The next Open Coffee Club meeting will be on June 4th.

Time and place is the usual: Absolute Hotel, Limerick from 11 am onwards.

We already have 1 confirmed speaker and it’s a special one too!

Nora Klaver, Author, Speaker, Executive Coach and Radio Host is visiting Ireland and has agreed to give a talk.

“On October 2, 2008, Nora launched “Bare Naked with Nora Klaver” a new show on the VoiceAmerica.com network. With a tongue-in-cheek attitude, Nora will invite well-known authors, business people, and experts to go “bare naked” and share how they’ve learned from some of their biggest blunders. Nora

An internationally recognized author and speaker, Nora also delivers counter-intuitive insights with her characteristic wisdom and humor. Her book, “Mayday! Asking for Help in Times of Need” is a perfect example. Filled with practical advice, “Mayday!” describes why we should ask for what we need, why we don’t and how to do it in a way that works.

Her success with “Mayday!” attracted domestic and international media, including The New York Times, Fox News, ABC News, Investor’s Business, Daily, Good Housekeeping, as well as Speak Up (Italy), Emotion (Germany), and Explore (Peru).

As an influential executive coach, Nora works with senior executives to achieve the unexpected. She relies on the cohesion of mind, body and emotion to facilitate personal and organizational change.” guarantees you will never look at your heroes the same way again!”

For those of you who can’t wait unil next weeks Limerick Open Coffee Club there is a nice surprise this Thursday. Anton Mannering has organised a “Digital Island meetup” in the Absolute Hotel for this Thursda at 7pm.

The Digital Media Forum is an innovation company specializing in developing and facilitating enterprise networks in the digital media industry. It has pioneered the creation of sectoral groupings such as the Animation CEO Forum and the Mobile TV Pilot Network to promote co-operation between companies with shared interests and the potential for specific synergies in joint venture opportunities. It is actively working to bring industry and academia together in joint research projects to develop leading edge commercial products and services. It has also successfully administered two Skillnets Network Training Programmes for the digital media industry and has raised significant funding to develop its enterprise training network on an all-island basis. The DMF is forging international links to create access for its network to international information, knowledge and commercial alliances. The Digital Media Forum currently has over 660 Digital Media companies on its database engaged in training and networking activities. We also work with large multi-nationals such as Microsoft, Google, IBM and Sun Microsystems to encourage networking and best practice.

Full details can be found here.

I don’t know about you but I’m getting fed up with all the interesting conferences happening mostly in Dublin and sometimes in Cork!

Time to organise one in Limerick!

It sounds like a good idea to me to organise a 1-day seminar on “Blogging & other social media for business”. But I would like some feedback on the choice of topic first.

So please comment on this post to let me know the following:

• Does this sound like an interesting seminar “topic”?
• Who would you like to see presenting at this seminar?

Thanks, Evert Bopp.

Paul Sweeney a longtime Open Coffee Club regular has been nominated for an IIA “Net Visionary” award.

Paul is nominated for his work with Voicesage: VoiceSage is a powerful, online suite of Interactive Voice Messaging products that enables you to automatically reach out to customers via a simple phone call. There’s no hardware to buy and no software to purchase, and it’s easy to integrate and simple to use. With VoiceSage, you can automate outbound interactions and avoid call centre agents making thousands of tedious, low value calls. Customers receive calls that are timely and relevant, with a range of dynamically presented options at the end of the message. Voicesage are regular presenters at the Telco2 and eComm next generation./ disruptive telephony conferences, and considered leaders in CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes)

Let’s all support Paul by voting for him here!

The next Limerick Open Coffe Club will be on May 7th, same time, same place.

I’m looking for suggestions on speakers for the day.

If you would like to give a presentation, or know someone who you would like to see/hear please let me know via email.

Evert.

Update: We have two speakers already for the day.

• Elaine Rogers from Seefin Coaching.
• Paul Dillon, Director Technology Transfer Office University of Limerick.

The next Limerick Open Coffee Club will be on April 2nd in the Absolute Hotel Limerick starting at 11 am.

More details to follow..

I’ve been asked more than once if we can’t have an Open Coffee Club meeting outside of “normal” working hours..

So I am proposing to schedule on on Saturday March 14th. This would also be a good occasion to promote the upcoming BizCamp Limerick that is on the next Saturday. Just to get some feedback I would appreciate it if people could comemnt on the post to let me know if they would be interested in meeting this Saturday..

Yesterdays Limerick Open Coffee Club meeting was another successful one. Apart from a number of new faces (Alex O’Connor, Paul Ferns, John O’Donnell, Tom Allen, Kevin Thompstone, Donncha Hughes and others whose names I can’t recall righ now) we had two speakers.
Aoife Garvey from Holmes O’Malley Sexton (one of Limerick’s leading law-firms) gave a very interesting talk about the need for shareholder agreements, directors responsibilities etc. This was followed by a lenghty talk by Tony Frattaroli from Sals Pizza, famous for his apperance on the Irish Dragons Den.

I will definetly continue this innitiative of having speakers at the Open Coffee Club and want to actively invite people to contact me if they would like to speak at any of the upcoming events.

The next Limerick Open Coffee Club meeting will be on this Thursday March 5th.

Location is the Absolute Hotel and it will kick off at 11 am.

There will be a good few “extras” on the programme:

1. We will have a local Dragons Den contestant participating in a Q&A session:Tony Frattaroli is the Limerick based entrepreneur behind Sals Pizza who appeared on Dragon’s Den to pitch his pizza franchise idea
2. Aoife Garvey an Associate Partner at Holmes O’Malley Sexton will give a short talk about shareholders’ agreements. She will also be available to answer questions afterwards.

Note: I am trying to bring a bit more structure into the event (without making it formal) so there will be a few “new” things:

• I will try to take a picture of everyone attending so that we can put a short bio on the site.
• Seeing that the Absolute Hotel will let us use the Abbey (conference) room free of charge I am trying to organise a one or more people to give a short talk on an interesting subject. If you want to suggest someone or want to give a talk yourself please contact me.
• I also look forward to seeing a lot of new faces so please bring someone along!