Bang the Drum

A somewhat quieter Watershed greeted us for Bristol OpenCoffee III, at least there were no lawyers this time around. As is now tradition John arrived first shortly followed by Mark and Tom. We were pleased to welcome Clive Birnie and Martyn Shiner who run Severn Delta Limited, a specialist textile company. Martyn is a real Open source evangelist and talked enthusiastically about his current project that he is working on. I am looking forward to the demo at the next meeting! Incidentally Clive’s blog is well worth a read, well written and informative.

More by luck than judgement the Bristol Enterprise network were hosting an entrepreneurs question time. So we gatecrashed, some to listen/ask questions others like me for some free food and drink!!! I did not stay for the question time and spent some time with Clive, Martyn and Gary Wilson who is the infrastructure manager for Coull Ltd. Coull provide a Interactive video distribution system for content providers. I hope to find out more about the technology behind this at future gatherings. Our conversation centred around Open Source, SAP and its associated costs to small and medium sized businesses, the point of Twitter and Clive was showing a real interest in my shiny new Nokia N95 handset!!

I then spent some time chatting over a couple of ideas that I have around the mobile sector with Mark and Gary. Hopefully I can get these off the ground over the coming few months.

Later in the evening we had yet two more new attendees, Kieran O’Neil and Oliver Holt who came over from Bath. We spent some time chatting over a number of different ideas that they have, all of which was very interesting. There seems to be a real pool of talented individuals in the Bristol area and I hope that Opencoffee will help bring that talent together.

Unfortunately we did not manage to have the Curry afterwards, but I promise it will feature at the next gathering!!

All in all it was a great evening and I was pleased to see more people attending and supporting the event.

Details of the next gathering will be posted in due course. Thanks Simon

Clive, Martyn and Gary