imran*

Wow. Yesterday’s inaugural OpenCoffee Leeds got a turnout of twenty-seven people, much higher than I hoped and enough diversity for a palpable buzz in the room! Starbucks was kind enought to let us use a small meeting room, but with so many attendees, OpenCoffee rapidly filled the first floor of Leeds’ largest Starbucks 🙂

The rich blend </groan> of students, entrepreneurs, academics, investors, developers and artists included…

• PlusNet founder Lee Strafford, CIO Dean Sadler and  alumni Marco Potesta.
• Chris Richardson and John Slater, co-founders of JCWEB and part of the team behind FeedMailer…they’re still doing their A-levels!
• Ian Pringle of Carbon Imagineering, Inteleme and Wireless Grids.
• Gang Lu, Netvibes’ VP of Business Development for Asia.
• Ian Green of full service consultancy, Green Communications.
• Ben Dalton, an MIT Media Lab alumni and a Senior Lecturer & Researcher at Leeds Met.
• Steve Manthorp, visual, public and media arts, museums and cultural industries guru. Steve also managed to rope in a random Australian customer in Starbucks, who happened to be an expert on Chinese IP law!   
• Ed French of Enterprise Ventures.
• Craig Albeck, Games Network Co-ordinator for Screen Yorkshire’s Game Republic consortium.
• Tom Scott from the University of York.
• Orange’s Ian Hay, strategic advisor to the Orange Group CTO.
• My cousin Mohsin!
• Justin Whitston, Whitson Group CEO and Investor; Justin kindly offered the use of his private gallery for  OpenCoffee Leeds {Duo} in July 🙂
• Paul Stanton of the University of Leeds, Coffeepowered and NorthPack.
• Mark Sailes, formerly of Wanadoo’s Technology Research team and the Buttress open source project.
• James Holmes, founder of myTripBook.
• Dominic Hodgson of digital marketeers, StickyEyes.
• Andy Mitchell of BumbleSearch and co-founder of Meecard

Andy  related that ‘everyone who I bumped into, the verdict was very
positive. That’s what I like about these things – nobody thinks there
will be interest, someone takes a risk, and lo & behold, it turns
out there are plenty of people looking for community. So
congratulations.’ {Uno} also got a shout out on a couple attendee blogs – Inaugural OpenCoffee Leeds and Northern Grit and coffee make a good mix.

Ian Pringle, Gang Lu, the Plusnet guys and I broke off for a separate meeting to discuss how we can bring our collective experience to help creat a sustainable tech ecosphere across the five major cities of the North.

An interesting side discussion between Tom, Ben and Steve led to a ‘games corner’ as attendees related their interests in the local videogames ecosphere.

All in all, a great start – I hope we can sustain the momentum for next month’s event as we build up to BarCamp Leeds later this Summer…

{ Flickr photos here… }