My first time at OpenCoffee Club Tallinn

 

Not sure if this belong in this blog or the nerd blog, since it's about techie stuff in Estonia - but I visited the Open Coffee Club Tallinn today.

In Ülemiste City Mercado it's a bit out of the way, but it was so worth it. I was a bit shy before, thinking that maybe everyone would be speaking Estonian and all too serious for my sort of... freely associative thinking.

Turned out I recognized the first guy I walked into, and essentially the second one as well, we took a table for ourselves and the event took off! It was very nice, somewhat professionally rewarding and great for ideas. Actually, one guy into SEO essentially repeated one of my favorite ideas out to me, word by word :-) . Proves one of my principles of that you're not usually alone about great ideas, you must dare to check out the competition.

Some of you readers may still think Estonia is a backwards Eastern European country, but the Tallinn OpenCoffee Club, and something I saw the other day reminded me that's not the case. In Sweden I've always been reminded not to bring gadgets out in public, and you're a bit of a freak to work on the laptop in a café - in the Viru Keskus mall the other day, there were three different people sitting on the benches by the escalators with their laptops, one of which was a MacBook Pro. That's so non-Swedish.


By the way, you cool people I met there, maybe you want to follow my twitter, jaiku or other stuff online.

If you couldn't come this time, next time if you feel that some networking and cool discussions would do you better than spending that hour in the office, just come show up! Come and go whenever it suits you, and if you don't know anyone, squeeze into some conversation. Also I noticed at least two groups with English as primary language, so that was no problem either.