Fresh coffee & opportunities

Well 2010 kicked off in the UK with snow, ice, sub-zero temperatures and general chaos as public services ground to a halt.

But not Open Coffee and the entrepreneurs of Bristol.

Fortified by the best coffee that the Boston Tea Party on Park Street has to offer we gathered on their first floor to catch up after the break and discuss the future. By the end Steve Cayzer (HP Labs, LinkedIn), Rupert Russell (Carmen Data, LinkedIn), Helen Davies (For Effect, website), Sam Machin (Orange, personal website), Nigel Legg (Katugas Social Media, website) and Andy (who surname I’ve unforgivable forgotten, sorry).

Conversation covered the various tax implications of company car ownership, developing new brand images for the new year (and the difficulty finding a good printers these days), online marketing for small tourism companies and the challenge of getting good geo-location data, and that was just at my end of the tables!

The general opinion was that while the weather and economic climate might be a bit inclement (or just down right awful) there was business to be done and opportunities to be exploited. Business cards were swapped and a couple of new collaborations initiated.

So the New Year is off to a great start and looks to get better.

Look forward to seeing you at the next Open Coffee Bristol on Tues, 26 Jan from 8.30am in The Boston Teaparty on Park St.

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January 12, 2010 | Filed Under opencoffee | 2 Comments 

Open Coffee Bristol updates

It’s been a few weeks since the last fortnightly reminder email and quite a few developments have taken place.

We’re settling in well at the Boston Tea Party on Park St as our new ‘home’. We’re also trying out some ideas to keep Open Coffee Bristol vibrant and of value to local smaller & growth companies. Helping me in this are Nigel Legg and Stephen Maudsley.

The most tangible development the Skilswap sub-group on the LinkedIn OpenCoffee Bristol group. The concept is to provide a safe environment in which to seek advice and support. You can post needs, and a suggestions on your area of expertise, and then other OpenCoffee members can offer to help in return for some advice / support from you; in this way skills are swapped.

We’re also revisiting the idea of having invited speakers / presenters to talk about specific innovations that they’re working on or things that might of interest to the broad Open Coffee membership (129 on LinkedIn, visitors to this website, etc).

However, the consistant feedback from the surveys that I’ve run, is that people quite like the slightly informal format & engineered serendipity so we’ll try not to lose that in any future changes.

I look forward to seeing you again on Tues, 20 October from about 8.30 am in The Boston Tea Party on Park St and fortnightly from then.

October 14, 2009 | Filed Under opencoffee | Comments Off 

Help shape the future of Open Coffee Bristol

The next morning is scheduled to be 8 Sept (we’ll be in The Boston Tea Party on Park St as usual).

I’ve been thinking about how to keep developing / tweaking / improving Open Coffee and discussed the idea of speakers to a few people . However I’m not sure if there should be occasional speakers on a specific topic, or more of a rolling programme of themes to which we invite ’specialists’?

To help sort this out, please fill in this short survey (3 questions).

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=zkAnhZuUFbShQ4CEvnGAVA_3d_3d

Many thanks,

John

September 1, 2009 | Filed Under opencoffee | Comments Off 

Open Coffee summer networking

With the weather seeming to reflect the economic uncertainty, entrepreneurs around Bristol still welcome the relative serenity of The Boston Tea Party’s coffee garden (at least when the sun’s shining).

The storm in the social media teacup was the purchase of Friendfeed by Facebook, however, the discussions last Tues were more around the balance between strategic planning and tactical agility for a start-up.

The perennial topic of funding & finance followed the recent (highly unscientific) poll from Businesszone.co.uk indicated that many businesses aren’t even aware of the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (and those that are don’t seem to be having much luck with it); meanwhile the Regional Development Agency is seeing a return of business confidence in the South West (Economic Review pdf).

Plenty to discuss next Tuesday, 25 Aug from 8.30am in the Boston Tea Party on Park St (the garden if it’s sunny, first floor if is isn’t).

