This week was mainly defined by meetings.

I met up with Dan Sutch, who is Head of Development at Futurelab to talk about various things but EventEye in particular. I’ve always been a little envious of Futurelab as they seemed to run so many cool projects and EventEye is destined to be another example of that. It was interesting to hear Dans’ plans for the product and my brain was whirling away during and after with ideas about taking a tool like that to market (especially with events tools being my main preoccupation already!). Futurelab have the benefit of a great innovative product, a strong reputation and access to some big names in media, industry and education so I have no doubt it will be a success.

Dan also very kindly agreed to speak at Bettr – which is shaping up rather brilliantly at the moment – I now have nine confirmed speakers all of whom will have interesting stories to tell. I am going to spend the first two weeks of September pretty much work on Bettr fulltime so I’ll be launching it properly around that time.

Thursday I had back-to-back meetings in London – kicking off with some light handover stuff with Ben who will be taking over the last remnants of my project activity – we talked at some length about the place for usability in the e-infrastructure work JISC is funded and I think/hope it was a useful discussion.

Then we had a team meeting that was a little strange for me as it was very much focused on various activities I won’t be involved in at all. In particular the large funding call that is going to be released in six weeks or so. It does look as if there is going to be some meeting organisation and some social web publicity work that I’ll get to do but the timing of my leave isn’t perfect for that so we’ll have to see what I can do next week.

I was then lucky enough to meet up with Alan Levine, CTO of the New Media Consortium and author of the CogDogBlog as he is briefly in the UK (though I did manage to miss him when he was actually in Bristol!). The NMC has been an organisation I have followed for many years and their Horizon Reports have been regularly on my reading list since they first started. In fact Alans blog was one of the first I subscribed to. It was really interesting to have a chat over a couple of pints of Bombardeir – especially hearing about some of his epub stuff first hand and also the distributed way in which the small NMC team are able to work (and their lack of formal meetings!)

Eventstreams has been going full steam ahead with Stef releasing new functions on a daily basis – I have written the blog post about it which I will publish this weekend sometime. I am also, along with Grace, going to push ahead with another event idea we have been discussing assuming we can get a financial backer for it.

I got a couple of knock-backs for jobs this week – one of which I really did expect to get an interview for so it does look more and more like I’m going to need to strike out on my own. I have had a very kind offer of free desk space back at Jiva if I do go in that direction which will make life much easier (despite the distraction of the effing table football!)