Bulldog Financial’s Bullblog

I was fortunate enough to attend the first meetup of MamaDramaConQueso - a very nice blend of the Houston Chronicle MamaBloggers and .

It was focused of course on the mommy bloggers, but a handful of men (and Houston Internet Celebrities) were in attendance including: Ed Schipul, Lawrence Simon, Ed T., Robert Nagle , and the Houston Chronicle’s own Dwight Silverman.

It was Dwight’s blog post listing all of the major local Houston technology community meetups that alerted me to the event in the first place. I am very proud to say that I have either attended or been part of the planning committee for every one of these events, except Science Cafe - something I hope to fix in September. I’ve always thought that Houston had a vibrant tech community, but local awareness of events like this has hampered our growth.

The event itself went very well, with lots of interest being generated about forming a new organization for Texas bloggers. I was able to meet and chat with one of the co-hosts - Laura Mayes who launched a “Digg for Women” called sk*rt with smashing success early last week. I was happy to see that she had the opportunity to speak with the OpMom founders Carrie and John Pacini.

Although I’m a dad and a semi-competent blogger, I’m not a DaddyBlogger by any strech - but I was very glad to be able to socialize with this terrific group of MommyBloggers and I’m looking forward to the next one.

I’ve been thinking about spam recently as I’ve been making the slow change from Outlook email to Thunderbird forcing me to reset my spam filters. Whether it’s online, on the phone or in the mail, managing spam has a cost. I want back all of the microchunks of time that it takes to decide what to do with spam once I’ve determined it was in fact spam. I want back all of the delete key presses and I want back all of the missed opportunities due to false positives. Since I’ll never see my wasted productivity back, I want to advocate a new idea on behalf of future spam victims. I think that we should consider reclassifying an obvious spam violation as “Attention Theft” and prosecute it the same way we would any other petty theft. I know it’s not much of a deterrent and that enforcement would be extremely difficult, but it might stop otherwise “good” people from engaging in the practice if they knew there were legal consequences. This would also give some protection to the Opt-in people whom I regard as the white-hats in the broadcast messaging business. Just a thought.

We’re going for the second round of OpenCoffee Club at a new time & place:

OpenCoffee Club encourages informal networking among entrepreneurs and investors to help grow startup companies in the Houston area.

Friday, June 8, 2007
2:00 PM
Starbucks Uptown
1151 Uptown Park #12
Houston, Texas 77056

Optional RSVP:
Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/195457/?ps=6
Meetup: http://smallbiz.meetup.com/57/calendar/5818119/

Homepage
http://houstonopencoffeeclub.ning.com/

I’m changing the venue to accommodate new and different attendees which I plan on doing each month until we collectively decide on the optimal time and place for most people. Email me or leave a comment to get on the email list.

I’ve already seen a few new faces that have RSVP’ed so I think that it will be another strong event for the Houston area startup community.

Richard Yoo has launched his Web 2.0 profile and information aggregator Natuba. I have a handful of invites left and if you leave a comment I’ll email one to you. The idea is that once you register, your username with various web properties like Twitter, LiveJournal, MySpace etc. and places them on a single page. As someone who writes content in a lot of places on the web - mostly in blog comments - I really like the idea of funneling all of the disparate data into one page.

Conceptually, I like this as a Web 2.0 play since it grabs info from different data silos and visualizes it in an intuitive way. I also like it as a way to repurpose content in order to increase linkbacks for Google PageRank, although this is not the primary function. Richard is a particularly bright guy and a great asset to the Houston startup community so I wish him and his team the best of luck.

If you’d like a private invitation to Natuba, I have a handful left - and I’m sure if I asked nicely, I could get a few more from Richard. I have to mention that it might be a little while until we hear from him considering his pending nuptials - Congrats!

It’s been ten days since our first OpenCoffee Club and I’ve already had several follow up meetings with some of the attendees and one in particular - Tory Gattis (www.houstonstrategies.com) who earlier this month launched www.openteams.com that builds structured wiki’s for corporations. OpenCoffee Club once again proved to me that the Houston technology startup scene is very vibrant. Two other companies that I know, www.berggi.com and www.opmom.com have made their public launches within the last week or so. I’m also eagerly awaiting Richard Yoo’s (www.richardyoo.com/blog/) new company codenamed www.hushlabs.com coming out of stealth mode soon. My belief is that for every startup I know or hear about, there are three that are being worked on in complete isolation. I’m hoping that I can foster a relationship with Kurt Stoll at www.startuphouston.com to help get some of those companies out into the open where they can grow.

Thanks to the over 40 people that showed up, the inaugural Houston OpenCoffee Club was a resounding success. We had several Angel Investors, bona fide Venture Capitalists, business consultants and most importantly - entrepreneurs discussing various aspects of the startup life cycle. With no formal agenda, the conversations that I overheard ranged from “we’re looking for $X equity capital” to “We need a lawyer” to “I have this idea” - all met with enthusiastic repsonses and an exchange of business cards with the promise of further follow up. This was precisely the goal of OpenCoffee Club and to that end I think that there is demand for a second edition.

One thing that I was particularly pleased about the attendees were the handful of people there that I did not know who learned about the event second or third hand from the original emails I sent out two weeks prior. The fact that the idea became viral so quickly demonstrates that there is a pent up need for this kind of organization. I am very happy that I could help facilitate the event, although I can not take the credit for making it as big a hit as it was.

Special Thanks go to Saul Klein in London for coming up and executing the original idea, Jason Mendelson in Boulder for walking me through what to expect (he was remarkably accurate after his first two in Colorado), Robert Brackenridge of the Houston Technology Center for promoting it to the people he thought would get the most out of it and of course to business leaders and my personal friends and associates: Paul Campbell, Andrew Clark, Richard Scruggs, Jeff Williams, Leo Womack.

About mid-way through the event, roughly 30 people still going strong

Another shot of the crowd

Tony Huang, founder of www.techxans.com Speaking with Robert Brackenridge

Reid Pennebaker of RPVentures

Billy Buchsbaum of 1790 Capital

Russell Holliman, Founder of www.podcastready.com and Robert Brackenridge

Jeff Willams of Mainspring Capital Partners speaking with Co-Founders of MindOH.com