imran*

Category: OpenCoffee

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {August}

    Opencoffeeaug
    Wow, it’s almost four weeks since this month’s edition of OpenCoffee Leeds, which also happened to be the opening event of LS1, our first Leeds web festival. At last month’s event, we just had a couple dozen – albeit interesting – people, but this time around we were back at the 25-ish level of attendance that we’re used to and the room was buzzing again. So, what of the most interesting conversations of the morning…

    • Craig Smith from O’Reilly Media’s UK office – and editor of O’Reilly GMT – dropped into Old Broadcasting House on his way up to Newcastle for a business meeting. Craig and I have been following each other’s work for some time, so it was great to finally meet him in person – and a lovely guy too. Craig’s been looking to broaden O’Reilly’s activities in the UK and hit upon the notion of hosting an Ignite Leeds evening – the first of its kind outside the US. Ignite is essentially an evening of lightning talks.
    • Sam Foster just moved to Leeds after 8 years living in Austin, Texas (incredibly, he’d never gotten the chance to go to SXSW!) and wanted to venture out into the regional community and see what was going on. Sam’s formerly of design-gods IDEO, so I’m sure we’re gonna have lots to talk about!
    • Kilo75‘s Monica Tailor and I had a great chat with Telco 2.0’s Keith McMahon about the impact of the iPhone and Apple’s design choices on carrier and cellco commoditisation.
    • Matt Edgar and Richard Lucker from Orange’s Leeds office dropped by after an absence of a few months…I did hint that they might like to sponsor the forthcoming BarCamp Leeds…
    • New OBH coworking resident Adrian Larkin explained some of his plans for True Media, his newly launched video production startup. Adrian’s been filming short vignettes of OBH coworking residents as marketing material for the service – but I managed to avoid being interviewed by distracting Adrian with stories of Stenley Kubrick 😉

    Also lurking in the background were Jane Lambert, The Hodge, Stuart Childs, Warren Slingsby, Katherine & Johnny from Kooji Creative, Tarique Naseem and nti Leeds’ Geoff Gifford who kindly provided the coffee & cake.

    You can see some of Craig Smith’s photos from this month’s event here and here (thanks to Craig for the photo above!), and please join us in a couple days time on Tues 2nd for OpenCoffee {September}.

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {July}

    Opencoffeejuly_2This month, OpenCoffee was a little quieter than usual, with only around twelve people arriving throughout the morning…infact the smallest crowd since we started out in June last year. I’m wondering if people are finding Old Broadcasting House less reachable or pleasant…or if the weather was just too good to be hanging around with a bunch of geeks…!

    But bigger isn’t neccessarily better and there was actually quite an interesting and varied group of people about throughout the morning…

    • Fresh from a trip to Apple’s WWDC event as well as Las Vegas and Hawaii, the University of York’s Maz Hardey rejoined OpenCoffee after a long absences of several months. Maz is about done with her PhD and I imagine will be ramping up her social media consultancy work at White Cat and also advisory roles with startups such as moonri.se…Maz and Linda also suggested that the days before BarCamp Leeds this August might make for a great time to run the city’s first Girl Geek Dinner. Sadly, even though Maz was around in the afternoon working in met:space, we didn’t get much of a chance to talk 🙁
    • We managed to tempt back regional venture capitalist Ed French, from the Rising Stars Growth Fund; Ed also took the chance to grab a coworking hotdesk to work at during the afternoon.
    • I noticed a recent posting on the global coworking mailing list by Reach Further’s Liz Cable and invited her alog to this month’s meetup. Liz’s newly launched venture Beyond9to5 is looking to provide support and advice for those working from home.
    • I had another fascinating chat with Arturo Servin, also studying for his PhD at the University of York, on the state of the tech sector in Mexico and how his hopes to encourage the kind of grassroots activism he’s seeing here in the UK…incidentally, Arturo just pointed out that Mexico’s Telcel are including MacBook’s as part of their iPhone tarriffs!

    Kinda serendepitously almost everyone this month was a Twitter user – @lindabroughton, @lizcable, @edfrench, @mazphd, @katielips, @ikisai & @the_real_r2d2 – all but Glen Hopkinson…but we had him killed 😉

    Join us next month on Tuesday 5th August for OpenCoffee Leeds {August}…this meetup will be the opener for what might become ‘Leeds Web Week’, including OpenCoffee, an evening keynote from Fred Wilson, BarCamp Leeds {2008} and another Open Street Mapping party…all to be confirmed!

