Trust the United Kingdom to out do the American's, Scoble believes the biggest geek dinner in the states was 60. While tonight's Geek Dinner in London had about 200 people in total. No wonder Scoble and his wife are so happy in the picture above. Good night, good people, good conversation, shame about the food. Next time we'll have to get somewhere much better for 20 pounds a head.
So how did the night go, well generally pretty good. I was one of the first ones there because I had finished up what I was doing else where earlier that expected. The whole event took place on the top floor of the Texas Embassy which was big enough for more people that 200 but felt good with the people who turned up. By 8pm there were over 100 people and some well known names from around London. Scoble was also walking around a bit but was surrounded by a circle of people who wanted to talk to him about different topics. Small amounts of food was being circulated and people were happily buying drinks from the ok-ish price bar. I think around 9pm was when the real food was rolled out. I say real but I honestly dont mean real! A mixture of Tex-mex and hints of Mexican spices were involved but honestly I dont think it was eatable. During this time I had a really good conversation with a guy from Deutsche Bank. I cant remember his name but we were talking about emergance inside of companies and why ceo's are so cut off from whats actually going on. A lot of the rules of the cluetrain manifesto was discussed during our long discussion over dinner. Ben Metcalfe somewhere along the line ended the conversation and we started talking about how great backstage.bbc.co.uk is. At somepoint scoble stood up and gave a really brief speech which was nicely recorded by Jon Kosso at Podbat.com. After which there was little time left and everyone started making there way home. During the geek dinner I finally met Kosso as mentioned before, Tom Coats again, Dr Jo Twist at long last, Hugh MacLeod, Robert Scoble and many many others…
The Night was Highly recommended specially in the light of the Apple announcement (which I have yet to talk about on my blog) and the secret Microsoft announcement which is meant to happen at Gnomedex soon. Something to do with RSS aggregation and podcasting is what a lot of people are saying including Scoble himself. There are tons of photos on the geek dinner flickr group and the wiki has changed to reflect the post event status.