It was our last Tuttle on Greek Street on Friday.

Quite a turn out plus we had cake and champers. I got the impression that the excitement about a move to the ICA outweighed any sadness at leaving our old quirky venue.

Do come along this Friday of you can. The sign up wiki is here.

And If you missed it last week then here are some bits and bobs from the morning including some excellent ukulele playing from Lloyd:

That should also give you an idea of the Flip Mino’s quality.

Lloyd has slapped the official post up on the Tuttle blog so now I can talk a little more about moving the Social Media Cafe (aka The Tuttle* Club) from it’s current home at the Coach and Horses on Greek Street to that other London institution, the ICA.

This is a big deal.

First though a reminder that we’re not leaving the Coach & Horses behind entirely. I found it via Hugh and Lee and then almost a year ago with Dean threw the first London Seesmic party there with Loic, Vinvin and co. I have every intention to continue my patronage and am happy to see other geeks use it on a semi-regular basis outside of the Tuttle for mini meet-ups. Alastair and his staff offer a very unique atmosphere and it’s quite simply one of my favourite venues in London. We’re not finished with it yet.

But the Tuttle club has also grown in that time. I put the success down not only to Lloyd’s hard work and the brilliant people who make up the regulars, but also the fact that we never imposed any rules on the beast. In a very similar way that Twitter has succeeded by asking one simple question that invites a multitude of different replies, the Tuttle succeeds through simplicity: come along and talk about whatever you like.

I think this is why far more than any other event that I attend it’s the Tuttle that has the widest cross-section of attendees. Just last Friday I started the day talking to an artist about the possibility of embedding RFID tags into clay, moved over to a TV presenter who wanted the creative freedom offered by new media and finished as usual watching Whatley perform mobile-surgery on someone’s N95. Each and every Friday morning I never know who I’m going to meet or what I’m going to end up talking about, but I always come away with a sense that I learned something and helped other people out.

So in less than a year we’ve garnered a great reputation and Tuttle has become an accidental brand and a verb. There are Tuttles now in Birmimngham and Brighton with others planned and Social Media Cafes running in the States. People come to us from far and wide and we have yet to have the exact same group turn up twice. There’s always someone new.

Which brings us to the ICA. We’re honoured that it was the Institute of Contemporary Arts that reached out to us. As Lloyd points out, this was all down to Tuttle regular Whatley and Spinvox’s James Scroggs who was kind enough to do the introductions for us after running a great bolt-on at the Tuttle earlier in the year. We had a meeting last week just prior to the Twestival and confirmed the move with Nicole Elias, the Biz Dev Director at the Institute.

That meeting went better than we could have possibly hoped for. Because the ICA only opens its doors to the public at 11am, we’re being allowed earlier access than normal. The cafe will be up and running with coffee, tea and breakfast nibbles. The knock on from all this hospitality is that we can now start talking about working in conjunction with the ICA to utilise not only their facilities, but also to mix with their members and the intensely creative people passing through their doors each day. We’ve already begun to talk about possible projects, but I feel the best way to proceed is get settled in with business as usual and then hold a bolt-on where Tuttlers and the ICA can swap ideas and discuss how we move things forward.

When I first came to London the ICA was one of the places that I was instinctively drawn to. Aside from my own interest in film and the wider arts, they’ve always been keen to host technological events and it’s a dream come true to be a part of the ICA’s future as they continue to celebrate 60 years of activity.

Of course, this will be a change for the Tuttle, but now that we can begin taking the stuff we talk about each week and give it a stage (quite literally in some cases) the scope for the next year is pretty incredible. I’m hoping the transition will be as painless as possible, but if there are any fears that need addressing or questions to raise then please have-to in the comments or come along to our final Tuttle at the C&H on the morning of the 3rd of October and bend my ear accordingly.

And most important of all, please come along to the launch proper of Phase II on Friday October 10th at 10am.

We’re gonna have some fun…

*Note on the image: Tuttle/Turtle/Whatever

Last Wednesday was what felt like the beginning of a new season of Creative Coffee Club. While the Leicester branch closed over the summer, our regular London meet-up has kept ticking over, but with a skeleton crew. I didn’t make them all myself and on a couple of occasions we were down to just two or three attendees, but that hardly mattered as the quality of conversation was always top notch. Everything from artificial intelligence to insider’s views on the film and music industry, more often than not with a social media application or solution.

Two weeks ago we tried something a little different by offering up a theme in advance. Normally a couple of topics naturally surface and we chew them over, but having a little more direction helped to get us under steam a little earlier. I really enjoyed that discussion (despite arriving late) as The Future of Television is something I’m particularly interested in right now. The nice thing about the people who are drawn to both the CCC and SMC are that they are not merely commentators – more than once a laptop is pulled out and we get to see how people are doing their bit to shape the future of something.

