imran*

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  • 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 🙂

  • Make Your Mark

    Makeyourmark
    A few days ago, I was invited to join the Mark Your Mark campaign as a Connector by the organisation’s Oli Watts.

    Funny, as a designer 7-8 years ago, I worked on a website for The Body Shop’s Make Your Mark campaign, marking the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

    This campaign, however, is focussed on helping young people, particularly entreprenurs, bring their ideas to fruition through the campaign’s ‘Network of Networks’. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, but I’ll keep y’all posted 🙂

  • Music for Time Travel – Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

    100days100nights When I first heard How Long Do I Have To Wait For You? while trawling through my friend Mike’s music, I wondered why I’d never heard of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings? They sounded like a band from another time, even their cover art is kinda old skool…but they’ve actually only been around since 2002.

    If you wanna be transported to the time of Al Green, James Brown, Otis Reading, The Four Tops and The Meters, be sure to tap the Dap.

    Daptone‘s puttin’ out their new album, 100 Days 100 Nights, on 2nd October and you can preview four tracks at their MySpace page.

    Funky 🙂

  • Future Of Web Apps Expo

    Fowabadge
    Wow – it’s come around quicker than I expected. Ryan Carson’s Future of Web Apps returns to London in October, along with a brand-new expo event.

    Carson’s VP of Sales, Andrew Calvo has told me he’s offering startups a discount on the basic exhibit package, reducing the
    standard rate of £ 2195 + VAT to under £ 1000…this gets you a 3m x 3m booth with connectivity and power. Andrew also has a limited number of free booths, so be quick – I’m talking to you Northern startups {afeeda, meecard, kodefoo, Expectnation, Pipe Ten, T3D, Yuuguu}. Get down there and grab those free spots!

    By all accounts, everyone I know who attended the inaugural FOWA earlier this year, came away impressed…I’m still disappointed there’s a definite US-bias to the speaker line up, but it’s a pretty good one nonetheless.

    We’d love to be previewing Believr and mee:view at FOWA…but the world will have to wait a little longer 😉

    UPDATE: I had a bit of a grouse about the lack of a Northern UK stop for the FOWA Road Trip, but I just got a surprise Facebook invitation for a newly added Manchester stop…well done Ryan! 🙂

  • Pipery

    Pipes_2
    I just built my first Yahoo Pipes application, using Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker tutorial. The app creates a single feed from my posts at O’Reilly’s ETel blog, TechCrunch UK and Corante’s Mobile Messaging 2.0. Here’s how I did it…

    • Create a Fetch module for all three feeds.
    • Pipe the fetched feeds into a Filter module that blocks any item where the dc:creator attribute is not ‘Imran Ali‘
    • Pipe the filtered items into a sort module to organise items into their descending date of publication.

    Unfortunately, my TCUK posts don’t seem to be showing up…I wonder if this is because they’re several months old and not in the feed document?

    I’m a little late to the Pipes party, but wow – I just made a mashup 🙂

  • Trippy – Nokia Sports Tracker & Google Earth

    TrippyAfter learning about the Nokia Sports Tracker almost a month ago, I finally managed to get it working. Apparently, there was a stray folder on my phone’s memory card which meant the application shut down each time I tried to record a GPS track.

    The software is clunky, but the integration with Google Earth is almost magical. On the way home from last Friday’s Ensembli board meeting, I flipped open the app and recorded my route home, including a detour to see my cousin Aisha. Curiously, at both ends of the trip, the GPS track goes crazy – I wonder if radio-bounces in an urban or indoor environment cause this?

    Brum
    Yesterday, returning from a friend’s wedding in Birmingham, I recorded a track along the M6, M62 and the North edge of the Peak District. Winding through a few Pennine valleys didn’t seem to cause any problems, but around two-and-a-half hours of continuous use resulted in a crash, losing the track north-west of Oldham.

    Google Earth pulls a few interesting facts outta the KML file, including the highest point at 472m in the Pennines, the lowest at 62m just outside Warrington and the fastest 88mph on the M6, west of Stafford (that’s definitely too low!).

    So what’s next? The Apple iTrack? Sometime in 2010, I’ll be loading my BMW CS Concept‘s integrated Apple iTrack with a drivemix of people’s favourite routes through the Lake District…setting it to autopilot and sitting back to enjoy the scenery 🙂

  • Blogger’s Guilt – Cured!

    Back in the saddle…

    Thanks for listening 🙂

  • Bat-trailer

    DarkknightYay! There’s a new Batman Dark Knight teaser trailer at Why So Serious? You get to see – um – nothing?

    UPDATE: Sounds like 2008’ll also see an anime-style, straight-to-DVD Batman movie set between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight…in the vein of Clone Wars, Dark Fury and Animatrix 🙂

  • Pretty In Sixteen Pink Breakfast Candles

    Johncusack
    Mark Ronson on The Kaiser Chiefs’ You Can Have It All…

    ‘It could have been the slow dance song in a John Hughes movie – like Molly Ringwald all bummed and stuff, before the cute guy she’s been secretly in love with comes over and takes her hand.’

    I see it too and I want to see that movie, starring John Cusack perhaps? Maybe I’m in an 80s nostalgia mood today after a girl I had a crush on at school friended me on Facebook 🙂

  • Blogger’s Guilt…

    So, it’s been almost two months since I posted for O’Reilly and Corante, so I figured I should pull my finger out…

    See you in October 😉