In a few moments, I am flying to Asia again. While the whole world is looking at the Olympics in China, my plane is headed to South Korea. I found a book to occupy my mind for the time at the airport, but I couldn’t help letting my thoughts run away with me for a moment, as I think back of my time in Amsterdam the last few weeks, and how I got impressed with the living web scene over there. I talked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and blogged about a lot of companies, noticing a lot of social activity and enthusiasm, maybe the reason why the list of interesting domestic startups is growing and growing. When you have a chance, I’d recommend you to visit the following meetups:

Work, creativity and a lot of beer

1. Visit opencoffee while you are out there, Opencoffee Amsterdam is held every Thursday morning in the Coffee Company @ de Nieuwe Doelenstraat (next to cafe de Jaren). Nice place to meet entrepreneurs in an informal way on a weekly basis!
2. I met Peter Robinett in the office, a nice guy from Silicon Valley that organizes Lunch 2.0 meetings in the Netherlands. The concept is this: web startups can host a location, provide lunch and tell about their service or product. You get to meet the people, and have a great lunch… what else do you want?! Unfortunately, the meetings are monthly, so I just missed it. But it sounds like fun, take a look if you can. Peter also organizes the iPhone Dev Camp in the old Volkskrant building in the Mediamatic offices in Duintjer CS. on August 30th.
3. If you like social sports, keep a close eye to the guys from thenextweb.org. In the winter they organized an event called Bowlr, and this summer they organize “Play” on the 23rd of August. Play is a fun (and FREE!) meetup to play pentanque. “The Next Web PLAY Petanque tournament is about fun, drinking, trash talking, networking, pitching.” Otherwise its always a good idea to plan for TheNextWeb conference on the 16th and 17th of April 2009, I hope to be blogging there next year so maybe we can meetup!

• Where is the party? Bring some beers and go to some parties! I am thinking back to July 22nd, when we met Mike Butcher at the Ebuddy/Techcrunch Party. Free beers and great food. Met entrepreneurs from The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and Belgium. The party continued at the pking bar to find out Mike Butcher is a nice guy! So as a last recommendation, find out what is going on at night, ask for parties and meet up with these nice people, there are many fine conferences and challenges out there too!

I wonder what the conferences and meetups in Korea will bring, and hope for an inspirational experience just like the one I had in the Netherlands. I start to wonder how many people will come to my opencoffee meetings – only to realize that the flight is long, so I can better start reading again… I guess we will see with some time… Stay tuned!