There promises to be some great presentations on social media tools (Colin Rainsforth, twitter) and the fine line between time management & time wasting (Lee Cottier, twitter) but I’m guessing the hot topic will be the Digital Economy Bill.

Paul Smith (Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Bristol West) is leading the discussion. The bill is about to enter the Committee Stage in the House of Lords, so there’s no guarantee that it’ll be law before the election, but this is a critically important bill for the UK and Bristol’s digital economy so come along and can make a positive contribution.

The nominal theme for this morning’s Open Coffee was ‘articulating your message’, or the art of the elevator pitch. Without wishing to do anyone (including myself) out of a job – go to this blog post and read it.  Actually might as well read the whole site if you’re looking at the investor path.

Having suggested that Matt from Montage Communications might get the ball rolling with a few pithy words on communicating complex ideas in compact spaces, by the time I got downstairs at Starbucks on Park St, the conversation was in full flow!

With roughly 2:1 entrepreneurs to business support professionals there was plenty of discussion and swapping of business cards. Everyone I spoke to had met someone new and interesting.

My new connection was with Rob Cox, launching a new motivational and self belief workshop and mentoring service for kids to “Dream, Believe, Achieve“.

Thanks go to Hannah at Montage Communications for handling the coordination with Starbucks and to Rosie (Interim Store Manager, Starbucks) for keeping the (free) coffee and cakes flowing.

The next Open Coffee is on 20 May, same Starbucks on Park St., please sign up or leave a comment here so that Rosie can order in enough fresh muffins!

I mentioned earlier on Twitter that I was hoping to confirm some additional support for Open Coffee, well Starbucks are getting behind us and offering free coffee, free muffins and free WiFi to attendees of Open Coffee at 9am Tuesday, 6 May.

We’ll be downstairs at the Starbucks on Park Street (map).

Kick off will be from 9am but some folks will be there before and you’re obviously welcome to stay as long as you like. Rosie (the interim Store Manager) has offered free coffee until 11am.

Hopefully this will be a long term partnership for digital companies in Bristol. The next 3 Open Coffee meetings are already scheduled in for 20 May, 3 June and 17 June.

All the details are on the Upcoming group, I’ll be talking about them here and on Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else that folks will be checking out. I’m also hoping to get notes put in BEN event announcements, Creative Technology Network, Bristol Media, Business Link, etc. The purpose is to give those companies (or start-ups) that are building growth businesses in digital software, services or media have an additional physical network to augment their online networks and wider business support services.

See you there!

But I’ve already done that on Twitter.

In fact there were at least 2 others twittering (@iamdanw & @sammachin) and I suspect a few others as well. The inimitable Scoble has noted that he’s pretty much on Twitter now and a quick perusal of his blog shows much reduced posting activity. Whereas he’s allegedly tracking 16,000 Twitter feeds (which is quite likely given previous form).

So what does that mean for this blog?

Well I’m not really in the business of reporting on events and stuff. I’m not a geek-hound rooting out the latest technologies and dissecting / discussing them.

I am a business developer with an engineering background and research credentials, working in some pretty interesting areas (at least I think they’re interesting). So I’m going to try and write a few thought pieces relating to what I’m doing. These roughly fall into 3 categories music, education, entrepreneurship; with business development and digital technologies as a common thread.

Lets see how things turn out.