This week the numbers swelled back to their pre summer heights (no pun intended) and the proposed topic went out the window as the large group splintered off. I maybe got to speak to half the people present which is a good sign. At the Tuttle on Fridays I speak to a lot less than that – the busier the better in my book. Both the Social Media Cafe and the Creative Coffee Club are the healthiest regular events that I attend. By  healthy I don’t mean that they’re just well attended, notably they also attract new blood so are never in danger of getting stale. Fresh views and opinions also help prevent an echo chamber from forming, while constantly explaining to new faces why it is we gather and what we do there helps to keep these events in focus.

New to the group last week was Mario Cacciottolo from Someone Once Told Me. Make with the clicky on that link today and you’ll see my ugly mug. Don’t panic though, there’s a new photo every day so I’ll soon get shuffled backwards. Mario also snapped off a few more Creative Coffee types including Lloyd and Steve and as Mario is very keen to see the project thrive independently of him, I’m hoping to rope in a few more Tuttlers to take part too. All you need is a camera and a sentence…

Tomorrow sees CCC Leicester waking up so I’m getting an early train to take part in that too. With new Social Media Cafes popping up in the UK and the US it looks like the next few months are going to be a lot of fun. It’d be nice to keep an eye on all these seperate events because despite the division geographically I’m pretty confident that some of the topics, and perhaps members, will overlap.

I’m thinking a lot right now about how we can move the conversations to another level. I love the coffee and the chat, but it’d be nice to see if we can make a few things happen. Be a shame to waste the ideas that flow across the venues as the people that gather in them are way smarter than me. I think we are making small steps in that direction already and I have just one more meeting with Lloyd to confirm that the Tuttle will enter stage 2 on October 10th. Not a massive transition, but something akin to having the stabilisers removed from the social media bicycle.

This is a great time to dip your toes into this particular pool if you haven’t already. Come along to a Creative Coffee or Tuttle meeting – if we’re too far afield from you or the weekday early mornings or a stretch then start your own. On Thursday evening I’ll be at the Twestival (great idea, horrible name) so feel free to bend my ear on some of this or if the music is too loud we can just make frantic hand gestures at each other across the room…

Had no idea what to call this post and then iTunes coughed up Turn The Page by Bob Seger. Great song – Metallica covered it on Garage, Inc but with a lot less saxamaphone.

… was pretty damn good.

We had a huge turnout for the Tuttle Club. I got there around 10.30 and it was already standing room only. I spent the morning catching up with friends (which is a nice side effect of the Social Media Café) but failed miserably at meeting anyone new until our QR experts arrived for the Geek Lunch. By this time we were a small, but formidable little party.

Myself, Gia, Laura, Lee, Nik, Francine, Mecca, Suw, James, Martin, Andy, James, David and Kimm (we were also hoping to meet Anthony but he had to go back to Australia at short notice which was a shame). It was a nice range of expertise and interested geeks. The feedback so far has been great.

I think the most important thing that I took away from the discussion is that while Japan may be years ahead of us in their use of QR they haven’t really done anything inovative with the technology yet. It so quickly became accepted as part of day to day life that it kind of faded into the background. The same way that here we take a regular barcode for granted.

While others were more interested in the practical aspects of QR I’m hugely interested in making some very impractical projects so you’ll probably start seeing a lot more QR stuff around me.

Maybe even on me.

The most interesting thing that came up in conversation was when Mecca announced that Moo had opened up its API. This is a HUGE deal and I can’t wait to see what people come up with. Seeing as Moo have already been experimenting with matrix codes in their sticker books it was a logical step for them to open that procedure up to the users and they’ve done just that Richard Pope has done just that with the Barcode-Sticker-O-Matic.

I’m confident that this will be a big leap forward in generating interest in the codes. Once these little squiggly squares start turning up regularly at geek meets on moleskines and laptops things will get very interesting very quickly…

Then once the I-nigma reader gets embedded into your handset: BOOM.

Watch this space. And that one. And the one over there…

Please excuse the meat*.

I’m co-hosting a dialogue about QR codes at the Coach & Horses tomorrow afternoon. You can read a bit more about it here – Yeah, I’m now also blogging for The Tuttle Club.

I just got outed as an “Esteemed international social media playboy” too.

Elsewhere (ie Twitter) I also found out that a simple repetition of the word fuck on Twitter can lead to a STAB TRUCK echo. Something to mine there.

Oh and the cat had a better day than I did. Thank fuck I’m in the pub tomorrow.

* Cheers to James for sending on the Japanese QR pics from his mate Joe in Japan. If you’re into your mobile trickery then have a word with James at the next Tuttle meet or better yet go along to his Mobile Geeks of London event.