Over the past couple of weeks the OpenCoffee people had their eyes fixed on the Stream 08 unconference. This is one of the most private (secrecy through obscurity) events, organized and executed by wpp.
Originally noticed by Dimitris Athanasiadis via Twitter, it eventually dragged in the whole OC Athens group. So let’s see who we met:
Jeff Pulver
I first met Jeff at the Stream. He was with Dror Gill, heading to Athens and looking for a ride. He was very stressed about keeping us waiting (he must have apologized like 3-4 times for that, really kind). While we thought that he was an accomplished blogger, later on in Tziralis’ stuffy car we learned that he’s actually a greatly accomplished developer, serial (seeeerial) entrepreneur, even wrote the Pulver law and apparently a multimilionaire (which made things pretty awkward after I learned it).
Leaving the Stream venue, we got for a walk at the Acropolis, which turned out to be rather fun.
and later had lunch during which I was a complete zombie due to sleep deprivation, but anyway…
Another notable mention is Pablo a very cool hacker/ intellectual property worker, whose surname no one seems to know. Something tells me we’ll be hearing a lot about Pablo in the near future.
Jason Calacanis
The one and only Calacanis, second most influential twitterer.
Ok so seriously I don’t know what to say. We asked (kudos to Tziralis) him to come and give a psych-up speech at our OpenCoffee meeting, and Jason came and overperformed. Bigtime.
Thanks Jason ! :)
Actually of all the people at Stream, I noticed that he and Tim O'Reilly alone had what I call the Jesus effect. It's a borderline-disturbing glamour attack where the speaker has people sitting on the flour around him literally feeding on his words as they come out of his mouth.
Tim O’Reilly
actually we didn’t get to talk to Tim very much. We were glad to have him observe/comment/place questions on our presentation at stream.
But ! Later on Nikos Anagnostou (kudos) organized a bloggers’ breakfast with him where we got to chat about emerging tech mostly.
An unfortunate detail is that we were too kind to interrupt Tim, which we later learned he interpreted as a lack of questions (while we were really bursting with such) and tried to fill the gap by giving a speech essentially.
The last breakfast. Jesus at the center (the pale skinned guy).
Me and Tim. Best friends forever… I wish :D .
Panaghiotis Vryonis also has the video scoop from the meeting with O'Reilly