Just a quick recap of the 2pm Starbucks version of Houston’s OpenCoffee Club.

1) roughly 35 participants - several whom I didn’t personally know - which means that the idea is becoming viral.

2) Of the people that attended the first OCC, many of them made new contacts and were able to follow up further with people they met earlier.

3) There were a lot of new faces for OpenCoffee which keeps the ideas fresh. I believe that Tim Black of the Social Network site developer Intellimar Solutions traveled the furthest to attend - all the way from Dallas. Rakesh Agrawal, the founder and CEO of TV to PC recording software SnapStream gave out T-shirts for his new venture Couchville, an online, real-time TV listing service (I personally use both). Some other dotcoms represented were www.greenlightusa.com - a niche online store for energy efficient light bulbs, www.zcubes.com, a browser-based modular social network development platform, and www.agoric.com a well-known Houston-based business management and collaboration software developer.

4) The spirit of OpenCoffee Club was very obvious - I saw very seasoned VC’s speaking enthusiastically to just-graduated dotcom developers. I witnessed entrepreneurs speaking with “super-connectors” like the Houston Technology Center’s own Robert Brackenridge about availability of programmers. Social Media Community Leaders such as Erica O’Grady learned about newly launched web applications like wiki collaboration site www.openteams.com and subsequently recommended the site to Social Media Club in San Francisco.

5) A handful of people were conspicuously absent - Ed Schipul was speaking at a conference. A handful of people like Reid Pennebaker, Tyson Weihs and Larry Estes had real work to do at the time we held the event. Kelsey Ruger and Daniel Glover - who is working on a stealth Web 2.0 start up both claimed they ‘forgot’ - but I’ll give them a pass since they are both extremely busy.

6) I think that we’ll have to move the time back to early morning since the general consensus was that time worked for more people. There was also a strong desire to morph OpenCoffee to OpenBeer for an after hours bar mixer. We also completely overtook the Starbucks from 2pm to 3:30 much to the chagrin of the other patrons so we’ll have to look for another venue. Attendee Stephen Newman offered his home and the MindOH! crew offered their office as alternatives.

7) Special thanks to Scott Stolz who added OpenCoffee Club to the Meetup calendar for multiple groups and brought a number of new people who weren’t on the original list.

Overall Score = another complete success that will warrant another function next month.