More new faces at OCC last Friday in Webworks
Another thoroughly enjoyable Cork OpenCoffee happened on Friday in Webworks with 20+ in attendance. A big thank you again to Kay Wright for facilitating this, sponsoring the refreshments and making us so welcome. And tip o the hat to Pat Phelan for co-ordinating it with Webworks and providing the projector.
We have a bunch of Qik videos of the morning. These include the round table quick introductions and the bulk of Phoebe Bright’s session on future energy scenarios. Phoebe’s talk was very well received and focused on demand instead of supply. Since this is something we can all practically engage with, she had lots of questions and feedback.
Welcome to all the new faces including Roland Steinmetz from Shared Visions, Michael Kane from YouGetItBack, David McCarthy from HTC, Ciarán Rooney from Weeno and Alexander Skeaping who is involved in the piano and harpsichord business! Aileen Cussen from Enterprise Ireland also attended. There was a distinct “mobile tech” feel to the meetup between Cubic, HTC, Lukulu, YouGetItBack and the 3 Nokia N95-8GBs and two different HTC devices on view.
I’ll do separate posts on the upcoming meetups but in summary they are:
- Feb 22nd – Rubicon Center in CIT. Demo by Shared Visions
- March 7th – CIX in Hollyhill. Demo of CIX by Tom Raftery
Pat suggested in his blog post about last Friday that we should have some elevator pitches at each session. Basically a longer version of the intros that we currently do. I think it’s a great idea. How about 120 secs each for 2 or 3 people each week?
Recap from last Friday’s OpenCoffee
I think the 2008 kick-off went particularly well on Friday with the addition of a small bit pf structure helping things immensely. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here is a quick recap and links to some videos.
- We held it in the boardroom of the Rubicon Centre to get access to a projector
- John and Gordon from eWrite Essentials sponsored the Mr Cotton Coffee
- After some general stand-around chats, we had a very interesting round table about
- Cork OpenCoffee itself
- how it can be more effective
- ideas for making sure people didn’t just huddle with friends,
- Rotating locations
- Rotating days of the week
- Publishing the full set of dates and locations for the year
- Gordon’s document sharing initiative
- General helping/sharing ideas
- the structure of the meetups -best balance between free form networking and highly organised
- After an introduction from John on what they hoped to gain from presenting eWrite Forms, Gordon then presented the product and the ideas around the business
- There was immediate interest from the group and a long Q&A session ensued with tons of ideas put forward, directions discussed and a general brainstorm
- David Reilly then gave some great thoughts on the sharing of documents and other issues around start-ups generally. This caused lots more feedback and what was particularly interesting about this was that the focus was business and not legal nitty gritty.
- This lead into further discussions on Patent pros/cons and generally protecting your business. We ran well over the usual midday end and I learned about at least two new applications under development which I think will get a lot of attention.
I felt it was the most successful and productive Cork OCC yet. I understand the concerns expressed by some that it doesn’t turn into a highly structured pitch-shop and I think we can successfully mix the informal with the formal to suit most people.
I did some videos of Gordon’s presentation and Q&A using my phone. You’ll find them here but the sound quality isn’t great.
Rather than me writing a massive essay about the morning, it’d be great to get the thoughts and feedback of the participants in the comments here.
As always, if you want to write your own post here on any topic you think is relevant to the group, I’ll send you an editor login. Also, if you want to demo a product or idea to get feedback from the group, feel free to contact me.
Coffee and Scone Sponsorship
The turnout for yesterday’s OCC was smaller than usual as expected due to the Bank Holiday Weekend. However we did have some superb conversations mainly focused on mobile, mobile services, SMS, Jaiku, Swarmteams and Location Based Services. A very interested side-chat occurred on To-Do list applications and how weak many of them are. Our current tool in LouderVoice (Remember The Milk) is good particularly due to Google integration but still frustrates.
I’m delighted to announce that the Rubicon Centre will be sponsoring the coffee at OCC from now on. A big thank you to Paul Healy for making this happen. A big thank-you also to Mr Cotton who has been providing the high quality product at each session.
However, we do have to take care of scones/nibbles ourselves so I would ask you to email me at corkopencoffee AT gmail DOT com if you are willing to be part of a round-robin system for paying and getting these for each session.
As always, thoughts and suggestions to the email address or as comments here.
First OCC in Rubicon Centre was A+
A while back Diarmuid Wrenne of Lukulu made the great suggestion that we hold Cork OCC in the Rubicon out in CIT. We had the first of two trial meet-ups on Friday and I think it was a roaring success. It looked to me that more than twenty people came and went in the two hours. We had regulars, Rubicon incubator companies and new attendees too which was particularly gratifying.
Paul Healy who runs the two Rubicon Centres (a new one with hot-desking facilities opened on Model Farm road recently) made sure to get the word out and co-ordinated on coffee etc. The event couldn’t have happened without him, thanks Paul! We did a quick round-the-room who-am-I which was a big help and the conversation roamed from Seed Capital Scheme to Nokia N770s to SeedCamp to guerrilla coffee marketing.
I was delighted that Joe Burke from South Cork County Enterprise Board turned up. I am convinced that there is a strong match between small Web companies and the target clientbase of the CEBs. Joe is keeping a close eye on SCS and BES developments so hopefully we’ll have more news there in two weeks time.
Another major improvement was the attendance of Phoebe and Sinéad. Apart from the first OCC and possibly one other, the meets have been 100% male until now. I hope they become regulars and encourage more women to attend.
A special word of thanks goes to Declan Nestor from Mr Cotton Coffee who sponsored the morning. I had thought that Declan was just an individual taking care of getting decent coffee on the day but it turns out [a] he’s in the coffee business [b] he is on the Genesis Enterprise Programme in the Rubicon and [c] he has some brilliant ideas for leveraging technology to help him sell even more coffee. If you do see any of his coffee vans in action around the city, make sure to buy a cup, it really is top class. Thanks also to Lukulu for sponsoring the scones.
This really had injected new energy into Cork OCC and I’m looking forward to the next one hugely.
If you have any suggestions for this new blog, do send them on either in the comments or using any of the methods listed here. If you would like to write posts here related to OCC, entrepreneurship and issues concerning small business, I’m more than happy to provide a login.
