Open Tech Calendar

Mobile is a necessity for most digital startups and in many cases it is at the core of their proposition. Unfortunately mobile usually means an app, and potentially multiple apps on different platforms, and apps are an expensive luxury on a startup budget.

For the typical “lean” startup (whether formally “lean” or just accepting the truism that the final product is in most cases not precisely the one they first thought of) sinking £20k into building a mobile app which is likely to need to be repeatedly reworked if not scrapped and replaced is a huge barrier.

Fortunately over the years a number of cross platform and/or rapid development mobile frameworks have come onto the market, e.g. Titanium, PhoneGap, Unity3D, Xamarin, MoSync and Livecode amongst many many others. They allow apps to be rapidly prototyped and delivered for far less investment than previously. This is due to a combination of the use of more mainstream development technologies, and the abstraction away of the often rather perverse and challenging details of the specific mobile platforms.

Of course this isn’t a panacea. The same abstraction involves compromise and makes some use-cases much harder or even impossible to achieve. It is critical for the team to understand where the limits are relative to the intended scope of their app when deciding to use one of these frameworks.

To help understand these issues we will hear from a number of startups who are successfully using this approach to build their apps, as well our local cross platform development framework provider.

The speakers will be:

* Geoff Ballinger of deltaDNA will briefly introduce the topic and give an overview of the major frameworks.

* Billy Jones of Appointedd will tell us how they have used Appcelerator Titanium to create a mobile interface to their small business services platform.

* Jamie Sutherland of Mallzee will tell us how they have used Phonegap to produce their personal shopper mobile app.

* Neil Polwart of Novarum DX will tell us how they have used Xamarin to develop their mobile reader solution which includes sophisticated and challenging image processing on device.

* Kevin Miller (RunRev) will tell us about Edinburgh’s very own cross platform framework LiveCode, and how it can be used to rapidly create mobile apps on iOS and Android using a very accessible natural language syntax.

As usual we will finish with an open discussion session followed by a networking reception with wine. We are delighted to be hosted by the Entrepreneurship Club (www.business-school.ed.ac.uk) again, and will kick off in LT2 at the Business School, 29 Buccleuch Place, at 6.30pm sharp.

This is a free event but places are limited so pre-registration is required.