April iPhone Developers' Meetup
On Monday we held our first Silicon Valley iPhone Developers’ Meetup, titled Creating Opportunities and Applications on the iPhone. Thanks to everyone who attended for making it a great evening of information and networking, and especially Ben Stiglitz, Warren Stringer, and Chi-Hua Chien.
Ben was the co-organizer of Monday’s meetup, brought the snacks, and presented a thorough and clear introduction to Objective-C that you can download from the files section of our meetup site.
Warren Stringer demoed an expressive iPhone application that he built with the unofficial SDK and is now porting to Apple’s official SDK.
Chi-Hua Chien of KPCB opened our meeting with a presentation and Q&A on the iFund. So far, they’ve received over 1500 submissions, with 75 or in dialogue, 10 in “deep discussion”, and two that have taken investments: one that is building a recommendation system on mobile social networking and one that is working to use the iPhone as a home automation controller. To the question “What makes a good iFund venture?”, Chi-Hua listed four qualities:
- A strong team.
- An inherently mobile application.
- A vision that builds on an expectation of pervasive mobile computing.
- A missionary-like desire to build a transformational product.
We met at the Cupertino Town Hall and we’ll be there again next month on May 19 for our second meetup, where Michael Mace will present some results from a survey of iPhone users and we’ll have more demos and technical presentations.
Speakers and Sponsors
We’re looking for speakers and sponsors for our future meetups. The Cupertino Community Hall is a great facility, but we have to pay to rent it, so for future meetups we are looking for companies or individuals who would help us cover those costs or find alternate venues. Also, if you’ve got something that you’d like to present, get in touch with me or Ben directly or through the meetup group.
Other Events
At the meetup I put up a list of other local events for iPhone developers.
- CocoaHeads, a monthly meeting at Apple’s campus in Cupertino that covers lots of different topics related to Mac OS development.
- NSCoder night, a Tuesday-night hacking session in Campbell that is also oriented toward Mac OS X development in general.
- and on Monday evenings (except when there’s a meetup), we’ll have informal iPhone coding and sharing session upstairs at the Red Rock Cafe at Villa and Castro in downtown Mountain View.
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