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.
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).
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.
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.
I first heard about the Collison brothers (John and Partick) and their company Auctomatic when the pair arrived at Open Coffee Limerick and talked about the company, the move to the US and how they couldn’t get investment in Ireland, but could in Silicon Valley. I think the visit led to the Paddy’s Valley trip. Source: Phil KastThe podcast audio and video is still available. What I heard was, the messages on Jaiku about what these teenagers were doing. Yesterday, and via Mulley on Twitter I heard that the brothers were now millionaires (on paper anyway).
Auctomatic is software to help sellers catalogue and manage their stock on on-line auction houses ad e-commerce sites. The stories of how the sellers were doing stock control beforehand is funny, tragic and on the podcast. Anyway, the press releases were released that the news is that Auctomatic is partnering with Live Current Media. So congratulations to Patrick Collison, John Collison, Kulveer Taggar, Harjeet Taggar, Phil Kast and Brian Collins.
Image by geognerd via Flickr