    Do let us know if you can make it next month 🙂

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {April} + Coworking Day

    CakecrowdLast month’s
    OpenCoffee {March}     could have been a bit of a downer, with only a handful of people attending. I’m still wondering if I shoulda canceled it while I was in the US for ETech and eComm, but sounds like 10-15 people did make it out to Loftart so it was worth keeping the doors open 🙂

    This month, inspired by Paul Robinson’s mashup of coworking and OpenCoffee in Manchester, we relocated to Leeds Met’s Old Broadcasting House, spiritual home to the city’s geek communities; from coworkers and Flickr groups, to BarCamp and a recent Geekup!

    Though OpenCoffee started slow, albeit wih a handful of new faces, about thirty minutes later the cafe area of OBH was buzzing with around 25-26 attendees, so the venue change didn’t affect the numbers – phew! So this month…

    • Telco 2.0’s Keith McMahon made an appearance, sounds like he’s helping the NetStart guys with some telco-nomics for their platform project. Keith’s in great company at Telco 2.0 with luminaries such as Martin Geddes and my old boss Dr. Norman Lewis; incidentally, they published a great post on digital music business models just the day before.
    • I had a long chat with Leo Fowler, Technical Director of Kensei and one of OBH’s newest coworkers. It sounds as though Kensei will shortly be providing media hosting, management and delivery technology as a white-label service, but are looking for venture funding to grow quickly. I’m not quite sure what they do yet, but they seem to have big ideas and ambition…a startup to keep an eye on for sure.
    • My friend Ross Brown made it over for a too-short half hour, but long enough for us to talk through some editorial ideas for Dotnorth and the timeline for spinning things up.
    • Though Leeds Met student, Stuart Childs had been along to a previous OpenCoffee, this time he brought along his friend Chris, so we, um, doubled the student uptake? Seriously, where are all the students at Leeds various geek+tech meetups?

    We had a few mixed reports on the success of Paul’s coworking day over in Manchester, so we weren’t sure what to expect. Most OpenCoffee attendees just wanted a peek at the facilities. Other’s stuck around to chat, share ideas and get a little work done…

    • Neil Wilson who’d travelled over from Halifax’s Elsie Whiteley Innovation Centre stuck around to get his email – we spoke for a while about the region’s digital industries. The EWIC is oddly named (and located!) but it appears to be providing some usefully priced not-quite-working facilities over on the tops of the Pennines 🙂
    • NTI’s Linda Broughton and I met to discuss our shared plans for 2008 regarding the coworking community and the city’s startup/innovation community.
    • My former colleague Mark Sailes was progressively irritated by me trying to convince him to buy a Mac…Ihe spent the rest of the day coding up some proof-of-concept work for Vlume.com. I had more success convincing Gavin Sweet to go Mac, once he saw Windows XP running under Parallels – yay!
    • NetStart‘s Gavin Sweet, Lee Strafford and Marco Potesta convened the NetStart board along with Keith McMahon.

    The coworking afternoon had no agenda – only to give OpenCoffee attendees a taster of the facilities and also give an opportunity to work, meet or just hang out…I think it worked out in that regard.

    However, I’m unsure whether to bundle both events together going forward…OBH is a little tricker to get to, for parking and distance from the core of the City. There’s perhaps a place for separate monthly ‘OpenCoffee’ and ‘Open Coworking’ days a couple of weeks apart…or maybe we do run a single day as a sorta BarCamp-lite each month. No food, just coffee and cakes. No sessions, unless you want to convene one. We need to think a little more…

    In the meantime, here’s a peek at Broadcasting Place, the area that’s taking shape around Old Broadcasting House.

    See y’all next month!

