OpenCoffee keeps rolling - now in 23 locations, 6 new this week

We had another great OpenCoffee Club in London today with well over 50 people coming over the 2 hours. Its nice to see many regulars from both the investing (Mattias at Atomico), developer (Damien at New Bamboo) and entrepreunerial (Paul at Cominded) community starting to connect on a regular basis and in such an informal and constrcutive way.

There are some really interesting young entrepreneurs in London at the moment and they were some great new apps being demoed including Joel Selvadurai who was showing folks his cool people directory for finding bloggers who Skype.

Sumon Sadhu (happy birthday) and Peter Nixey were also around -- they both have some interesting new ideas up their sleeves as well for us to look out for.

The group on London OpenCoffee group on the very excellent Meetup has reached over 300 members and the Ning social network is becoming quite active as well, pulling together the now 23 OpenCoffee locations around the world.

New locations this week include:

• Pittsburgh - organized by Alan Veeck
  
• Lisbon - organized by Ricardo Saramago
• Portland - organized by Ben Strackany
• Toronto - organized by the excellent Jonas Brandon, who has also helped to create the start of an OCC wiki
• Sydney - organized by Kim
• Seattle - organized by serial entrepreneur and blogger Andy Sack

Patrick is also going to be hosting the first International OpenCoffee Club after the NextWeb Conference on June 2nd in Amsterdam.

There are also plans afoot this week to take OpenCoffee to Houston and even Second Life.

The collective energy around OpenCoffee has been amazing, it's really encouraging to see people involved in the startup scene responding so positively to the notion of informal get togethers.

At the moment, we've seen it work best with a no pressure environment and the right combination of developers, investors and entrepreneurs - keep pushing for the right mix in your local market and if the VCs don't come, let them know what they're missing :)