I hadn’t been at the OpenCoffee meetup here in London since probably June or July, as at a certain moment you know everyone. As I wasn’t looking for an investment, or to invest, or to work for some of the companies, explaining why I was there was starting to get harder by the day.
A few weeks ago though, some people wondered if I was coming to the OpenCoffee, and so I decided to give it a try again. It was a refreshing encounter as the crowd seems to have changed a lot. The venue is still the horrible 5th floor cafe in the Picadilly Waterstones, and the size of the crowd has slightly diminished, but still there seemed to be a strong vibe of the entrepreneurial spirit.
I talked to the guys from Veedow a few days before the OpenCoffee already. Their product is a social shopping portal that I haven’t really played with yet. I have always been a bit skeptical about products which sound too much like other products I know, but these guys actually seem to have a real business model and the funds to work it out.
Lastly I talked to Pete Smith of SongKick who contacted me because I talked to his colleague about half a year ago. their product is now a real product and up there for all of you to try out. The idea? “Track concerts and song dates of you favorite bands”. The business model? A bit unclear at the moment but probably affiliate deals and such.
Last weekend I went to the first PlugLondon at the Skype headquarters here in London. It was a lot of fun, although I didn’t really participate as I had a really bad headache that day. The idea of PlugLondon is much like a MiniBar (which is boring and nothing like a BarCamp) but more oriented on developers and geeks sharing their APIs, projects, and other brilliant ideas. I liked this much better than a MiniBar as even though Skype and eBay had a talk about their API it was still not a sales pitch. Even Ian Forrester (BBC Backstage) gave a little talk on how to use your WiiMote on Linux, and what else kept him busy.
The food (pizza and coke) was great and the presentations were of high quality, making it a nice event for a Saturday. I think next time I would like to see this happen on a Friday or such, as in the weekend all London public transport seems to be rubbish. Not to mention the amount of slow moving tourists in the subway! Below are the photos and go here for the winning logo design.
As it will take a moment for Melinda, Reinier, Martijn, and Sjors to get to writing recaps of their talks, it might be interesting to notify you of some of the other people that have already written interesting stuff about BarcampLondon3.
LondonBubble - The whole LondonBubble idea was based on the BerlinBlase idea that a few guys had during BarcampBerlin. They then acted as a group to do a live coverage of the Berlin event, and so now the same Germans including a few London locals decided to do the same here. I didn’t get to adding much to the blog or twitter feed, but I did cause for some inspirations.
Tom Morris’ Videos - I think Tom was actually planning to do live streaming, but he never came to do it. He did put some stuff online eventually which can be found on his Blip.TV profile.
Adam Cohen-Rose’s Blog - Adam wrote a lot about BarCampLondon3 and I think he did it while attending the talks. As a result it is not that much like an actual blog and more like quick note taking sessions of every talk. Still, handy as a reference.
Kerry Buckley - Kerry did something similar as Adam, but a bit less note-like and therefore more readable.
I didn’t take that many photos this weekend at BarcampLondon3. Somehow photographing the same geeks over and over again becomes annoying (and they get annoyed with you). I did have fun though by actually listening to people. Hope you enjoy the photos and maybe find yourself in some.
Last weekend it was time for the third Barcamp here in London, a.k.a. BarcampLondon3. The location was the beautiful Google Office in London and the organization was brilliant (thank you Ian!). Besides all the nice food, the games of Werewolf, and riding the Google Segway, we also had some moments to present our talks. I actually knew what to present before I went, which made it easier to follow some of the other talks going on without the need to build on my own presentation.
At BarcampBerlin2 I had spoken about Yahoo Pipes and noticed that not too many people knew about Yahoo Pipes at all. Many people that had missed my talk there happened to be attending the Barcamp in London and so I decided to hold the same talk, but presenting it is as more of a walk-through/hints-and-tips session. It turned out to become quite an interesting session, with people ranging from newbies on the topic to people like Ian Forrester that I had a discussion with on the practical uses of Pipes and what was needed to make it realy handy as a tool for commercial developers.