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {February}

    Table I don’t get it. When I promote OpenCoffee we get a smaller turnout than when I don’t…fortunately, I didn’t this month and we had a buzzing and vibrant mood with over thirty people dropping in thoughout the course of the morning! I guess it was a Super Duper Tuesday 😉

    Some of the highlights included…

    • A great chat with Everything Ability‘s Tom Smith about his experimentation with songbook services and most notably his impending role as an entrepreneur-in-residence with a VC firm he’s been helping out. Tom’s instantly likeable and I have a feeling anything he creates will be too.
    • Jeremy Jarvis of Brightbox, a newly launched Ruby-hosting company in Leeds and offshoot of Reflex. Jeremy’s also the guy behind Leeds Ruby Thing, who’re holding their inaugural event tonight! Another meetup for the Leeds geek community – woot!
    • I didn’t get a chance to talk to the guys Leo and Dave from Kensei Media, who’ve just moved into Old Broadcasting House and are developing a media platform that promises to ease the pain of developing rich media sites for developers and designers.
    • Fiona ? from Simple Usability had just moved into town and it was great to welcome her into the city’s tech community. Originally from Glasgow, Fiona previously worked on usability issues for a San Francisco based company, from the Dominican Republic! But she’s actually happy to be back in the North and surprised at the vibrancy of the community 🙂
    • We finally managed to tempt Gavin Sweet out to OpenCoffee. Gav hired me into Freeserve back in 1999 as an Assistant Producer and I always saw him as Freeserve’s engineering and technology brain; more CTO than the real CTO, someone from whom I’ve learned a great deal and have immense respect for. Gav’s now part of the NetStart team as Chief Information Officer, helping to scope and build out a crowdsourced platform for new technology ventures in the region.
    • I had a really great chat with Stuart Childs, a student from Leeds Met; apart from people related to me (Mohsin!) we get very few students to OpenCoffee and that’s a real shame. OpenCoffee should be a springboard for design, computing and marketing professionals wanting to break into the creative and digital industries by networking. Stuart however saw this opportunity and is excited by the various meetups and groups blossoming across the City. He’s currently working on some digital arts installations that’ll be on show along the waterfront, we’re hoping to provide some coverage for that with the impending launch of dot:north 🙂
    • Though Westhawk‘s Tim Panton intended to do a demo, we actually spent quite a big chunk of the morning talking about telephony, innovation and Macs! Tim has some great ideas on innovating telephony and voice services by exploring multi-modality in user experiences; this is exactly why we snagged him as a keynote speaker for Emerging Communications 2008 in Mountain View, California next month! We also talked a little about the Manchester tech scene and our mutual friends Yuuguu…Tim showed me the superb Twiddla, an entirely web-based Yuuguu-like service that has me a little worried for our favourite Mancunian startup…
    • Finally dragging out my good mate Paul Key, drummer for local band The Good Die Young
      and THE BEST DESIGNER I’VE EVER WORKED WITH!!! Paul and I have a great
      design partnership going back almost seven years, together with Ian, we worked on a bunch of R&D design concepts including Fingertip, a portable 3G hotspot, Vlume,
      wireless grids UIs, a broadband phone and a bajillion other concepts. I
      miss working with ‘Key’, so fingers crossed there’ll be a little more
      of that soon…

    Stay tuned in the next few weeks for…

  • OpenCoffee {January}

    OpencoffeejanuaryWow, I’ve been lazy…real lazy. It’s three weeks since the first OpenCoffee Leeds meetup of 2008 back on 8th January and I’m just getting around to a round up of that morning’s events…

    • Trina Garnett of All About Joe and I have been talking on and off for a few months, but this month we managed to persuade her along to OpenCoffee. Like myself, Trina recently exited Orange to go solo, though she was part of the Ananova acquisition, rather than Freeserve. Trina’s new venture, a multimedia communications agency, looks to be well served by her experience at FT and Orange.
    • Channon Powell of Leeds Learning Network, Leeds Met’s Linda Broughton and I got into an interesting discussion on the educational merits of OLPC‘s XO computer and associated learning programme. We got to talking about how the XO was actually useful in developed economies as well as the developing world; coincidentally, OLPC America was launched just a couple days after OpenCoffee!
    • The University of York’s Maz Hardey & Linda Broughton had a side discussion about plans for the Leeds’ first Girl Geek Dinner…I’m hoping we’ll see some announcement soon – maybe March?

    I’d hoped to see Freeserve’s co-founder Rob Wilmot, Ian Green as well as Digital Therapy‘s Simon Jones, but they were unable to attend for various reasons…

    We’ve settled into a comfortable 25-30 people each month, but it’s something I’d like to improve upon with a few tweaks to the format over the coming months…perhaps a Vagueware-esque OpenCoffee+Coworking Day at OBH, might see a few demos, so be sure to sign up…

    —

    OpenCoffee Leeds {February} will take place on 5th February, 10am to 12pm at Loftart…be sure to let us know that you’re coming 🙂

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {Sette}

    Sette
    So the seventh and final OpenCoffee of 2007 rolled around this last Tuesday morning with around 25 attendees throughout the morning, traveling from as far as Durham and Manchester.

