Will Knott

If you sit down for a group meal at 5pm, is it a lunch or a dinner? Some insist that it’s not a dinner until 6pm.

But no matter. If you sit down with good company and good food, then it’s a good time.

Our master of ceremonies, in theory, Joe Scanlon lead the meal. The story is that Joe left the Cork Open Coffee Club for a few moments and on his return discovered that he was the one organising the meal.

He did a good job.

He selected the (surprisingly dark) Market Lane on Oliver Plunkett Street. Good food, and in the company of (deep breath, in seating order) John Handelaar, Ciara Crossan, Walter Higgins, Joe Scanlon, Randy Jordan, Margaret Jordan, Catherine Wilson, Marion O’Sullivan, Matt Kane, Michael Kane, Aedan Ryan, Pat Phelan, Damien Mulley, Enda Crowley, Gordon Murray, Sabrina Dent and myself, a good time was had by all.

And given that there was an outbreak of santa hats, Walter, thanks to this Pixenate, or rather Twixenate project to add Santa hats and snowflakes to Twitter avatars efforts. This last shot is for him. (I think he took the joke well).

and finally, I am apparently a jammy git. There was a little raffle. Sponsored by Dell and Puddleducks. I won a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook. There will be unboxing photos (and probably a Loudervoice) review once I get it.

So a very happy thank you,
Will Knott

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fun Cork Mash Ups
• Bloggers Dinner in Cork.

One of the little things that happen at the Cork Open Coffee are the demos. On April 27 the attendees got a pre-release demo of Pat Phelan’s new project … Twitterfone.com

Image by netzkobold via Flickr

The idea is rather simple. Ring a local telephone number (currently US, UK and Ireland) and leave a 15 second voice message. Be careful what you say (or cough as Michael Arrington discovered), and your message is converted to text in a tweet on your twitter account. In addition a recording is also available (via a tinyurl), which is handy if your message doesn’t fit in to 140 characters of less. Yes we talk that fast in Ireland.

Its a useful service, especially if you are in a crisis situation and can’t talk for long.

I’ll be honest when I say that I’m dying to try it out, but given the sudden tidal wave of registrations it might be a little while.

And Twitterfone’s look is a Sabrina Dent creation.

take care,
tweet safely,
Will Knott

The video conference between the three Open Coffee sessions went sort of well. There were a lot of sound problems. Which makes sense. If you have a crowd, you have speakers. To talk, you need microphones. However a microphone picking up the output of a speaker causes a problem. At best, echoes. At worst feedback. And the session was dogged with echoes. After the main session, those of us that remained in the session had a nice discussion about the ASUS EeePc and installing a touch screen on it. John assured that he would blog every step, I’ll link to it when I get the details.

Image by geognerd via Flickr

Still getting the video to work was something of a surprise for me. You see I upgraded to Adobe Flash 9 (latest version). I’m on Firefox 2 (latest version) for Windows XP. And they don’t like each other. Things work well for a while, but fairly quickly flash video just stops working. I suspect that one is tearing a memory leak out of the other, but I can’t tell which. I do know that I’m not the only one seeing this problem. This might explain why it’s being opened up.

All I know is that it takes a reboot (and an upgrade of Real Player for some reason) to get videos on YouTube, reviews by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw and (flash) embedded audio files to play. So I’m throwing in the music videos I’ve come across (I miss the days when I could say stumbled upon and not have people assume I’m talking about a certain site).

First up is the slightly surreal (in a Coca-Cola advert sense) music video (which has embedding disabled) for “Love Song” by Sara Bareilles.

And the completely loopy (in an old folks community visit to Silent Hill way) video for “I’m Good, I’m Gone” by Lykke Li.

take care,
Will Knott

At 11am on May 1st three cities are going to be linked in Open Coffee and inspiration.

OpenCoffee Club was started in London to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meet-ups to chat, network and grow. The Cork Open Coffee meetings tend to take place every second Friday, in Dublin, Limerick and Waterford, their meetings tend towards a Thursday. And not only are their three sessions taking place at the same time tomorrow, but they are going to be linked. And New York is joining in too.

And you can join in too.

The three OpenCoffee sessions are going to be broadcast online thanks to Joe Garde of OnlineMeetingRooms and Bernie Goldbach of Tipperary Institute (Update : And Mary Rose Lyons who is looking after the broadcast from the Dublin end). Also thanks to Chuck Boyce of ChuckTV on Blip.tv finding out about the meet on Twitter (thus proving a business use if ever one was needed) means that the Irish OpenCoffee sessions are going to be part of the wider technology community.

Attendees should have a “Twitter style introduction prepared” (or a killer 90 second pitch ready) and join in. The details for joining the online sessions are on Mary Rose Lyons of Brightspark Consulting’s site. But if you are able to attend the sessions in person, it will probably be worth it.

And be prepared for a little Twitterstorm (and probably a Jaikugale) tomorrow morning.

take care,
Will

I’ve been away for a little while and I’ve seen a few things.

First off, I’ll join in the chorus of congratulations to Conn Ó Muíneacháin for his Intruders TV Ireland going live. The interview in Cork was filmed just after the Cork Open Coffee that was streamed on August 17. There might be a few more to follow…

As for the post title… partially to attract attention and I found this song and video today (finally cleared out my e-mail and discovered a few gems). And for something almost insulting, David Ford makes it sound so sweet. A little Damien Rice-ish, but less sulky. The video is also an example of a cheap video done very well.

tags : Edgecast Media, Conn Ó Muíneacháin, Intruders TV, Intruders TV Ireland, Cork, Cork Open Coffee, David Ford