WebAppropriate

I made it to my first ever Open Coffee Club last Thursday - and I don’t know why I’ve waited so long. If you’re an entrepreneur/entrepreneurial developer etc, you really should join the Ning group, find your nearest OCC, and get along to the next meet-up.

Pretty much everyone you meet at OCC will be eager to talk about their businesses/ideas. However, I’m not sure if the whole OCC scene is only intended for Web startups, but most of the people I met were working on something completely Web-focused. Obviously, that wasn’t a problem from my perspective (and the same probably goes for anyone reading this blog), because it meant I could have some really in-depth conversations on Web business, design and development.

Most attendees will be interested in finding out about, and critiquing whatever you’ve been working on. If you take your laptop with a product demo ready, you’ll inevitably get some great feedback. There’s free Wi-fi too, so no excuses.

I should be attending the next OCC in Waterstones on Picadilly, so leave a comment if you’d like to meet-up. I intend to be in London from Wednesday (12th December) to Friday, so if you know of any other Web tech meet-ups, please let me know in the comments!

The guys from Songkick held a UK hacker/entrepreneur meet-up last week at their offices in London. It was (and will hopefully continue to be) a great chance to meet lots of talented and entrepreneurial hackers, and to keep up-to-date with the latest UK startups.

There were some good demos too; Songkick and Hypernumbers showed some really interesting upcoming features for their services - and you can tell they’ve both been through the startup camps (Y-Combinator & Seedcamp). It was a freestyle demo environment, so if you’re looking to show-off your Web app, this is the sort of audience you’ll want to demo to.

Ian from Songkick originally organised the event on the Y-Combinator Hacker News site, but around thirty-five people came from all over the UK to attend - which shows just how much events like this are needed for the UK Web startup scene. Fortunately, it looks like this was the first of a monthly fixture. If you’re a UK hacker/entrepreneur, make sure you join the new GroupSpaces group for this event, and hopefully we’ll see you at the next one in January;