    The attendance levels are averaging out at 25-30 people and we’re still getting to meet someone new each month, so the formula’s just about working…though I really wanna shake things up a little. So what was of interest this time around…

    • Dave Hudson, Jennifer O’Grady and digital strategist Ross Brown were loitering outside Flannels just as I arrived and later we shared coffee and cake. It turns out that the three of them met for the first time at BarCamp Leeds, found they had complimentary and overlapping skills and plan to collaborate where they can. That’s exactly the kinda OpenCoffee romance that we’d like to see more of Cupid’s Pointer has indeed struck 🙂 Coincidentally, Dave is the brother of one of the more interesting people I met at BarCamp and has been busily hooking up with the North East geek community as well as mulling a BarCamp of his own… Jennifer’s just left Manchester’s Brazen PR and is currently on garden leave before going freelance; strangely we get a lot of Manchester people coming to OpenCoffee Leeds unaware of our sister events over the Pennines. Hmmm?
    • Matt Edgar and Richard Lucker from Orange were along; we talked a little about how we could get Orange more deeply involved in the emerging regional community…one, because they have deep pockets and two because large companies such as Orange have an important contribution to make in the ecosphere, particularly as they turn to startups to help kickstart their stagnating R&D teams and innovation agenda. I hypnotised them both with Nokia’s Moving Ball demo for the N95 and now expect they’ll sponsor the next BarCamp Leeds 😉
    • I was really stoked to see Geekup’s Deb Bassett come out for her first OpenCoffee. Deb’s been deeply involved in helping surface the local geek community through both GeekUp and BarCamp. Now that she’s coworking outta Old Broadcasting House, a few minutes away, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of her.
    • Nigel Spowage was tinkering with his Asus Eee PC over in a corner. Though compact and Linux-ready, it’s sorta, um, dull…lacking the design flair of Sony’s old TR series and the innovation of OLPC’s XO, though I’m sure you could run XO’s Sugar on the Eee.

    Most importantly, I got my fix of freshly-baked custard-filled danish pastry (thanks again Justin!) and had a relaxed, enjoyable morning with some smart people.

    The next OpenCoffee Leeds will take place on Tuesday 8th January…I think we might try some new ideas in 2008, in the meantime thanks you everyone for making our first seven months a huge pleasure.

    Oh wow, I just realised the date for OpenCoffee {January} is palindromic – see you on 08.01.08 😉

    UPDATE: We made the home page of the global OpenCoffee site!

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {Sei}

    Oops. I missed my own meetup. Fraught with preparation for our session at Web2Expo Berlin, I embarrassingly couldn’t make it to this month’s OpenCoffee Leeds, our sixth event of the year.

    Thankfully Ian‘s blogged an update for this month, over at Techiedog. Some of the highlights included a new local mobile virtual network enabler, Smallplanet, and a very interesting biotech entrepreneur looking for assistance from the web industry. Thanks Ian 🙂

    We’ll round out 2007 with our last event of the year, OpenCoffee Leeds {Sette}, on Tuesday 4th December. See you next month!

  • OpenCoffee {Cinque}

    Opencoffeecinque_2
    OK, OK, I’ve been real lazy (hey, it’s Ramadan and I’ve been busy repenting) and haven’t gotten around to blogging last week’s fifth edition of OpenCoffee Leeds {Cinque}; y’know the Italian-coffee themed numbers sounded really hip four months ago, but as someone pointed out, it’s maybe smarter to go with months. So from December, I’ll do just that!

