Damon Clinkscales | Cultivator

Open Coffee Club Austin

An open space to meet Austin entrepreneurs and investors

First Wednesdays – Jo’s Coffee* on 2nd St – 7:30-9:30a

The time for this has been adjusted, please see the reboot post for more info!

While reading through David Walker’s Born Entrepreneur blog recently, I noticed a old post about the Open Coffee Club Movement:

The idea is simple. Events are arranged on a set date in a set location. Entrepreneurs and people interested in the industry come along to chat, discuss their ideas, and build relationships. VCs also come along and entrepreneurs have a chance to pitch their ideas to them – and discuss whether they might be interested in funding them etc.

It’s such a simple and obvious idea, I thought that surely Austin must have one and that I just didn’t know about it. It turns out that Bryan Jones and Nick Ducoff did actually start and run one in 2007 when the idea first surfaced, but they don’t meet anymore. I’ve spoken with Nick and he was quite supportive of starting this up again.

When I first raised the idea, I was given various pieces of advice which largely centered around who would or wouldn’t come to this kind of thing. I like the idea of a consistent meeting time that has no set agenda, no politics, and no real structure. It’s open and that means that quite literally anyone can come by. Sure, there may be some bozos from time to time, but in general I think we’re at a point as a larger entrepreneurial community where we could stand to get to know each other better in an informal setting. So walk up to Jo’s, grab a coffee, and find someone interesting to talk to. And for heaven’s sakes, please be interesting! 😉

The recent AustinStartup article Wherefore Art Thou, Austin Investors spawned a lot of varied commentary, but not much real understanding about the investor perspective. I hope that if we can attract quality entrepreneurs to meet up and connect in this open space, that we will also attract some open-minded investors who will join us and share their unique perspective with us. There are benefits to both sides to be more open with each other and a cup of coffee seems like a good place to start.

We are going to meet on First Wednesdays at 7:30am in downtown Austin:

Think you can make it to the first open coffee this Wednesday? If so, click “count me in” on the Plancast site to show others that you plan to attend.

If you want to keep up with the event as we forge ahead, you can check out the Open Coffee Austin web site for updates.

Look forward to meeting you!

*Good news about the parking situation. Jo’s can validate your City Hall parking spot!

Idea #18: Adaptive Baby Swing

In the early days of a baby’s life, both baby and parents need to get their rest any way they can get it. A baby swing is often used as a baby sleep aid and when it works, it’s pure magic.

There are a couple of issues with the basic designs today:

They are often battery powered. This is pretty senseless. Just offer an A/C adapter already!
Probably because of the battery, they are “programmed” to have their white noise/music run for 30 minutes and then stop. This can be a problem when the baby isn’t quite asleep yet or they wake up at the slightest change in environment. Some babies are just like that.
They are quite manual, mechanically. You set a speed and that speed does not change until you come and turn the knob to some other setting.

So a first step forward is to just alleviate these problems by offering a wall outlet plug, music and white noise settings which do not cease until you tell them to, and offer sequences (perhaps fast at first to put them to sleep, and then slower to keep them relaxed and out). These would be great improvements.

However, being an engineer, I have something a bit more advanced in mind. And in a programming sense, it’s really not that advanced, but it’s way beyond the current state of the art in baby products. Ideally, we would design a smart baby swing.

The Components

Aside from the frame and seat, the swing would also have a microphone, a speaker, a computer chip, a Flash drive or CF card, and a motor for doing the swinging.

The Software

The software would be a genetic algorithm (or any kind of optimization approach, really) with a goal of silence. The software would listen with the microphone for distressed crying (and it would ideally be able to distinguish real crying from talking and cooing) and it would develop an initial pattern of sound and swing speeds. It could measure and store persistently a Time to Silence, date & time, coupled with the sound/swing pattern used to achieve it. The optimization the swing would be trying to achieve would be the lowest possible time to silence measurement.

The ultimate goal for this product would be for a parent to set their child in the swing, turn it on, and walk away…letting the swing figure out which stimulus the baby best responds to, to achieve rest. Obviously, you still need to care for your baby and listen to him/her, but this device would hopefully free you up by trying variations on a theme to smartly relax the baby. If the baby wakes up mid-nap, the swing would automatically react to the sounds by repeating the same process that it initially used and adjust its behavior accordingly based on what is working.

Update: Had another thought while working with my baby in the swing this morning. Offer a hackable swing with an open interface, such that programmers could write their own logic for the motors and sound playback!

Known Implementations: None

Idea #17: ‘Pull down to refresh…’ Shorts

When Tweetie first launched the awesome ‘Pull down to refresh’ feature, it was pretty obvious that when you pull down, good stuff happens.

The same is true for shorts sometimes so it seems natural to put the two together.

Steps:

Find a manufacturer of some nice shorts
Print ‘Pull down to refresh’ on them
Set up a store (maybe on Shopify?)
Profit
Send me $1 per pair. I’ll help you market it.

This idea has legs.

Known Implementations: None

Idea #16: Twitter Mass Block / Spam Report

For those of us with multiple Twitter accounts, it would be nice to have a tool which can block or report spam against an annoying account from all of our accounts at once.

