Palo Alto's OpenCoffee Club

There are so many European entrepreneurs I speak to and meet who want to spend time in Silicon Valley - to visit, to work, to live - but they don't know how to get plugged in once they arrive.

So in the spirit of opening things up, Keith Teare will be hosting a weekly Palo Alto OpenCoffee Club on Tuesday between 830-100 at Deuce France in the Town & Country Village close to the intersection of El Camino Real & Embarcadero.



Keith is a serial entrepreneur and has been a founder on both sides of the Atlantic (easynet in the UK and now edgeio in SV), so he has a perfect perspective on the challenges and opportunities for folks coming new to the Valley and building teams, raising money etc. He's also a partner in Techcrunch so he's pretty plugged into what's going on in the startup scene.

There are a huge amount of startup events in the Valley, so the focus of the Palo Alto OpenCoffee Club is very much to help connect people from outside SV get connected in, but hopefully the informal nature of OpenCoffee will extend beyond this over time.

Click here to check out
The Deuce France, Palo Alto OpenCoffee Meetup!

For now, if you're planning to travel to the Valley and are interested in the startup scene, pop by and say hello to Keith.

edgeio lets anyone be craigslist

There's a good post from Dan Farber pointing out the disruptive potential behind edgeio's marketplace platform which has just gone into beta.

Keith and his team at edgeio (disclosure: I am a small investor through TAG) are really doing some creative things with listings and changing the way publishers of all sizes can generate revenue from classified advertising online.

For more on the product, see an interview with product manager John Dowd on Scoble's Podshow.



edgeio is really challenging the traditional destination model for listings business and I think offering services to publishers has real promise. Publishers, both big and small are looking for support in helping generate more traffic, inventory and revenue.

I still feel that LinkExchange was one of the great pioneer's in this space, in fact it looks the model is re-emerging in South East Asia.

Google's AdSense clearly put publisher services on the map and doing $1.2bn in Q4 '06 ad revenue is certainly not shabby in terms of showing the potential for this space - AdSense already accounts fro 37% of Google's revenue.

Now there is a whole new generation of companies offering amazing services to publishers, some of the more interesting at the moment include: Daylife (contextual inventory, disclosure: I'm also an invetsor through TAG), edgeio (classifieds) and AdBrite (text ads). Of course PayPal and Google Checkout are extending the offer from to commerce as well - more on that later.

Watch this space, as the web disaggregates more and more networks (or platforms) which serve the increasingly interesting long-tail as well as the Alexa Top 1-10k will become more and more important.