    Every month I wonder…will they come?…did they read the emails? will Justin have enough pastries? Well, they saw the pastries, ate the emails and yes, they came! Though not quite the stellar turnout of the last two editions, this month’s   still captured an attendance of around 25 people. I should learn not to trust Upcoming’s numbers as definitive…

    So this month highlights…

    • I’ve been trying to prise Elias Moubayed into OpenCoffee for a few months and this time around, we were fortunate to have him come hang with everyone. Elias is a veteran of several tech startups, including (now defunct) Israeli advertising tech innovators iWeb; one of Freeserve’s first partners. We spent a couple years tinkering and playing with ad formats a the birth of the web, but more significantly, Elias is one of the smartest, humble, laid-back commercial guy I’ve worked with. He’s keen to get stuck into the region’s grassroots community and I think he and Sally Broom and he, shared some thoughts about online travel opportunities…
    • Local designer/developer Richard Garside announced that he’d resigned his current position and was choosing to go freelance. Interestingly, he’ll be one of the first residents at Leeds Met’s coworking facilities at Old Broadcasting House. Coincindentally, Carbon signed a deal with Leeds Met to help define OBH’s services, help build a community, advisory board, some social applications and a programme of events. Richard and I got talking about what he’ll be needing as an indie, so I’m hoping we can work democratically with the residents to define how coworking will work in Leeds…we’ll be putting out a call-for-assistance soon, so anyone that’s interested in helping, give us a shout!
    • For the second month in a row, I was unable to make time for Maz Hardey! Grrrr!! Though Maz made it all the way from York, neither one of us found more than a few minutes to talk. Fortunately, we’ve been chatting a lot online about advancing plans for a one-off Geek Girl Dinner in Leeds…the discussion has extended to Sarah Blow and Inventya’s Valerie de Leonibus with a view to perhaps doing parallel events in Leeds and Manchester. I’m really fascinated by Maz’ work on the sociology of social media, maybe one day we’ll get to talk about it in person and not just Facebook messaging at 4am!
    • Tom Scott embarrassed me into explaining why there were no firm plans for Barcamp Leeds yet; we talked a little about the scheduling problems, sponsorship issues and venue, before deciding to give ourselves a week to investigate the feasibility of a ‘snap’ one-day BarCamp sometime in November (yes, yes Gordon Brown etc. etc.), followed by a fuller edition in the Spring…then Tom went and raised £500 in sponsorship the next day! We’ll make a call within the next couple days on whether we can go ahead 🙂
    • Mexuar‘s Tim Panton and Georgia Brown popped across the Pennines from their Manchester base; Mexuar was one of the companies that came out to this year’s ETel conference in San Francisco and are continuing to do some interesting web-based voice and social networking mashups.
    • TierLinear‘s Sarah Laycock and I spoke a little about founder Dean Sadler‘s vision for SME webapps and appliances as well as the general health of the Sheffield tech scene.

    Eliasmarco
    Though this month’s turnout was a little lower than August and September, I was really pleased to see more women coming out to play, with Maz, Sally, Sarah, Georgia and Simple Usability‘s Helen Harrop in attendance. Disappointingly, I only got to meet one or two new people…I’m wondering how we can get our regulars to bring fresh faces; for this to be a vibrant, growing community event, we’re gonna need diversity…otherwise we’ll end up as a member’s club…

    Well, here’s to next month – I may be in Berlin, speaking at O’Reilly’s Web2Expo, but that shouldn’t stop you guys geeking out! In the meantime, we also have an evening OpenCoffee warming up thanks to Sheffield’s Matt Grest and Marco Potesta (yes, Matt lifted my silky blurb to promote their event, but he promised to buy me a, um coffee).

    You can catch Paul Stanton’s post here and my photos of the day here…

    Looking forward to OpenCoffee {Sei} next month already 🙂

  • OpenCoffee {Quattro}

    Opencoffeequattro Just over a week ago, I was worried that the numbers for Leeds’ fourth OpenCoffee event weren’t going to be as stellar as the previous month’s turnout. I was wrong 🙂

    Thanks to some voluntary PR efforts from local PR hero Richard Hamer* and a last minute uptick in Upcoming registrants, we managed to attract around 30-35 people throughout the morning. As well as the now regular core of OpenCoffee Leeds regulars*, we had some new faces…

