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Recap from last Friday's OpenCoffee

Publish date: Jan 16, 2008

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.