Bangalore Open Coffee Club debuts with 50 plus !!!!

India is truly revolutionizing and so are the guys in the Silicon Valley of India.Two of the major advantages of the Unconferences are "Knowledge Sharing" and "Networking".How does it feel to learn & network,every 2 weeks? Lot's of learning and this is where I would like to start my article on "The first meetup of the Open Coffee Club,Bangalore" which was held at BrewHaha on 19th August,2007(11:00 AM).Let's do a quick recap of the meet in a Q&A style:

What is Open Coffee Club (OCC) ?
The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.This is the online complement to that offline network. Meet people, find out what's going on nearby you and then go and take part. More about OCC here

What exactly happened at the event?
Since, this was the opening chapter of OCC, the expectation was around 20+ people but thanks to the power of "Word of Mouth marketing (WOM)" and "Blogging" , the turnout was surprising and was close to around 50+ The event started exactly on time at 11:00 AM and than started a brief round of introduction, which lasted for around an hour.Being the first meet, it was quite expected that there would be a mismatch in the expectations and hence, it was very important to decide the agenda for the next meet.There were a couple of suggestions:

1. What strategies startups should follow to compete with some of the big guns in the IT industry?
2. Apart from an excellent idea, there should be a market feasibility(and scalability) and hence,How do we bridge the gap between Technology and Marketing?
3. How does an entrepreneur share ideas with other people in the group and how can (s)he get an HONEST feedback about the same?
4. How much should be the VC involvement in OCC ?
5. Discussions as to whether any particular venture requires VC funding? ie Some insights into VC funding?
6. Some of the mistakes that Entrepreneurs should avoid.
   

[If I may have missed out some of the things discussed at OCC , than kindly leave a comment and I would add it to this list :)]

Phew,after lot of discussions now was the time to network and I also shared my part-time, partly Non-technical idea with a quite a few people and was appreciated by some of them.This was a quick check as to whether I am headed in the right direction?

Some of the key highlights of the event:
Apart from the discussions, the other key highlights of the event were "Startup Funding" and "Mentorship for Entrepreneurs".These key issues were addressed by people from National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) - Laura Parkin(Executive Director, NEN & Wadhwani Foundation) & Sameer Kanth(Consultant, NEN Bangalore). Another notable attendee at the event was Yiting Shen from MIT Sloan school of Management. This is just a small example of a new and changed "Globalizing India" !!!

What exactly happened after the event (a Buffet Lunch Club) !!! ?
Had a good lunch with Prateek & Nithya Dayal;the husband-wife team working on their startup Muziboo, Saurabh, Ramjee, Siva, Vaibhav.There were some interesting discussions about Business Blogging, Legal ways to increase traffic to your blog, Wordpress, UI Development, Unconferences, Networking .... After the talk, I thought that I should also start "Blog Consulting"

Crowd present at the OCC:
[Attendees who haven't provided information about their blogs are tagged with their email id's. Also,if I have missed out your name,kindly add it in the comment section...]

1. K. Aditya
2. Saurabh Singh
3. Kaushik Gala
4. Deepak Shenoy, founder of MoneYoga
5. Pooran Prasad, co-founder of Zealous Solutions
6. Vaibhav Pandey
7. Harish Kumar, founder of OneBigWeb
8. Sandeep C Senan
9. Kiran Jonnalagadda aka Jace
10. Manasi Baranwal
11. Shivakumar Ganesan
12. Prashant Acharya
13. Gunasekaran S
14. Sameerkanth , ConsultantNEN Bangalore
15. Venkat Ramana
16. Anand
17. Piyush Gupta, Co-founder of RouteGuru
18. R. Senthil
19. Kiran Kadekoppa
20. Parvez Ahmed
21. Ajit
22. Rohit Bansal
23. Prateek & Nithya Dayal, Co-founders of Muziboo
24. Karthik Jain, Co-founder of PicSquare
25. Satish TJ
26. Anshul Gupta
27. Meera K , Community & News media
28. Rajan, Co-founder of Motvik
29. PV Sundaram
30. Vipul Gupta
31. Bhasker Kode,Co-founder of "The Returnable Project"
32. Laura Parkin, Executive Director, NEN & Wadhwani Foundation
33. Yiting Shen
34. Saurabh
35. Paveen Kumar
36. Parineeth Reddy
37. Harinath Pudipeddi
38. Siva - now an Entrepreneur
39. Akshat Choudary, Co-founder ActivMobs
40. Amit Singh, Co-organizer of BCB4
41. Ashish Solanki, Co-founder Yulop
42. Puneeth Prasad
    

[Photo Courtesy : Jace]

Time to wrap up the coverage of "First OCC meetup".Last but not the least, thumbs up to the organizers of OCC - Ramjee Ganti and Vaibhav Pandey for taking this initiative and making this possible !!!

When does the next OCC happen?
OCC would be held once in 15 days and hence, the next OCC is on 2nd September,2007.For more updates , join the 'OCC Community Group'

What other bloggers are saying about OCC?
[If you have already blogged about OCC , than kindly add your link in the comments section...]

Ramjee Ganti - Bangalore Open Coffee Kick Starts with Bang

Hope to catch you all at the next "Open Coffee Club" in Bangalore !!!