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}.

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