This article is a bit late because Wordpress ate Version 1. Please mind if it’s a bit raw.

I attended another OpenCoffee meetup this morning and again I met some nice people with some special ideas. I was amazed that I didn’t see many of the same faces I had seen last week, which means that the OpenCoffee crowd is very dynamic. I must note that with the hot weather they might have to consider a StarBucks with airconditioning to keep people coming.

There were some very interesting concepts at this OpenCoffee and I exhanged quite a few of my Moo cards (which I brought with me this time). The first person I spoke with was Jonathan Greensted from SportsDo who provides a service that allows you to track your sport activities much like the Nike+iPod system. It runs on most mobiles, uses GPS, and doesn’t need an iPod or Nike shoes. It does costs £49.95 for the mobile client and £50 for access to their online portal but then you do get a lot more than the Apple/Nike thing does.

I also had a talk with Stephan Tual from TeraPad which is basically a hosted platform for creating a site plus blogs, shops, photos, CMS, etc. I couldn’t really understand if it just focuses on professional users (small businesses) or also on individuals. The clear advantage is that it provides all the service on one hosted platform, but I wonder if that would attract many locked in individuals. In the end I think the tool is definitely very interesting for medium businesses who don’t want to do their own hosting, etc.

As usual there were also some people who didn’t know what they did, couldn’t tell what there product was because it was a “secret” (I am not kidding here, this person was there), or couldn’t show anything yet because they were still in private Alpha. One of them did really stood out though, which got my attention though still being in private Alpha. The tool is called Rememble and besides having a catchy names it helps you keep track of all those small, (un)important thing that you might want to remember.

“Rememble is an easy place to put stuff you’d like to keep even if you don’t know exactly why.

It’s an online service that empowers you to create, view, enhance, share and even co-create digital memories. You do this by adding membles to a timeline representing your life.

Membles are text messages, emails, images, video, audio clips, etc., that are stored on PCs, laptops, mobile phones, smartphones, digital cameras, and even other web services such as Flickr.”

As usual there were also the odd ones out: those people doing a non tech startup. This week I had a nice talk with Daniella from Luento Santoro, a chocolate emporium. Although not really selling her goods online she was interested in concepts like building a webprecense and blogging in a professional perspective. In the end, now that I think about it, if she ever wants to really build a webprecense with a blog she might have to look into TypePad. Maybe I should bring these two together, or maybe the already have? For now I am looking very much forward to next weeks meeting and maybe you will join me?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 0:27 and is filed under London, Meeting, OpenCoffee, Uncategorized, event.