Google is giving away money…

To Gadget developers that is. A few days ago Google announced Google Gadget Ventures, a pilot project for funding third-party Gadget developers.

The Official Google Blog says Google wants to help developers who want to spend more time developing Gadgets and:

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love—building great Gadgets.

It’s very nice of Google to think about us pour developers, but I don’t think this is the main reason.

Google knows how important the developer community is. Without developers who want to create Gadgets, iGoogle won’t be very popular and people will go to Yahoo, Netvibes or one of the other personalized pages services. I even think there are more Netvibes modules at the moment than there are Google Gadgets. So it’s a very smart move to start awarding developers.

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First Amsterdam OpenCoffee

This morning, after I brought one of my kids to school (the other one had to go to the dentist), I drove my bike to the KoffieSalon. This is a place in Amsterdam where you can get a great cup of coffee, but that wasn’t the main reason I was going there. The ‘KoffieSalon’ was the location where the first Amsterdam OpenCoffee Meetup was held.

OpenCoffee is the name of a weekly event where entrepreneurs, investors, bloggers, developers and other web savvies can meet at the same place and at the same time.

It was a good and interesting meeting. 30 people signed up and I think they were all there. The time frame (one hour) is short, so you can’t talk to everybody. But it’s long enough to meet a few new people and have an interesting conversation. And because it’s weekly next time you can talk to the others 🙂

One thing I learned, while talking to others, is that I have to work om my introduction speech about the project(s) I’m working on.

So if you want a good Thursday morning start, meet like minded people, talk about your startup, find people to work with, or just have a nice cup of coffee, sign up for the next meetup!