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.

Picture of a previous such event:

It is now more than a year ago that I moved to the UK and therefore also a year ago that I started networking in London. One of the first events I ever went to was the OpenCoffee Club meetup that happens every week in a coffee place somewhere in London.

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.

We just had the first incarnation of Open Coffee Delft in Bacinol (announcement) and it was a fun event, just as small scale as the Web 2.0 drinks of last Friday but no less fun. Jeroen Visser and I were joined by Kilian Valkhof and Redmar Kerkhoff. Reinier and Mik Nijhuis unfortunately were not able to make it.

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.

We have an upcoming event and a Google Group you can subscribe to if you want updates on the event.

See you guys October 9th.

Reinier and I went to the International OpenCoffee Meetup in Amsterdam today to start the conference a day early. Although this was my first Dutch OpenCoffee meeting, I did recognize a few people including Saul Klein, Conor O’Neill and Dick Hardt (who doesn’t know him). I met some new faces including some Dutch, French, British and Israeli attendees. Most of them will be present tomorrow at The Next Web conference and some of them will be presenting.

I had a nice talk with Reinier who has been extremely busy with TipIt and therefore had not that much time for Four Starters recently. TipIt has a stand tomorrow at The Next Web conference, and I will be making a short film to at their stand to see how far they have come in the last few months. They wanted to release tomorrow for the conference, but they rather (obviously) do some more beta testing. I am excited!

I just wanted to remind everyone living in The Netherlands, or going to The Next Web conference, that there is an International OpenCoffee Meetup in Amsterdam tomorrow. The meeting is from 4PM to 6PM and conveniently located in the cafe “De Jaren”, just around the corner of the Tuschinski theatre where The Next Web conference is to be held. Although not completely related, I think you can expect many of the conference attendees to be present, and it is therefore a nice moment to start your networking a day early.

Here is a map with all the relevant locations.

Yesterday it was time for another OpenCoffee meetup, and just like last week I really hated the new location. Besides feeling pushed away in a dark corner of the 5th floor of a Waterstones bookstore, I had the urge to push the horrible coffee through the throats of the cafe employers. I am looking if the Starbuck at Leicester Square could host the OpenCoffee in the future as they have a lot of space in the back and obviously they serve some nice coffee.

This week’s meetup was extremely interesting. Besides the usual suspects there were a lot of PRs, lots of people with great ideas looking for developers, and many people who were extremely interesting for me as an educational podcaster. One of these was Dean Whitbread from the UK Podcasters association who do a lot of good work for Podcasters in the UK, raising awareness and defending their rights. I am still doubting to join (£3 a month) but if teachr.tv really starts rolling I think it is a no-brainer.

I had another interesting conversation with Phil from PhilsMathsPage who is doing a simple website to explain basic math principles (nice new link for teachr.tv). I met Phil via Amir Amirani who is a documentary producer/director. I didn’t happen to know his work (shame on me?) but we got talking about some of his ideas, my podcast, and the current state of the web. We will be talking a bit more this weekend, about educational podcasting, development and some of his ideas.

The last link I want to point out for now is GBOB who are launching their 4th World’s Biggest Live Championship of popular music. They don’t offer that much info about where, how, and when the next edition is, but I know that they are planning live coverage of the 24 hour around the world event.

Thursday was another day at OpenCoffee and of course I was there to spot the latest trends. I noticed that I started to recognize more and more faces so I decided to take it easy that day. As a result I spent most of the time talking with people who had nice ideas but no product, and others who had nice products but shitty ideas. I won’t name these people as they weren’t that interesting (however, it might fun to do a worst-of-opencoffee?).

In the end I had a good talk with the ever present David Terrar who pointed me to some guys from Cork (Ireland) who had some nice products and ideas. The guys had come to OpenCoffee London because as organizers of the OpenCoffee in Cork they wanted taste some of the London vibe. Besides being very nice guys they also proved to be very much into the subjects of web-apps, social software, and startups.

Walter Higgins of Sxoop Technologies developed an online photo-editor with the name Pixenate. In contrary to tools like Picnik this tool can actually be licensed/sold to be run on other servers and they offer a very nice API to integrate their product with existing solutions. I’m actually not that much a fan of online editors as I love Photoshop and LightRoom, but I think that integration of tools like these with online web-apps like Flickr would ease the workflow of many consumers.

The workflow that consumers go through now is “transfer from camera to pc - edit - upload” and I think that with the integration of Pixenate this could be turned into “transfer from camera to web - edit - publish” .

I recently heard some rumors of a photoframe with direct upload capabilities for Flickr which would cover the first step in the workflow described above.

Afterwards I had a lunch with Walter and some other Irish guys including Conor O’Neill. Conor runs a very interesting site called LouderVoice. The concept behind LouderVoice is to enable users to make reviews (the main thing we do here) made on their own site/blog/myspace/whatever searchable and rate-able. I really like the concept as they leave the content made by the users at their own sites instead of pushing all these reviews into one pool like Amazon does with books and Kelkoo (rubbish site) does with products. Although it might not be the most “Ajax equipped and Web2.0 looking”-website on reviews I do think that the technique behind it (a special Microformat called hReview) really makes them a very interesting player. I’m thinking of putting the hReview format into some of the past Four Starters reviews soon.

In the end I think it was another successful OpenCoffee, but I do notice more and more that when you ask a startup (like LouderVoice) if they support OpenID that their response tends to be: “We are looking into that”. Isn’t it an easy way for new web-apps to get attention from the highly tech-oriented population by providing OpenID from the start? Most of these startups actually agree with me that OpenID is a very good thing, but still they don’t dare to provide it from the start. I think it is time to start pushing OpenID as the primary login system to new startups.

Yesterday it was time for another OpenCoffee London and of course I went again. It was the first time I actually recognized some people from a previous meeting and I took some more time to actually talk with some interesting people this time.

I started out talking with a nice guy who was planning to start a kind of wired magazine for green startups. It really sounded interesting but there was no businesscard and therefore no plug on this blog. From green technology to gardening is a small step and therefore I was suprised to meet the guys behind GrowsOnYou.com a social gardening website. I loved their enthousiasm, green moo-cards, and plans to expand to video. Their site is sadly enough only in English but my mother loved the page anyway which means alot to me because she normally only reads Dutch or Italian sites.

From green moo-cards to meeting the founder of Moo.com is a story best told on David’s site. Richard Moross (founder of Moo) is a very funny guy and we tried to understand how they came up with Moo and what they were planning. The most stunning fact was that their “best value investments was £10,000 spent with an agency to get the design of the process into four slick steps” which sets them apart from guys like Vistaprint. I exchanged a lot of Moo cards lately and I’m still amazed how positively people react to them.

The rest of the meeting went a bit slow, talking about technology with guys like Sam Sethi, Simon Grice (etribes) and Amanda Lorenzani. Amanda and David both invited me to the Geek Dinner later on that day and so I spent my whole day in suit. I was clearly overdressed for the Geek Dinner but it was nice meeting guys like Ian Forrester and Tom Morris again. The talk by Mike Culver from Amazon reminded me a lot of the talk at the Girl Geek Dinner I went to a while back so I didn’t pay much attention. Next time I hope to be able to show my own mashup, because announcing that you have a product is just so much cooler than “I am a student”.