Hot on the heels of the First Tuesday club for IT venture capitalists comes Wireless Wednesday for all of the mobile commerce gurus.
The First Tuesday Club, so named because it is held on the first Tuesday of each month, was formed in London almost two years ago as a method of putting venture capitalists together with IT developers.
It was introduced to Australia earlier this year and is now firmly entrenched in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
Now the organisers of the FTC are getting the industry wired over Wireless Wednesday, a monthly get-together for anybody interested in mobile commerce. And with predictions that up to a billion people will be connecting to the Internet wirelessly by 2003 it is obviously a hit.
The first meeting in Sydney attracted 200 people including representatives from major investment banks, venture capitalists and a wide sprinkling of entrepreneurs.
Coordinator Oscar Trimboli says the aim of WW is to foster networking, development and the funding of m-commerce ventures.
He said Australia had to look to global markets to benchmark ideas and utilise the WW network as a starting point to distribute concepts. Until now, apart from major conferences, there had been no industry event or forum that could act as a meeting place and catalyst for the emerging market.
Like the first Tuesday Club, Wireless Wednesday is open to all industry professionals, but participants still need to be invited to get in and it is only after the invitation is accepted that they are told where the next meeting will be.
First Tuesday Regional Coordinator for Australia and New Zealand, Randal Leeb-du Toit, said the event was fully booked within a few weeks of the announcement to the industry of its introduction to Sydney.
He said the feedback to date had been extremely positive. Wireless Wednesday is being held on the last Wednesday of the month.
Who knows what the organisers will come up with next? They still have a few weeks to play with and that leaves space for a Terabyte Thursday for storage network specialists, a F.A.T Friday for operating system gurus, and a Microsoft Monday for people who hate... er, Mondays.