I don’t have slides except for these here which I used at Barcamp Berlin, but lucky for you Tom Morris has recorded my talk on video. The quality is not brilliant and sadly you can’t see what is on the screen, but if you use my previous post on Yahoo Pipes and the slideshow as a reference I think it can be interesting to watch.
So, as you might have noticed I build my own little copy of a Lifestream, much like Jeremy Keith (Adactio) did on his website. Although it is fun to build a lifestream, it isn’t the simplest thing to do, so I took a different approach to use mine and build one using Yahoo Pipes.
The cool thing of using Yahoo Pipes is that my Lifestream is all Javascript+HTML and no server side logic (a.k.a. PHP). I gave a little talk during BarcampBerlin2 explaining what I did, but in the next few paragraphs I will hopefully explain with a bit more detail how it was exactly done, and also focus on some quirks of Yahoo Pipes that I had to work around.
It has been a while since my last post on Essential Mediatech but the guys of IntrudersTV were cool enough to record the entire keynote by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and I guess it took them a while to process. They finally released the video and I thought you might all find it interesting enough to watch.
I talked about OpenAd.net yesterday but it might be a better idea to have Katarina Skoberne of OpenAd.net do the talking for her company and let her explain the idea. Video created by Intruders.tv.
It is time for the last showcase at Essential Mediatech today. The last few panels were boring, and I am starving (didn’t have breakfast this morning) so I am actually planning to leave after this showcase. If this review sounds a bit grumpy, then go ahead and blame my growling stomach. The presenting companies were:
K2 Network - service provider and online community for massively-multiplayer games Telcogames - global publisher, developer and distributor of mobile games Weblin (Zweitgeist GmbH) - developer of avatar software for internet browsing WooMe - online speed dating platform
Honestly, I have no idea what the first company did. I must have watched it but it simply slipped my mind. The second company was a big platform provider for a telco to host, distribute and promote mobile games. I never play mobile games except for the little tennis application that game on my Sony Ericsson K610, but if I really wanted to play something I’d grab my Mac, a PSP, or Melinda’s Nintendo DS. In other words: glad they all make money but seriously not the interesting things to blog about.
The last two companies were about stupid animated browser puppets and online dating. I am not the one to install an app to have a whole bunch of Weblin animated puppets walking around in my browser, showing me what other people are visiting the site that I am visiting. Besides it being intrusive and annoying and a possible security leak, it doesn’t even work on a Mac!
WooMe is a kind of online speed dating, which a) doesn’t interest me as I already have a girlfriend and b) I am a GEEK so inherintly not that interested nor motivated to put myself in the line of fire like that.
All and all it was fun today but a bit weak in companies presenting. I actually miss the “expo” part of a conference like this, but I will do a bot of a better write-up later on.
So, we just had the 3rd showcase of companies here at Essential Mediatech and honestly most of them were (again) boring. The only one of the list below I really, really enjoyed was OpenAd, and weird enough this was the only company up until now that I really enjoyed listening to.
IGA Worldwide - in-game advertising company with proprietary ad-serving network OpenAd - online marketplace for buying and selling advertising, marketing and design ideas Trutap - developer of a social media application for mobile phones Xtract - social network analytics and mobile marketing
OpenAd is a seriously good idea (unlike Trutap which is like an unfocused big mashup of online mobile services pushed into one chaotic looking java app) even though it is about advertising. Their idea is to crowdsource the advertisement industry, making it possible for any company to use their thousands of creatives to create a new advertisement campaign. The cool thing is that you actually don’t pay for the process (which is the old model) but just for the end product you agree to license. In other words: you only pay for things you will like to use and are happy with. Their previous customers include quite a few big companies so I am looking forward to the future of this business model and the effect it will have on the quality of advertisements.
