imran*

This 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 🙁

• Katie Lips – social media consultant and cofounder of Liverpool/Amsterdam’s Treasuremytext – came out to speak with Ian Hay and I about joining the advisory board of Treasuremytext as well as meeting some of the Leeds crowd. Incidentally, after Katie’s (also) recent trip to WWDC, Treasuremytext was recently issued iPhone developer status 🙂

• 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 🙂