I held open office hours for the first time today at the Cosi in Kendall Square.  It was a casual couple hours chatting with folks about their startups, startup ideas, and the Boston tech eco-system.

A couple thoughts:

1. It’s always amazing how much I learn from these sorts of encounters and how it elevates my thinking.  For example, I’ve always thought that iphone games and apps are most successful when they embrace the uniqueness (and constraints) of the medium.  But until my conversation today, I hadn’t given much thought about what that really should mean in a practical sense.  My dumb idea of the day: imagine earning farmville credits by launching an iphone app and taking a picture of a cow, or a particular brand of milk 🙂  Like I said, I just started thinking about this.

2. There is a big co-working movement that’s been building in Boston recently.  From Betahouse, to DogPatchLabs, to BzzAgent, to a new one that might be starting up at MIT that I just heard about.  I think this is great – entrepreneurs in this area feel starved of community and love to have a place to congregate and get their work done.  It would be interesting if someone could coordinate a demo day between all the tenants of these spaces and invite investors, angels, students, press, etc.

3. I liked this experiment, but need to think more about how to make it sustainable, recurring, and most helpful.  My thinking now is that I’m going to start doing this twice a month.  I also think that I might try a few different locations from time to time, maybe even on the campuses of MIT or Harvard (or others as well).  I’m curious to hear what locations would make the most sense for this and what student organizations and research labs I should connect with to promote this.