OpenCoffee - An excellent blend Friday, March 02, 2007
I spent this morning at the inaugural OpenCoffee event which Saul Klein had organised. Designed to be an opportunity for "money" to meet "talent", over 100 people turned up, albeit not many of those were fellow investors.
The Starbucks venue is located inside the Esprit store on Regent St., which doesn't open until 10am, which was the start time for OpenCoffee. The staff clearly had a big shock therefore to see a large crowd gathering outside the store before it opened and an even bigger one to see them all wander directly past them upstairs to Starbucks. I reckon the security guards thought they had a flash mob on their hands!
Whilst there were a few familiar faces, the event attracted many faces I'd not seen before despite my regular attendance at many of the London web scene events. I listened to some great ideas/ventures and shall certainly be following up on several of these. Obviously not all of the businesses I spoke to suited our interests, but as I've reported before the "funding" dating game is about right price and right investor.
The event is scheduled to be held every Thursday at 10am-12pm, albeit when I left at 1pm it was still going strong. I hope that there will be sufficient interest to maintain this frequency as it would be a great shame if the event petered out from insufficient churn of new faces and too few attendees.
My tips for entrepreneurs thinking of attending are
- don't plan to do demos. For a start, there's no free wifi in this Starbucks, but more importantly this is about making initial contact with the "money".
- be prepared to give a short explanation of what you do and what you are looking for
- find out what the investor is looking for - they may not invest in your space or have min investment thresholds that may rule you out.
- acknowledge that other entrepreneurs have come along to speak to investors too, so if there's interest on both sides after say 5 minutes, then get agreement to a follow up and then move onto the other investors. If they aren't interested, it's not necessarily because your idea is lousy or they are "thick" and don't get it. It may be because your venture doesn't fit their investment profile - most times, they will explain this.
- regularly check that the investor understands what you are describing as you are talking
- have a good supply of business cards with you - lots of people ran out today!
- be approachable and initiate conversations with people hovering nearby as well as encouraging people to join your group/discussion
- circulate; it's why you are there and so is everyone else
- you are not in competition for investor money; if the venture is good enough and the price is right you should get funding regardless.
Details of OpenCoffee "members" and future events can be found here.
More coverage of OpenCoffee can be found here at Vecosys and here at the Guardian.
Labels: event, london, opencoffee, VC, VC startup
posted by John Wilson @ 12:31 AM Permanent Link
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BusyTonight? Friday, February 09, 2007
I've mentioned that I use upcoming.org as well as meetup.com to keep an eye on what various chums are planning on getting up to in future as a prompt/tipoff so that I too can wander along to interesting/fun events. Of course, the trouble with this is having to rely upon them to be socially conscious/responsible enough to post their future plans for "my benefit".
BusyTonight is a service that is trying to overcome this problem as well as trying to deal with the fact that the market for event listings is hopelessly fragmented
Presently only operating in the US, it is a search engine for events. It is algorithmically driven via a Web crawl. The index of event listings is generated "automatically" - the software aims to identify pages with events and extract the event listings accurately.
Hence it seeks to eliminate the need for good natured folks to post their plans to a service and the same service! As such Busytonight is not dependent on having a critical mass of motivated users to type in event data - the content only needs to published on the Web.
They claim to be closing in on one million unique, future events with plans to expand to the rest of the English speaking world in Q1 of next year, and begin including non-English content in Q2.
They intend to generate revenues from a combination of pay-per click advertising and commissions on ticket sales. There's also the potential to sell the harvested data to a variety of other sites that offer tangential businesses.
Only founded in April 2005, there are only five people working full-time on BusyTonight including Joshua C Lerner (CEO), Richard Mintz (COO) and Matt Kangas (CTO).
Clearly there are a number of challenges here
- These are not recommendations from friends that you trust or can meet up with at the events. So the quality of the events is uncertain.
- Depending on how successfully the crawler works, you could easily end up with misclassifications of place, date or content that means you miss things or waste time looking at irrelevant stuff on listings it suggests.
- The sheer volume of stuff it finds will take some wading through. Upcoming lists for London are big enough. Whilst I could filter/search for specific events or topics, that overlooks the serendipitous events you stumble across which look interesting
- Timeliness of the crawling. If events can be posted on any site and at any time, will the spiders pass by sufficiently frequently to spot last minute entries on sites? Whilst other automated crawlers have the same issue, a human posting to a service overcomes this (of course, this can be one of the sites busytonight crawls over).
- Accuracy of tags could be frustrating. I tried to search for "comedy" in San francisco as a test. The results were odd as you can see from the image below, which included CityFlight - Black and African American History …
I very much like the concept though, representing a very useful vertical search - most of us go out and not just to eat/drink.
For future enhancements it would be great if they could add to it
- services like google's alert provides to notify me via email/rss that something matching my criteria has appeared.
- the ability for people to "ping" the service to notify it of events announcements, rather than await the crawlers
- the ability to "tag" their site as an event site in order that the crawlers visit more often
Labels: busytonight, event, meetup, Upcoming
posted by John Wilson @ 11:38 PM Permanent Link
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Another excellent Second Chance Tuesday event Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Last night Glasshouse events ran another of their London networking events and once again it was excellent. Held at the Commonwealth Club, which was a much improved venue on last time, there was a good mix of people that had been selected from the applicant list.
Whilst some of the faces were familiar including Danny Bull of MyNeighbourhoods; Shivaun Farr of Foundem; Kieran O'Neill of Everwire; Tim Barker of Koral, many were new to me (company list here). This highlights the broader appeal of the event than some, albeit all of the entrepreneurs I spoke with were web/IT businesses of some description. Interestingly, many were unfamiliar with the other regular events in and around London. In case you are curious which events I am referring to check out my upcoming.org profile here.
I understand that there is a Second Chance Tuesday in New York next week - based on the London showing I'd happily recommend that New Yorkers should head along.
Labels: "second chance tuesday", event, SCT
posted by John Wilson @ 8:53 AM Permanent Link
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