    • I raided the Upcoming listings for The University of York’s Towards a Social Science for Web 2.0 to invite Maz Hardey, a self-described PhD student, freelance writer, blogger and Geek chic. Maz has been conducting some interesting sociological research into what she describes as the iGeneration, the first to reach adulthood in the connected age. The sociological motivations of social media have long been a core theme in my own work, so I’m kicking myself for not making more time to pick Maz’s brains on her research. Maz, Deb and I have been a little disappointed with the turnout of women at tech events – so we’ve been talking about organising a one-off Geek Girl Dinner somewhere in the North to surface the region’s most interesting tech women and find out why they’re not coming along to GeekUps, BarCamps and OpenCoffees! Let us know if you’d like to be involved 🙂
    • Sally Broom, Founder of Your Safe Planet, came across OpenCoffee from The Connectors. Your Safe Planet is a service that matches travellers with trusted local friends and guides across the planet – kinda like CouchSurfing and Stuff Your Rucksack – there’s some great potential to position YSP as a reputation platform for all kinds of local content and services. Sally just moved to Leeds from the Lake District, so it was great to see our local dotcom and geek community fulfilling the premise of YSP and welcoming Sally to the City 🙂
    • Tarique Naseem, one of my partners in Carbon Imagineering and the technology brain behind our forthcoming services mee:view and Believr demonstrated some recent work he’d been doing for the WOW Academy. Tarique’s Lunar Lander  demo showed of only a fraction of his talent. Taz was one of the founding team at VR pioneers Walden Industries, Maelstrom and Red Tie and has an incredible two-decade legacy in games development, 3D technology and now web applications.
    • Linda Broughton, Head of the New Technology Institute at Leeds Met is fast becoming one of my favourite people in the regional tech community. Linda is keen to connect the university’s innovation showcase at Old Broadcasting House to the stattup and geek communities in the city and also use it as a platform for academic innovation and engaging with entrepreneurs and digital media professionals from all disciplines. Linda and I have been talking about establishing a coworking space at Old Broadcasting House for a several months and has been extraordinarily supportive in bringing some of our ideas on coworking to the attention of the university. Linda’s kindly letting Carbon locate at OBH in exchange for helping cohere some strategies for innovation 🙂
    • Enterprise Venture’s Mark Rahn, told me he was recently reviewing a potential investment (Hive?) who’d quoted me discussing semacodes in their pitch! I don’t remember writing about that…tell me more Mark!
    • I also bumped into old Orange colleagues, Fraser Brydson, Matt Edgar and Ben Childs, now Managing Director of Common Agency.

    A special shout out should go out to Nexus‘ Carl and Bal for setting up wifi connectivity for everyone and of course Justin Whitson for once again providing the use of the Loftart gallery and the staff of Anthony’s restaurant for the amazing fresh pastries and the coffee! Justin couldn’t make it this month…he’s about to announce some very, very good news 🙂

    Once again, thanks everyone for making time to come and mingle – there are a bunch of photos here and some thoughts from from Sebastian Mysko here. See you next month on 2nd October – same time, same place 🙂

    —

    * Our regular faces include Dominic Hodgson, Lee Strafford, Marco Potesta, Paul Stanton, Guy Redwood, Ian Pringle, Ian Green, Graeme Moss, Kevin Whitworth, Mohsin Ali, Colin Glass, Glen Hopkinson and Richard Garside amongst others!

    ** Richard helpfully prepared pres releases for Digital Yorkshire, O’ReillyGMT, Blognation, Round Foundry, The Register, Velocity, ZDNet, Computing, Computer Weekly and Business Link)

    UPDATE: James Holmes, one of the attendees from OpenCoffee {Uno} and founder of myTripBook has just joined venture-backed Parisian startup Tvtrip…well done James!

  • OpenCoffee Leeds {Tre}

    Coffee
    The clouds parted, the sun shone and our third OpenCoffee Leeds event was another great success with our largest turnout – we counted thirty-one people in the Loftart gallery, even though we had with 28 definites out of 45 registered at Upcoming. I’m really pleased that we’re seeing new people amongst the crowd as well as regulars each month…also we had two *girls* this month! Seriously, women are badly under-represented at OpenCoffee and I now for sure there are some very smart tech women in the region (I’m talking to you Katz, Deb and Liz!)

    **A special mention has to go to Justin’s guys at Loftart – they make by far the best fresh croissants and danish pastries in town! **

    Surprisingly, no one cracked open their laptops this time around – perhaps a good sign that people are indeed connecting with one another…though as Ian noted, maybe the consequence of a higher proportion of suits and the be-chino‘d…please, we wanna see more DEMOS!

