Barking

So the 7th June is the inaugural Coventry OpenCoffeeClub meeting at the Coventry StarBucks. Anybody that thinks this might be of interest to them is welcome to come.

The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow. (From the OpenCoffeeClub Site)

Coventry is a great place to do business (I am one of the Coventry Ambassadors) and has a huge number of entrepreneurs thanks to some of the excellent schemes being put in place, by AWM, the council and the two university science parks - my only slight issue is the lack of decent office space at present for those graduating from some of the great start-up accomodation offered by the science parks. However, the council already has this in the pipeline its just a case of waiting!

So if you are interested in business, entrepreneurship or just coffee - please pop along meet some great people and you never know you might just meet a future (business) partner!

This morning I attended a business network event run by Business Network Clubs, over 25 business representatives attended, which was pretty good going considering it started at 6.45am!

In the past I have found some networking clubs to be a bit too regimented and formal, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the club to have a much more friendly, welcoming and generally less serious format. There was also a twist to the usual 60 second pitch as you had to give a pitch for the person sat next to you! This was actually really effective as instead of switching off during the pitches I had to learn all about someone else’s business and it was interesting to hear if the other person understands enough about your business to talk about it – and if not – then it can make you rethink how you describe your services / products.

I found it particularly useful as I had to explain all that EGS can do for a business in really simple terms – the lady stood up and described EGS perfectly and also tailored the pitch towards the Small businesses attending – such as the e-newsletter management and tracking module and the CRM contact management module – which there was quite a bit of interest in!

It really was great to see so many different people making the effort to get up so early and to meet so many different business people – there was everyone from a lady who makes bespoke dolls houses, another designs corporate offices, an independent courier service, a full service marketing agency, a telemarketing company and a media production company – to name a few.

These are all new contacts that I will add into EGS and having gained their permission I will include in our quarterly e-newsletter. I will certainly be joining them again (providing I get an early night beforehand!).

Has anybody else noticed the new results page on Google? I was trying to visit digg.com and typed it in wrong and got this page instead of the standard results. A nice little DHTML drop down too.

I knw the guys at TechCrunch saw one similar but this is a different layout to theirs. Has anyone else seen this?

I have just logged into our online banking with HSBC and was greeted with a rather optimistic banner offering me Marine Finance to help me buy a yacht or power boat. Glad to see the bank think we are doing so well - but I think it will be a while before I look at buying one of those!

So the new Simply Suns website has gone live. The Simply Suns website is an on-line retail outlet for Chapmans Opticians and is the exclusive on-line retailers of Ted Baker and Lulu Guinness sunglasses and prescription sunglasses.

So with the new re-brand we need to put together some new business cards. This photo set is a great source of inspiration!

The guys over at Fog Creek have a really interesting way of marketing their software for upcoming Mother’s Day - they are giving it away for free!

Traditionally software is not the sexiest or most loving of gifts to give your family and certainly not a piece of software to remotely connect to a computer. However by marketing the fact that you can fix your loved ones computer is an interesting twist. Making it free will hopefully get more people interested and perhaps come back in the future for a paid for pass - I hope that it works for them!