Open Coffee - South County Edition gains traction

Posted on May 18th, 2009
By Michelle Girasole

RI Nexus Open Coffee - South County "Yes, Virginia, there is a tech entrepreneur community alive and well in southern Rhode Island. As I wrote in a blog post in February, we had a hunch that maybe, just maybe, there might be a collection of RI Nexus followers who might not want to drive "all the way to Providence", but may gather "locally" for coffee and connections. As you can see from the photos, there is indeed a thriving tech biz community. So we are happy to report that the RI Nexus Open Coffee, South County edition (affectionately nicknamed "RINOCO-SOCO") will continue, on the third Thursday of every month, at Bagelz Wickford.

RI Nexus Open Coffee - South County The conversations I've had run the gamut: new mobile phone applications being developed, web business models, the state of the venture capital market, the challenges of straddling the employment/ business startup period, forming partnerships, exploring web applications, what's buzzing on Twitter, and, admittedly, how nice it is to park in Wickford without ever worrying about a parking ticket. We have welcomed people from Providence to Connecticut to Hope Valley to Jamestown. All are welcome.

Please join us this Thursday, May 21st, between 9am and 11am.

Bagelz Wickford, upstairs loft area
21 W. Main St.
North Kingstown, RI
Map

Hope to see you there!
Michelle Girasole

And for your Providence area tech entrepreneurs, the next Open Coffee up here is this coming Tuesday. Details here.

3 comments

Comments

SassyMiche

Submitted on May 21st, 2009 - 11:14am link

I promised to report back on this morning's coffee, and once again, a varied group of tech entrepreneurs showed up. Here are some of the people:

Bart Baldwin, Entrepreneur, baldwinwb@verizon.net

Richard Graefe, Freelancer, wordsmithri@cox.net

Chris Shoemaker, Freelancer, c.shoemaker@cox.net

Robert Balliot, oceanstatelibrarian.com

Evan Lapisky, Far Sounder, evan@lapisky.net

Jake Goldman, C. Murray Consulting / jakemgold@cmurrayweb.com

and me, Michelle Girasole, Sassy Ladies, michelle@thesassyladies.com

Interestingly, two people came "over the bridges", and there was a discussion about possibly hosting an Open Coffee trial in the Middletown/Aquidneck area. If you are interested, chime in and stay tuned.

We had a lively discussion about social media, particularly Twitter, and I promised to post a link to the recent news coverage on Tuesday night's Tweetup. There was also some buzz around these topics: the news industry, a local video surveillance company, the local web development space, local living economies, and public transit in Rhode Island. In discussing the new RICIE center at Brown U, the conversation instantly jumped to modeling MIT and there was a show of love for John Maeda (RISD/Simplicity) and the Providence Geeks. A mixed bag of topics, as every Open Coffee event should be.

Til next month, same time, same place, same 3rd Thursday...

OSLIB

Submitted on May 22nd, 2009 - 10:54am link

This should be required viewing: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/john_maeda_on_the_simple_life.html

and required reading: http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Simplicity-Design-Technology-Business/dp/0262134721

Robert Balliot - yet another fan of John Maeda

http://oceanstatelibrarian.com

jamesw

Submitted on May 26th, 2009 - 3:12pm link

I'm all for an Aquidneck Island open coffee. Or maybe as a start we could do an open coffee at Slice of Heaven in Jamestown and potentially pull people over from both bridges.