collar whenever I hear about people going on about the value of ideas. In reality, it is execution that matters. While different ideas might lead to different outcomes (money, fame, hot girlfriends) they all require a truck load of dedication to bring to market. Thats why I was happy to give up an idea in return for the chance to get some work done. It might have been six months (or never) before I had managed to get the taskfive.com app implemented any other way.
Thats all well and dandy now that they’ve been good enough to implement my proposal - what if they hadn’t? Well - if they do nick anyones idea, they can pretty much forget about getting any other development work from anywhere else. Would you trust a dev house that had a reputation for nicking client concepts? It’d be commercial suicide.
Posted by James at 7:59 am on 29 October, 2008.
LOL, but does facebook use their data.
Also, those patent companies tend not to protect… your… rights.
Not that I’m suspecting you guys of deliberate plagiarism, but you know, if you think about it you must think about it. Competitions are invariably pooling mass input by offering an exclusive prize.
I’d actually be disappointed if all the submissions hadn’t given you any ideas!
I’ve seen design competitions all round. Why don’t the judges charge for their time? ‘Cos they like putting their noses in a whole bunch of other peoples’ best work! Hehe.
Posted by da bishop at 10:37 am on 29 October, 2008.
I have to say I think one of the only things of value in business is ideas, I have never sold a ‘dedication’ or ‘promise of hard work to bring an idea to fruition’ to anybody. on the other hand I have made great money out of ideas.
I think that if you have a competition and people need to post ideas to enter that’s their prerogative, that counts on both sides of the transaction, if you fear getting ripped off go out and get your intellectual rights in order, if you don’t then go into it with good faith, if you are working with professionals the level of ethics (despite everybody’s inherent cynicism) is normally quite high.
what i find exciting about this proposal was that it wasn’t merely a one sided idea - the design house also had an idea they put out - namely to create an app in a week. I think its has the hallmarks of one of the best situations you can find in business…. win-win situations
Posted by karl deeter at 2:05 pm on 29 October, 2008.
хех… забавно
Posted by DiattNex at 7:01 am on 4 April, 2009.
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