The London OpenCoffee Club moved to a new venue this week (on the 5th floor of Waterstones in Piccadilly), and the flavour of the event changes slightly each time I visit - part of its attraction. This week an Irish contingent flew over from Cork. Walter Higgins, the founder and CEO of Sxoop Technologies told me that getting to the centre of London with a decent Ryanair fight and the tube is actually easier for him than getting to the centre of Dublin. Walter’s company develops PIX-EN-ATE, a webware photo editor doing the same job as something like Adobe Photoshop or Ulead PhotoImpact, except with no software to install. I’d already been swapping stories with Conor O’Neil of LouderVoice about the difficulty of using desktop photo editor applications. He’d spent ages trying to simply cut, past and crop his logo on to an image he could upload to Flickr for his MOO cards. Too many drop downs, too many toolbars, too many options - they are powerful design tools, but a new user wanting to do a few simple things can get totally lost on this type of application. I’m hoping Walter’s approach is a lot easier, and delivered as a service it’s available from a variety of browsers, anywhere I’ve got an Internet connection. It’s aimed at the user who has a few photos to tidy up and post to Flickr or send to Mum from some Internet café when they are travelling, but it looks pretty comprehensive, and well worth checking out.
Here is how Conor’s LouderVoice is described on his site:
“This site is dedicated to reviews on blogs. We provide tools that enable you to publish reviews to your blog using a community-agreed format and we also collect reviews in that format from registered blogs.
Other users can search for content here. If they find a review of interest then we send them to your blog to read it.
They can rate that review here and also bookmark it along with other related ones. “
Sounds like a great idea, and I’ve registered to try it out and see how it works. Conor was showing us some of his competitors, with one in particular that has a really sexy interface, with nice icons that expanded as you floated your cursor over them. Conor was bemoaning the fact that their underlying technology is nowhere as good as LouderVoice, but that people might be seduced by that interface. A lesson for all of us there. Later on Sam Sethi joined our group, and there was plenty of banter about the optimum length for a blog post. With so much content in your newsreader, if a post is a long, detailed dissertation it might never get read. Too short and the reader might think it’s inconsequential and move on. I know Sam’s been thinking about this a lot for his new Blognation initiative (launching soon).
While I was there I also spoke to Manoj Ranaweera who has just moved to Causeway Technologies, Andrew Doe of gizme, a VC who also helps incubate start ups, Cristiano Betta (as usual!), Tom Gordon, CEO of Alien Pants, Ajay Mathur, co-founder of Grows on You, a social network for gardeners, and Justin Hayward, who is in PR. I also spoke to a few people without business cards including a Greek jewellery designer just starting in business. She was there to talk to people to get some good advice and ideas. She was in the right place. Maybe I’ll see you there next week?
More Flickr photos here.
