Speaking of which, I pre-ordered 40 beers. You never know. I know there’s only 15 folk due across the evening, but… we can’t be scrimping. They’ve got a fully stocked bar (and restaurant) so whatever the attendees choice of tipple, the chaps at the bar will be able to assist.

And although the event begins at 7.30pm, the One Alfred Place staff are bringing a selection of sausages, mini cheeseburgers and scampi things (and a few others) from 8pm.

A few have been asking about the choice of venue: One Alfred Place. Well, it’s just off Tottenham Court Road — from memory, about fourth right if you’re walking up from Tottenham Court tube station. We’ve got one of their ‘spaces’ for the evening — it’s called The Quiet Space — which will be nothing of the sort when we’re there. It’s a big yet intimate setting for a spot of networking, beers and on-camera interviews.

Here’s an overview of the venue from their YouTube channel:

Once again, copious thanks to DeviceAnywhere who’re helping support our Developer Events.

I’m just about to send out a reminder of details to all the attendees so standby to receive.

And standby for the video interviews next week!

Standby for the Fail Whale. But in a good way.

Either Twitter has some ahhh-bsolutely brilliant public relations chaps working their magic here in the UK; or the platform is really beginning to hit critical mass. Newspapers and their respective websites are alive with Twitter introductions. Half the BBC news reporters are on Twitter during live broadcasts. It’s getting big.

So big that the likes of Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) are hitting it big time. Fry just zoomed straight by the 50,000 follower mark. The guy is developing some *serious* real time influence.

At the beginning of the month I posted a note about Twitter being ‘brilliant, brilliant, brilliant for famous people‘ and it that story I speculated upon this matter:

I can see a huge growth for Twitter in this area in terms of attracting the normobs. The folk who don’t understand and simply don’t care about Twitter. But they care about celebrities and they’ll most certainly tune in directly if they are educated enough about it.

Speaking of which, it appears that Jonathan Ross (@wossy) has asked if Stephen Fry — appearing on Ross’ new show this month — would be interested in Twittering live during the show.

If that happens, you can now leverage the X million people watching BBC1 and get’em signed up to Twitter and your feed.

Fast forward a few weeks and here’s a prediction that MIR technical contributor, Dan Lane, postulated last night on Facebook:

Prediction: Twitter will go down at about 10:30 – 11pm GMT tomorrow if @wossy talks to @stephenfry about it on his show.

For those of you reading from the re-born United States (well done on electing someone who can speak assertively in public), you might not know Jonathan Ross.

He’s a broadcaster here in the UK. One of the highest paid. Uber-well known across the mainstream media with various television and radio shows.

Jonathan, having taken a leave of absence because of a stunt-gone-wrong, magnified by a previously bored mainstream media, is back with his Friday night show. Think David-Letterman-Sort-Of.

He’s got Stephen Fry on the show this week (more details about the show). We know this because Fry and Jonathan have been discussing the fact publicly on Twitter. Indeed the other day I followed Stephen’s array of comments about the filming process.

Well, a few hours ago, Ross stated on his Twitter feed that he and his guests ‘discussed Twitter’:

Indeed, Tom Cruise — another guest on the show (hugely and literally overshadowed by Stephen Fry) — ‘might sign up’. I think it would do him good to do so. Almost everything we read about Tom Cruise in the mainstream media consists of a load of stale rubbish about him jumping on a sofa.

So.

They discussed Twitter. Jonathan, Stephen — and, from that Tweet, even Maverick himself.

Did they even ‘Tweet’ with each other during the filming of the show?

If any of this gets on air… If there’s any attempt at explanation — particularly by the gifted communicator that is Mr Fry — then I think Twitter is about to begin a march toward an impressive UK zenith. Millions of folk watch Jonathan Ross’ show.

Millions more will tune in ‘to see what happens’ having been given a build up by the rest of the shocked-and-saddened-from-Surrey brigade appalled by Jonathan’s ‘behaviour’ (here’s the background).

And millions will hit up Twitter and have-a-go, if it’s explained properly, if Stephen gives a decent enough advert. Indeed, the knowledge that you can get unadulterated communications from Wossy and Fry is likely to send their followers skyrocketing beyond even Scobleizer proportions.

Exciting. Very exciting.

I’ll be watching. I’ll maybe even watch live.

And if we see the Fail Whale from the millions of folk logging on to Twitter simultaneously… great. Great because, well, the Twitter engineers really have done a good job recently. I haven’t seen the Fail Whale image for months myself. And if we begin seeing it tomorrow night, that’ll indicate that there’s a ton of new Twitterers about to join us.

Follow Mobile Industry Review news story updates here: @MIReview

Follow me personally here: @ew4n.