If somebody is doing something that you deem annoying or spammy, you probably don’t want to see them again and you want to maximize the effect of your block or spam report. This is best achieved by reporting from all of your accounts at once.

To do this manually is pretty laborious, so it’d be nice to have a tool to do it in one shot.

Idea #15: Why Do You Follow Me on Twitter?

Build a web app which would:

provide for authentication via Twitter OAuth
show the logged-in user their following list and allow them to annotate why they follow someone
provide a search (preferably live) to find a particular person in their following list if they want to annotate a particular person
provide a public discovery search / browse which is based on the notes others have made

This actually benefits everyone involved…you can remember why you followed someone, the person who was followed can better understand why you are following, and the general public can use this information to better decide why they might like to follow someone.

Update: Geoff (@gtcaz) adds this bit to the idea in a private message to me: “Totally. How met. Who introduced. Context.”

Ok, so who’s going to build this? 🙂

Known Implementations: None

Idea #14: Vegetarian BBQ Truck

Vegetarians must feel pretty left out when they tag along to BBQ joints here in Austin. There’s a burgeoning food truck movement in some cities in the U.S. and Austin is dabbling at the edges of it. I hear that Portland has a thousand food trucks and whole blocks of downtown are designated for them. Sounds very cool. The market in Austin is so nascent and BBQ is so popular, I would guess you could make a killing with this idea, but who knows.

Think up some killer vegetarian dishes, served on different bread or wraps. Collect the best BBQ sauces from around Central Texas and the rest of the country (represent different styles of BBQ) and allow people to try different sauces on the vegetarian BBQ. It brings in a crowd who typically feels left out (being relegated to eating sides and a plate of pickles) and offers them delicious vegetarian fare with a variety of sauces. The sauce is an important part of it and there is a lot of variation out there.

You could also offer actual BBQ in an attempt to satisfy both meat and non-meat crowds, but perhaps it’s best to start with a niche focus and grow a following from there?

Any food truck aficionados out there? What say you?

Known Implementations: None

Idea #13: Skiing in Vegas

Vegas is crazy like that. Creating one-of-a-kind experiences that you can only have in Vegas. The very last thing you would think you could possibly do in the desert is to go skiing indoors. But the contrarian nature of it strikes as me as so crazy it just might work.

We have indoor rock climbing gyms. We have huge ice rinks inside buildings that we keep cold. So, why couldn’t we conceive a design for an indoor ski park?

Some casino mogul should buy up some land just outside of Vegas and build an indoor ski park.

Known Implementations: None (are you insane? no one will actually build this)

Has anyone ever heard of someone doing anything like this elsewhere in the U.S.?

Idea #12: Wine Reference For Your Pocket

I’ve actually wanted this application since 2005. With the rise of the smartphone, this is completely feasible now and I can’t believe it doesn’t exist.

Picture it: you’re perusing a wine list and nothing looks familiar. You’re browsing the aisles of the wine store and only 1/100th of the wines actually have a hang tag. You wish you had a little extra help in deciding. You could go to Google and try to find out more info, but that’s a bit heavyweight. What would be really nice would be a wine app for your phone which matches your search based on only a few characters. The database could be based on a site like Cork’d or some other curated source. Reviews/ratings from major wine critics as well as users on Cork’d would be displayed.

You could sell a subscription to the site or data downloads. The app could be free or made available for a small fee.

I was thinking this would be an iPhone app, but really it could also be a generic mobile app if you could get the live web search to be fast enough / good enough.

Potential revenue sources: advertising, app purchase, subscription

Known Implementations: None (as always, let me know in the comments if you hear of anything)

WineFindr – thanks to Adam for sharing this

Idea #11: Automatic Dog Wash

You design a machine with a conveyor belt that is similar to a car wash, but works for dogs. There are businesses which have come up to allow you to wash your own dog (and that’s a great idea). This would take things a step further and automate the whole washing process. You’d need to develop a system that was gentle (and most likely still monitored by a human), but it’d be much less manual effort than actually washing each dog.

Franchise it. Make millions.

Known Implementations: None. 🙂

Idea #10: 24 Hour Businesses

More businesses should be open 24 hours. Why? Definitely a contrarian idea. Nobody thinks having a business open all the time is a good idea because everyone’s asleep, right? However, this creates a market opportunity with almost no competition. There are a lot of people who are up at weird hours doing all kinds of things. There are whole cities like Las Vegas which are built on the notion. What if you could come up with a concept which fit that late night crowd, that wasn’t being served, and you took it to sleepy America. You could create a sensation sweeping the nation. 😉

Local Austin businesses like Epoch, Bennu, Magnolia Cafe, and Kerbey Lane are capitalizing on this idea. Based upon my experience in the late night hours at the coffee shops, I’d say they are doing quite well serving this underserved market (namely, students who need to study with regular caffeine injections and snacks).

Known Implementations:

convenience stores
coffeehouses
diners

Are there others? Are there underserved constituencies that have a different sleep schedule than most people? How large is the population of people with alternative schedules?