Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Next Open Coffee Club Meetup on 30th March 2008, Sunday

The next OCC meet shall be held on 30th March 2008, Sunday from 11a.m to 1p.m. at

St. Mary's Boys Orphanage,
2nd Cross, D'costa Layout,
Cooke Town, Bangalore 560 084
(google map will follow)

We will have Mr. Ramesh Jude Thomas with us. You can find the profile
of Mr. Ramesh in the attachment.

Mr.Ramesh is the CEO of EQUITOR Management Consulting P Ltd., the first and probably the only management consultancy in India focusing on brands as lead business assets. Amongst his key professional contributions is having led the first known Strategic Brand Valuation in India which was for Titan Industries Ltd. Followed by the valuation of the TATA brand.

Mr. Ramesh's lectures are attended by very high profile CEO's, and he has lectured at the CII, IIM B and various other forums of repute.

It is fortunate that he will be with us on 30th. Let us learn a bit about branding.

For those of you who are not the member of the group but would be interested in being a part of the meet, please drop in to the venue on Sunday and register yourself. The membership to this group is Free.

Cheers
Vaibhav

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Meetup Sumaary: 16th March 2008

It was definitely a good meetup yesterday,16th March 2008 Sunday. A group of close to 50+ people turned up for the Open Coffee Club meet at CoreObjects. As known the agenda for this meet was centered around OpenCommune and NEN Startup Jobs.

Venkat Ramana, C.E.O of Outsmart360 started with his talk on OpenCommune and the idea/inspiration behind it. He went on to discuss the existing gaps in the present office space ecosystem. Venkat has been working on the idea of OpenCommune since sometime now and it was great to hear him replying back to some interesting questions passed on by the fellow members. Below are some of the questions raised by the group:

  • The fees for this entire service? As per Venkat, Outsmart has some 8 desks to rent out and he plans to keep the fees for that at a bare minimum of 1500rs per desk.
  • How come the fees is so damn low? This is not a commercial offering, its an offering aimed at growing the community.
  • What happens if the startup company gets a big project and/or needs to hire more people for its requirements? The OpenCommune desk space will be based on a charter which shall be able to take care of this scenario.

In brief the idea of OpenCommune is still new in India and is gaining traction with this initiative of Venkat which he plans to keep on the lines of OpenSource.

Also, Shalin Mantri from NEN Startup Jobs was present at the meet to talk about this new initiative being taken up by NEN. NEN Startup Jobs is still nascent and the purview of its activities is still not finalized in full and therefore i wont talk much about it here. I believe when its all set to launch, Shalin being a member of the group list, shall announce it himself :)

All in all, it was exciting and awe inspiring to have a good turnout of people for the meet. Hoping to catch up with more of you on 30th March, Sunday. Stay tuned for further info's with regards to the same.

Also, if you are blogging about yesterday's event; do share the link here.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Next OCC meet on 16th March, Sunday.

Its time to announce the date and venue for the next OCC Bangalore meet.

Below are the next meet details:

Date: 16th March 2008
Timings: 11AM-1PM

Venue
: CoreObjects
Brigade MLR, #50, Vani Vilas Road, Opp. National College, Basavanagudi,
Bangalore, Karnataka 560004
(Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)

Agenda:

1.) Shalin Mantri from NEN ( National Entrepreneurs Network) shall walk us through the concept of NEN Startup Jobs. Being closely associated with Stanford Technology Venture Program, Shalin will bring his perspective and observations of how things work in Stanford (by far one of the most successful institutes in terms of the number of successful startups it has churned out) and the steps/initiatives being taken by NEN to address some of the prevailing issues in the startup ecosystem.

2.) Earlier during the week, we introduced, OpenCommune as a concept, taking it further, we shall have Venkat Ramana ( CEO, Outsmart360) helping us understand this by addressing the various queries being posted over the group.


Action Item:

For those of you planning to attend the meet, kindly mark your confirmations at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/450951/

Hoping to catch up with you all