Update: Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross did discuss Twitter — briefly — on the show. Not enough to explain the concept to the normobs though. One or two people appear to have noticed a bit of a slowing of Twitter as a result. Fry’s followers have jumped by about 10k. Good. But clearly not indicative of a huge normob shift to Twitter.

We run AdMob advertising code on the Mobile Industry Review ‘mobile’ version of the site.

If you wanted to see what it looks like when you get a payment from them, here we go:

Almost $33 dollars of pure joy for the month!

Swedish Beers, the networking event, is 7 years old.

MoMo London (Mobile Monday London) is 3 years old.

And they’re having a joint-birthday celebration.

And we’re doing our first ever MIR Show LIVE tonight.

The chaps are excited. Dan is wearing his pearls. James will be sporting his shades, and I’m pretty sure Ben will be wearing one of his sharp suits.

Tonight’s event is a chat show featuring industry luminaries such as Mike Short of o2, Russell Buckley of AdMob and Bill Thompson from the BBC’s Digital Planet. They’re going to be managed — or hosted — by Tim Green, Editor of Mobile Entertainment Magazine. And in the middle — slap bang in the middle — we’re going to be filming a live segment on stage.

We’re also on the hunt for interesting mobile related stuff and I’m going to get James to do a Normob walkabout, so if you’d like to get on camera, look for us and say hi…

I know that quite a few Mobile Industry Review readers will be pleased to see that Trutap now have support for Google Talk too. Let me hand over to their CTO, Carl, for an update:

- – - – -

Ewan,

Great catching up last week @ the Smartphone show, as promised, more Trutap news for you tonight…

The team here in Kings X have just rolled out a load more IM clients across Trutap (as promised in my last post on the site from the Hornet Content news). From today our global users, over 250K since launch 11 months ago, can now enjoy Facebook Chat, Google Talk (yeah, took us a while), Rediff Bol (big in India) and Jabber services, all alongside the existing MSN, Yahoo!, AIM and ICQ messenger services.

We’re not just finishing there though. In the next few weeks we’ll be adding even more IM clients, including MySpace, Gadu-Gadu, LiveJournal IM, Bonjour, Groupwise, IRC, XMPP, Sametime and Zephyr. So in all, Trutap users will have the choice of about 17 IM clients, I think that’s fair to say, more than any other mobile application in the world! I also have some others planned after that…

Why? you might ask… We know that our users have their preferred IM clients and from research they don’t want to keep opening multiple apps one at a time, we bring all of them easily in one place. One of the best parts about the new IM clients is the fact that they’re already available in the current application, so users won’t need to upgrade the app to find their favourite IM.

Finally, Facebook haven’t released their chat client on the “people’s phones” yet, so I am expecting this to go down well with the main stream!

Speak soon, new client next…

Carl.

- – - – -

Carl, nice one — we’re actually about to put up the vid we took of you last week at the Symbian Smartphone show. This is super news — you’re creating a truly valuable service there. I’m really looking forward to seeing the new Trutap client!

By the way, we recently added Carl to the Who’s Who in Mobile list. Check out his entry here.

Chinwag are putting on an excellent evening. Here are the details:

- – - – -

Is an alliance of mobile search and location-based services (LBS) poised to take the consumer experience and wireless marketing world by storm?

Where is mobile marketing in relation to search and LBS, and how can they connect? Are the market and the consumer ready? Are business models primed to go, and the value chain in place?

Are brands missing an opportunity with search and location-based services, or wisely biding their time?

Join us on 7th October to explore the issues and opportunities created by search on-the-go and LBS.

What does it all mean for marketers, brands and technology platforms?

Come along, quiz our panel and have your say on the trends in this emerging space…

http://www.chinwag.com/live/search-lbs

## SPEAKERS ##

Felix Petersen – Co-founder, Plazes / Head of Product Management, Social Activities, Nokia
Chris Moisan – Product & Market Development Manager, Taptu
Andrew Scott – Co-founder, Rummble
Peggy-Anne Salz – Chief Analyst & Producer, MSearchGroove
Adrian Drury – Head of Commercial Strategy & Business Development, The Cloud
CHAIR: Jo Rabin – Consultant & Co-Founder of MoMo London

(Complimentary drinks and snacks will be served)

## TICKETS ##
£40+VAT

## BOOKINGS & MORE INFO ##
http://www.chinwag.com/live/search-lbs

## TIME ##
6.00pm-8.30pm (arrive early for complimentary drinks & snacks)

## VENUE ##
The Slug & Lettuce, 80-82 Wardour St, London, W1F 0TG.

## ABOUT CHINWAG’S EVENTS ##

Chinwag Live is a new series of panel events founded to cast light on trends in the digital media and marketing industry. Chinwag Clinics are focused, collaborative consultancies for digital professionals.
http://live.chinwag.com/