StillLive.NET

Currently I have no ways of accessing the photos from my T1 with my Mac, so I’m going to introduce Mimi, who used to live with me until recently taken away from me by her mum, to the friends from Launch48!

Ever since the launch of co-creating the future, Tom has been doing quite a good job as an editor to keep it alive. Almost every time I walk past him he’d be drafting up something for the blog – or at least it catches my attention when I see the Wordpress interface on his screen. So I thought as a blog owner, I should be doing a better job at keeping StillLive.NET, well, alive. As busy as I do get at times, I should certainly regard ‘blog keeping’ as part of the house keeping.

So here we have it. Thursday is now: Blog Day! And because I only decided to do this less than 24 hours ago, I haven’t really thought a great deal about what to write. I guess I’ll start with Launch48!

Last Wednesday, I picked up Adil’s tweet on Launch48, and registered to attend. According to the Launch48 website…

The aim of Launch48 is to bring together participants from different backgrounds and levels of experience in the web industry to think/plan/develop and launch one or multiple web apps in one weekend. That’s right, in 48 hours! 

Compared to perhaps watching one or two films over the weekend, and perhaps writing a blog post or two, I decided this would be quite a good learning and networking exeprience. And I was right! Friday night started with a round of 21 pitches. Bravo to all the people who had a go at it. I would’ve had a go at it, except my main concern back then was: would I be doing design, developing, or marketing? When 21 pitches came down to LocalCoupon (now VouChaCha), Charity Pie (now MyCharityPie), i like u coz, and Decisions Decisions, we had to go our separate ways and decide on an area of expertise. At the end I decided to try out the design department. Why? I wanted to try taking a pure design role in a  project, and see what that’s like really. Then, I joined the Charity Pie team. (For more descriptive information on the projects, you can check out the blog posts on the Launch48 blog.)

The next day, Julian from Dennis Publishing kindly showed us to our individual ‘HQs’. The team introduced ourselves to each other, and work started to get delegated.  Not that taking on work for other departments would’ve been a wrong choice, but choosing to go into the design team was definitely the right move. I LOVED IT! The design team was absolutely awesome, and the nature of the ‘job’ itself brings me instantly to a state of flow. Thus, I’m temporarily not considering taking on hardcore developing work, but will still be interested in learning the development side of web design and applications. At the moment, MVC and AIR/Flex would be the top of my list. As for the design side of my to-learn list: Adobe Illustrator is, although quite complicated as a Photoshop user, interestingly fun. Definitely have to learn how to use it more professionally.

Despite being pushed to launch an app prototype by the end of Sunday, quite a few people did wander about to see what other teams are up to. Well, at least people from other groups did come up to our design hub quite a few times. As anticipated, the Launch48 event was short of designers. I can’t quite imagine graphic designers to be interested in this kind of event, unlike UI and UX designers. That’s why we were all grouped together as ‘designers’. So, having hogged 4 designers in our team (which is a large design team compared to i like u coz who didn’t have any designers), all the other teams ended up coming to us for one form or another of design work: logo, UI, graphic etc. Too bad we couldn’t help everyone to the end, but taking on multi-mini-projects at the same time was quite an experience in itself.

By the end of of Sunday, most teams finished their app in their own ways. VouChaCha had a working Java application developed and installed on a Nokia N95. i like u coz and Decisions Decisions both had a working platform. As for MyCharityPie – I guess our idea was bigger than what we wanted to achieve in 48 hours, which was bigger than our team – we had a working back end system, and a thought through UX and UI design, but didn’t manage to string them together.

Too bad.

Still, it was a lot of fun. The teams continue to carry on with their design, development and marketing campaigns, and the networking opportunity was priceless. Thanks again to Adil and Ian, and we’ll see everyone again on March 20th when all teams come together again to meet angels and VCs!

 

Oh, did I mention that the design team ROCKS!?