August 20, 2009 | Filed Under opencoffee | Comments Off 

Developing a home-brew Open Source ERP

5150fantast, 17 November 2006

5150fantast, 17 November 2006

A really good start to the day yesterday with the third in our company demo series. Kindly hosted by the eOffice on Wine St, people started turning up from 8.15 which caught even me out!

A whole bunch of new folk came along which is great to see, building the entrepreneurial ecosystem is what Open Coffee is all about. Apologies to everyone I didn’t get to say more than a quick hello to I know there’s a great cross-over taking place between Open Coffee and the BEN group on LinkedIn which is fantastic to see – please leave a comment about you and your company if you’d like to.

Lots of new relationships and discussions taking place & it was a shame to break things up a bit to introduce the presentation / discussion topic.

We had a couple presenter’s drop out but that gave Martyn Shiner from Severn Delta a chance to really go through their software development journey. Having engineered a Management BuyOut, Martyn and Clive Birnie (the MD and Positive Churn blog, full story here) were faced with a legacy planning system that was based on Sage. While a good accounting package, it didn’t do what they wanted and since Martyn’s a self-confessed open-source fan the journey for a replacement went firmly down that route.

There wasn’t anything available that did what they wanted, as a small manufacturing business they have more complexity than you can manage on spreadsheets, but not sufficient resource for a full-blown Enterprise Resource Planning system that can cost from £75k upwards. That was just over a year ago, they now have a fully functioning ERP system that they’ve developed themselves. The original Customer Relationship Management project they began working with is developed by a separate company as Tactile-CRM and they’ve now forked the code-base so that the ERP & CRM software projects are individual products (though obviously very complementary as they still share the open-source code base).

Leaving aside the more technical parts of Martyn’s talk, it was great to see their future road map. I say road map, Martyn’s description of SCRUM was to lean over the desk to his in-house developer and say “Dave, wouldn’t it be great if …” or Clive would ask Martyn “Do you think it could do…” and off they’d go!

We touched on hosted instances on Amazon, Android apps on the new HTC Magic, various business models around open source and what sort of businesses would use the system. Through a link with the South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (SW-MAS) they already have their first customer, sort of. Another manufacturing company into motorbike gear sprockets is now using the MRP system, Martyn estimated 1 day from starting with a blank PC, installing Ubuntu, extra bits, the MRP system, configuring, and being ready to receive orders through Web-EDI and raise the first invoice.

Not bad for some home-brew software from an accountant in a textile printing company!

Following Martyn, Martin Coulthard introduced himself and what he’s doing with the Bristol Enterprise Network. Having launched, built an sold a couple of businesses, Martin is taking up the reins on BEN. There have been quite a few changes with BEN recently and the next year promises to be an exciting one with much more focus on enterprise and entrepreneur support & connecting plus the exploration of services to try and make it a self sustaining (and funding) network.

A large part of this is moving the ‘home’ of the network from the Research, Enterprise & Development team within Bristol University to the Science City Bristol as a core delivery for the Bristol & Bath city regions. [Disclosure: From today, 1 July, I am the Manager of Science City Bristol as my part-time 'day job' so it's great to have Martin joining right now.]

Everyone was really keen to continue the networking so we ajourned at that point for more coffee and informal discussions.

Around that time, Sam and the Chinwag folks popped in. They’d been holding their Bristol leg of the Digital Mission tour the day before and had a few more flyers but also some great opportunities for digital companies to go to the US with substantial help from UKTI. All in favour of that! :)

So thanks to everyone for supporting, asking questions and contributing.

We’re back at The Boston Tea Party, Park St [map] on Tues, 14 July from 8.30 for our regular networking, look forward to seeing you all there, then. The next company demo will be around Sept/Oct, I’m just nailing down a date/venue confirmation.

July 1, 2009 | Filed Under opencoffee | 2 Comments 

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