Seattle Lunch 2.0

A couple of years ago I worked in downtown Seattle and every summer in downtown Seattle there are the Out To Lunch Concert Series. These are a great way for the artistically inclined Seattlites to enjoy a summer afternoon listening to great music during the week. These lunches are hosted by Seattle businesses and usually held outside…so if you go to lunch anywhere near the music your get to enjoy it.

Well, this idea of gathering like minded people from around town to share lunch together is replicated in the lunch 2.0 series….A lunch 2.0 event is hosted by a local company, the local tech community is invited, there is a good amount of eating, networking, and general enjoyment to be had, and afterwards everyone can go back to doing their own thing at their own companies. To be more precise, the definition from the originators is….

Lunch 2.0 A social phenomenon referring to a migration of web 2.0 company employees to other offices around the Silicon Valley Seattle area; characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share food and ideas, and “the lunch as a conversation.”

Down in the Valley this Lunch 2.0 thing has been a hit! From web companies, to software companies, to just about any company that wants to connect with the web 2.0, blogger, podcaster community (including HDS, AOL – Mountain View, LinkedIn, Microsoft – Mountain View, Yahoo, etc). So what about the other areas where startups have been abundant? What about the mothership to some of these companies? What about the huge crowds that swarm events like Mind Camp, ignite, and gnomedex? What about casual Lunch 2.0 events in cities like Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, or Boston? These are all the cities that sit right alongside the Valley as THE place to start a 2.0 company.

So why aren’t Zillow, TheCobaltGroup, GearLive, WaMu, Pixpulse, Lockdown, Redfin, Bsquare, Treemo, LexisNexis Microsoft, Nintendo, Farecast, InfoSpace, WetPaint, Attachmate, Curious Office, Classmates, ProgrammableWeb, Google – Kirkland, BlueDot, Oracle, JamGlue, PopcapGames, MessageGate, Escapia, Pluggd, AOL – Seattle, Zoji, Fluke, Judy’s Book, Clearswift, Sampa, Impinj, Menuism, F5, LexBlog, Sun, Findory, Madrona, mPire, Motorola – Redmond, Limeade, Amazon, Jobster, Premera, iLike, Vulcan, Real, Adic, Twango, Adobe, Ontela, Denali, SecondSpace, EMC – Bellevue, UrbanSpoon, AMD, OneByOneMedia, Aditi, 3Sharp, Boeing, Newvine, Avanade, eyejot, Intel, Mixxer, XO Communications, eDiscovery Law, ZenZui, ZooDango, Isomedia, Mixpo, Loudeye Trailfire, eProject, Shelfari, Tmobile ImageKind, comcast, PicNik, Azaleos, BagBorroworsteal, Expedia, Trumba, Lucid8, Payscale, IBM – Kirkland/Seattle BuddyTV, Bocada, TheRobotCoop, Safeharbor, Vizrea, Isilon, Shackprices, Concur, OthersOnline, Jetstream, SmartSheet, X10, Wishpot, Opsware, GridNetworks, Clearwire, Synapse, CA, TrenchMice, Cingular, Quantum, and all the other Seattle Tech or startup companies…

I know, I know, there are the WSA events where people fight over Google and Microsoft…..or you can go get coffee with some startup entrepreneurs ……but for the actual techies…. developers, bloggers, technologists, server admins, PMs, entrepreneurs, etc, etc….we need a better easier way to get together for lunch. We need a better way to enhance our local tech community…maybe then Hugh won’t decline attending a Seattle Geek Dinner.

So who wants to sponsor a lunch 2.0 event here in the greater Seattle area?