It was nice to go to Apps for good  as it harked back to my roots in the education sector.

This is taken straight from the website:

“Once a quarter, the best teams of students who have completed the Apps for Good course will have the ability to pitch their work, ideas and prototypes to a panel of  ”dragons” at our Dragons’ Den events.

The dragons assess their ideas for market focus, originality, mobile features, viral marketing effects amongst other criteria and vote if the apps should get funding for development to become fully-functioning apps that can be downloaded on Android Market.”

Although I missed the first 30 minutes of it due to train delays and the venue not having a sign, I arrived halfway through an Gaming review App. I was interested to see how hard the Dragons would push the developers (who are all high school age), would it live up to the BBC2 concept.

In friendly manner, they pulled no punches asking how they were going to differenciate themselves in a crowded market, what was their USP, how would they fill their review database with content when launching?

All very important questions.

The next App was very interesting, the concept was simple to help young people budget their monthly income. A reasonably slick presentation was prefaced by a entertaining video detailing the perils of spending pay day money on shiny hardware (obviously they knew their target audience!). The App itself took the look and feel of farmville and applied it to financing, although they were keen to stress that other UI’s could be applied if you weren’t a fan of agriculture.

This was my App of the night, simply because its such an important life skill that isn’t being taught in a way that engages its audience. It was also my pick simply beccause they had done their research, courted a range of companies to gain support and had enough facts to back up what they said (clearly they had read my previous blog post on pitching apps!)

The final App was to do with the ever present problem of cyberbulling, providing advice and guidance on what to do, although I dont think it went far enough (one suggestion that came to mind is a simple report abusive sms/call button that can be added to the Android call U).

Sadly I didnt have time for networking after the event, as I had a early am meeting, but I think I will go to the next one (and arrive on time ;))