We had our June Dublin GTUG on Tuesday last (28th June) and by all accounts it was a fantastic success.
We had Ilmari Heikkenen over from Google's London offices to talk about HTML5 and specifically the visual elements that are new to HTML5 and how you can use them to do some cool in-browser modifications to images.
We also had Neil Turner, a freelance web dev, talk about some of the tools he uses when developing for HTML5, I have a list of what I saw:
Some of these frameworks have built in tools to help mitigate cross-browser issues, particularly with regard to Internet Explorer, which was mentioned several times, not every time was in a bad way.
City of a Thousand Welcomes is a Dublin focussed website that allows visitors to our great city arrange to meet a Dublin ambassador. You book your slot for when you are visiting and then when you arrive you pop into the Little Museum of Dublin to meet your ambassador.
I use Google Apps on a number of my sites, it is a very handy tool, for one thing it makes it ten times easier to move a domain between registrars and hosts since all email is stored somewhere else. Anyway, I have a new use for it - to identify what companies sell my email address on (or lose it). I used to add a + to my email, like this:
In the last 24 hours we built a new web app: General Election 2011 on Hit The Road, it enables Dublin registered voters get transport information for their polling station from anywhere else in Dublin.
Make sure you know how to get to your polling station and go vote on Friday!
A lot has happened in the last ten days, Ross Shannon, Fintan Fairmichael, and myself are now involved in the Launchpad NDRC business accelerator program based out of The Digital Hub. Hit The Road has been a great success and can stand on its own based on our visitor numbers and the amount of use people are getting out of the site, but now it's time to commercialise both the site, the technology, and all the ancillary revenue streams we can think of.
I'm going to break down the last ten days into a very brief synopsis: We have been figuring out our markets, the different products that come out of a site such as Hit The Road and the technology that it is built on, as well as figuring out all the costs associated with running a successful business.
We have learned about all the other startups in the current Launchpad program, there certainly are some ambitious plans! We've had a crash course on the Lean Startup and the importance of "pivoting". Definitely some interesting ideas, though not ground-breaking, the key is to be flexible, realise that your business 'plans' are all built on shaky foundations. Everyone believes their foundations are solid, but it's only when you talk to clients, meet people in your potential market, and engage, that you realise that you may actually be in a different industry to what you expected!
At this point in time we have a fairly solid idea of what we offer different to our competitors, we have a good roadmap for the future development of the product and we have a fairly good grasp of the costs involved in running a business, putting all that together we have a good idea of how much revenue we need to make a success of Hit The Road.
All that's left is sales... how difficult can that be?
