So this weekend me and Julian took part in an event called Launch48. It was hosted by Dennis Publishing at their offices near Goodge Street Station, London.

People from all over the country attended ranging from Entrepreneurs to Software Developers. The aim was simple, to create and launch a web business within 48 hours.

It started with a round of pitching, anyone could come forward with an idea for a business. The ideas were then put to a vote and narrowed down to four final ideas.

• Local Vouchers
• I Like You Coz
• Charity Pie
• Decisions

We then split into teams picking the idea we liked best and got to work – Me and Julian picked the Local Vouchers team (Team A).  We got straight down to it and had a discussion as a team about the best way to go about things. The business team decided on a business strategy and discussed ideas for monetization and the developers got straight down to work building our product.

There were four main areas that we had to develop – A central system that stored all of the vouchers and allowed the data to be accessed via a restful web service. Then we had a web client which allowed users to enter their location and present them with a rich GUI and selection of vouchers. The last two clients were for mobiles, an iPhone application and a Java application. These together would allow us to hit over 60% of the mobile market.

By the end of the 48 hours all four products were built – to a prototype level anyway.

It was such an exciting weekend, we learnt loads and met alot of new people – generating alot of new and interesting business opportunities. Its definately an event that we would take part in again.

Tags: api, business, iPhone, java, launch48, marketing, monetization, service

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