    With the larger attendance, I didn’t manage to meet everyone, but did bump into some interesting people…

    • I came across Reinhold Behringer‘s work at Leeds Met while googling for photos of Old Broadcasting House a few weeks ago and figured he’d be a fascinating individual to meet. Reinhold is Professor Of Creative Technology at the university’s Innovation North faculty, his work focuses on computer vision, augmented reality, wearable computing and robotic vehicles…an incredible porfolio of research and someone whom I’m sure the others were fascinated to meet.
    • We had the founders of Freeserve and PlusNet, Ajaz Ahmed and Lee Strafford in the same room, respectively responsible for two of the British dotcom industry’s largest exits and notable success stories. Both from the North…I wonder if the next British dotcom hit will also emerge from this region…? Ajaz spoke briefly about one his ventures, Browzar and was curious about what I’m now up to…I owe him, so I’ll explain later 🙂
    • Earlier this week, I test drove Manchester-based Westhawk’s Phone from HERE technology for O’Reilly’s ETel blog. It’s a cute softphone applet that can run directly from within your browser. Westhawk’s Georgia Brown hopped over the Pennines to tell us more about their plans and the state of tech in Manchester.
    • Richard Garside, of Garsonix Design, left everyone with some cute origami business cards – could this be the post-Moo badge for geeks? You can read about Richard’s projects, at um Richard’s Projects – including his impressions of OpenCoffee and all about his cards 🙂
    • bmedi@‘s CEO Steve Ding and Chairman Nick Burton were also around this month. The company is a regional network of new media companies that’s created a unique tendering model that aggregates the capabilities of local firms to bid for new contracts. {full disclosure: I’m a non-executive director of bmedi@}
    • I was really looking forward to meeting Tim Waters for a whole bunch of reasons – I’m a bit of a mapping geek and Tim has some fascinating expertise in locative and geospatial media. Tim’s also behind Leeds’ OpenStreetMap project and is hoping to put together a weekend OpenStreetMap-camp in mid-September…I’m hoping we can swing the use of Leeds Met’s Old Broadcaasting House as a venue for him 🙂 Serendipitously, it turns out Tim also knows a good friend of mine, another mapping guru and fellow-Foo Rich Gibson. Rich is currently contracting for a short time in the UK and I hoped to get him up to Leeds for a few days, but sadly he couldn’t make it…we coulda had our first bona-fide American!
    • I finally got the chance to meet Andy Mitchell, co-founder of meecard – we missed each other at the first OpenCoffee Leeds and also at BarCamp Sheffield! Andy’s a great guy, with an idea which could be particularly well timed, defragmenting the various personal and social identities we’re creating across the web. Andy and I met again later in the afternoon to talk about a bunch of stuff that we could do together to help tech across the region and share our experiences working on digital ID projects 🙂
    • It was nice to see some old Orange colleagues, Jedi-Developer Mark Sailes, ultra-smart Kevin Whitworth and Graeme Moss, creator of GromBlog, a sqeamishly hilarious Boing Boing-like blog; I really wish Grom would ‘go big‘ with GromBlog, He’d be a great blog-preneur.
    • I spoke briefly with Colin Glass, a partner at accountant’s firm Winburn Glass Norfolk. Colin described how WGN uses its accountancy practice as a base to develop startups, assisting in fund-raising, business planning and finding exit routes; WGN’s been involved in a couple AIM and OFEX. I can’t claim to understand much of this – I think of stuff and I make it! – but Colin’s expertise seems like it’d be quite useful to tech startups and as such he’s a valuable guy to know.

    So, two months in with three events behind us, it’s time to take stock and figure out the direction we wanna take…

    • We need a better balance of geeks and business-y guys and a more representative gender balance.
    • We need to get people from the big design agencies, such as Poulters to come.
    • Upcoming and my blog posts aren’t a good enough resource, we need somewhere for people to find and locate each other after the event.
    • We’d love to see more demos – so we need more geeks!
    • We gotta work more closely with the GeekUp guys.
    • We need to drag Sam from Blognation, Saul and O’ReillyGMT’s Craig over for the next event – show them close up that London’s not the only buzzin’ tech hub in the UK 🙂

    Despite this – the feedback we’re getting from people is that they’re really loving the format and the community, so we’ll make a few tweaks as we go along and of course we welcome everyone’s ideas and suggestions on how we can make things better 🙂

    —

    OpenCoffee {Quattro} will be taking place on 4th September, do let us know if you’re coming and let your friends know too 🙂