On Thursday night, I went to a networking event in London called “Chinwag.” The idea of this was to get to know some of the people “in the business” and make some links that later we could form a kind of symbiotic business relationship. It also gives us a better feel for the scope of technology, and we get to talk about what’s hot and whats not in the tech/design/media world.

It was a good event, with around 2,000 attendees. There was free booze (well, for a long while there was…) and free food. I met many interesting people, though I must admit it was Jof who did most of the forging ahead and meeting new people, I opted to follow a short while later and talk specifics.

As I already said - it was a good event. It would have been brilliant if it wasn’t for the poor organisation of the door. We queued to get in for the best part of a hour! They were checking people off against their registered email addresses, which were printed onto paper (yes you heard me - dead trees!), which they had to flick through to check, at around 50 email addresses per sheet. The sheets were in mostly alphabetical order, but it still took a while to look through - I think part of the reason might have been the time taken to actually understand what the visitor was saying their email address was. One pile of paper was email addresses starting A-M and the other N-Z. For some reason the N-Z queue seemed to move a lot later, I wonder if that says something about English email addresses/first names.

We finally got back to Jof’s house in Kent at around 1am, and I slept in the latest that I had in a good while - 9:30am!