It’s been a while and it’s somewhat too late to wish everyone a good year but Open Coffee will continue in 2008. The next event will be in Delft on February 11th, 2008 (Upcoming event).
Location: Coffee Company (large table), Market Square Delft
Time: 09:00 (till 10:00 or so)
What is Open Coffee? Open Coffee is a gathering for web and startup minded individuals to get together and talk about any topic that comes to mind while drinking some cofee. A pleasant start of the day with some familiar and some new faces talking about interesting stuff.
See you there! Post stuff you want to talk about as comments to this post.
Though small, I see a lot of potential in the event format and the diverse mix of people who are mostly doing pretty interesting things. We discussed al sort of thing such as work, FOWA, Mac, Linux, Open Source, branding, OpenID, Processing art, improvements in Leopard, cameras and the likes. Plenty of cool stuff and lots more to talk about at our next meeting in Rotterdam in two weeks (Upcoming).
Two weeks after that we might be headed back to Delft, if we can secure a nice venue here, or else we might head out to the Hague. And Jeroen talked about a gathering of internet creatives that he is planning on November 30th.
For up to date information and all relevant links see the Open Coffee page here on Four Starters.
In the Summer we had done a small series of OpenBeer events on Friday afternoons. Now that Winter is approaching we thought we would resume the series in Delft with official OpenCoffee meetings.
The idea for now is to have biweekly meetings on Tuesday mornings at 09:30 somewhere in Delft. The next meeting is October 9th at 09:30 at Bacinol (Wateringsevest 38) at the office of Jeroen Visser.
Join us webprofessionals in the Delft area to have some coffee and discuss business and events.
A small schedule with interesting events during this summer when Four Starters hits the road. Add your own in the comments if you have them.
Guido van Rossum — Python 3000
July 5th Guido will be visiting his old employer CWI in Amsterdam to present the state of Python 3000 and other things. I will be attending.
O’Reilly and friends — Web 2.0 expo
July 10th Brady Forrest and Jen Pahlka will be doing an European tour in July to get a feel for the European Web 2.0 community for the Berlin Expo.
I would like to extend their invitation to meetup to all readers of this blog. It will be nice to show a strong presence of European Web 2.0 activity. Four Starters and Tipit.to will of course be represented.
OpenCoffee — Delft
OpenCoffee Delft is up for a revival in the next couple of weeks. Watch out for an announcement here soon.
Further away (in distance and time):
Barcamp Cologne
August 17-19 there will be a Barcamp in Köln. This is pretty close to the Netherlands and it looks like a cool place to show and tell about cool stuff and meet old friends. I got an invitation from some German guys at Reboot who will be present (Upcoming page).
dConstruct and Barcamp Brighton
September 7-9 dConstruct looks to be an excellent event and with a Barcamp following it, it’s a great combi. I’ll probably drop into London a couple days earlier to visit Cristiano and other friends from Imperial College and maybe grab an OpenCoffee.
It does look like most Barcamps are filling up really fast mostly with local people (e.g. Barcamp Brussels). I discussed it at Reboot and it seemed like a good idea to set apart a small allowance of places for international visitors. People willing to travel should be rewarded for their efforts.
The Next Web is over and it is now time to have a good look at what happened. The conference was quite a lot of fun. For me it started at 7:30 AM when I arrived to help create the bloggers-booth where bloggers had a landlines internet connection. This booth was used by some grateful bloggers to do live write-ups of the speakers. I did all this hard work together with Sjors Timmer who had prepared most of the work. He wrote a very interesting wrietup of what The Next Web is:
“The next web is wireless (not mobile), The Next Web isn’t a web, The Next Web is about being connected, The Next Web is de-central, The Next Web is about love, The Next Web is a social prison, The Next Web will be transparent”
Once this task was done at 8:30 I decided to search for Jeroen and Reinier of TipIt.to because they were given a stand in the hall. All the startups with stands were pushed in a very narrow corner of the Tuschinski Theatre which was very regretful as it was dark, warm, and narrow. They could better have used the main entry where they put Adobe and Level3 (boring!). (more…)
Yesterday we had the second edition of Open Beer Delft. Turnout wasn’t as large as we had hoped, but a good time was had by all.
The event was livecast using the WiFi present and the technology from ustream.tv which we reported about earlier.
Newcomer this time was Crijn Bouman from Epyon. Epyon is a startup company of Yes!Delft who make superfast charging batteries. Their first gizmo which is due out, you plug into the wall and it charges itself in a minute and you can then use it to charge cell phones and other small devices on the road.
They are working on getting the technology into laptops which would be a godsend. Imagine charging your Macbook battery in 1 minute.
Next week the event can go on as usual but I will not be able to make it. I am going to setup a notify mailing list for these meetings. If you want to be added to that, e-mail me or post in the comments here.
Yesterday evening some hours after the actual launch of Wakoopa there was the launch party at their (and Fleck’s) office in PostCS Amsterdam.
Wakoopa
Much has been written about Wakoopa already and the brief is that it is a sort of Last.FM for applications. There is a tracker (just not one for Mac yet) which updates to a website the applications that you use. According to them it will revolutionize the way you use your software.
All that remains to be seen of course, but what can be said is that the execution of the website looks outstanding. As soon as they have a Mac tracker, I will take it for a spin.
The idea seems to have originated with Robert whose friends from gaming would ask him what kind of software to use, which Bittorrent clients etc. etc. To solve these questions once and they deviced a tool that allows you to share and aggregate the software that you use.
I get these same questions and I have made a list of essential software to get friends up and running as quickly as possible on their new Macs.
One issue I have is that popularity should lead to a canon. The Mac has certain applications which are canonical in their domain like Adium and Quicksilver. There is no choice with these applications, they are must haves.
People
Lots of familiar faces at the launch event I met Tijs and James from the Roomware project who are showing their work at the ApacheCon in Amsterdam today. James also has a new site out called Beroepseer.
The guys from Fleck are busy organizing this year’s The Next Web conference which is going to be great. They have a massive amount of international registrations, The Next Web Awards (vote for Tipit.to!) and a startup arena where individual startups will be pitched against each other. The conference is taking a lot of their time but Fleck is due to release a new version soon.
I will be at Reboot then, but Reinier and Cristiano will attend to represent Four Starters there.
Four Starters and Open Beer Delft have an open invitation to attend the Amsterdam Open Coffee meetings which we will have to take them up on.
Yesterday the first Open Beer in Delft took place and it was something of a succes. Turnout may have been low with five people attending but new people were met and interesting conversations took place.
I talked to Redmar Kerkhoff who I already knew from a previous Barcamp Amsterdam and who also studies at DUT. Redmar is all over the place and we talked about graphics programming, intelligent devices, Ruby on Rails and Erlang.
I also got to talk with our other attendee Bart, who has a website (Where was it at again?) and who installed the wireless network at De Plataan.
A lot of people either could not make it today or were otherwise detained but that is not a loss to the format as there is enough interesting stuff to talk about with the people who were there. I didn’t even get to talk to Reinier because he had to leave early.
So let’s see what this grows into with some consistent attention. Next edition is next Friday and will probably start some 15 minutes later.
If you guys have any websites of yourself that you want to plug or have anything to add, put it in the comments.
Just to remind everyone. Late this afternoon, we will have the first version of Open Beer Delft. A networking event for web professionals and independents in the greater Delft area.
Besides the launch of this event, we will use today to formally launch this weblog.
Time and place: 18.00, het Klooster (Vlamingstraat 2)
