I’m getting rather excited about the MIR Developer event this Thursday. One of the big downsides for me about putting on large ‘unlimited drinks’ style events is that I spend the whole evening saying ‘hi’ to the hundreds of people who come along… only to not *actually* meet anyone.
Everybody else chats amongst the heave of mobile geniuses and I stand near the front ready to welcome folk. Whilst everyone else is having a wicked time at the bar, I’m lucky if I get through a single beer.
This isn’t typically an issue. It’s a nice thing to do for the industry, I think. But in terms of contentf or the site — it’s a big challenge.
Hence the Developer Event concept. If you haven’t read about it yet, here’s the background. A quick primer: 15 representatives from companies specialising in mobile development in one room. Talking to each other. Plus we’ll have the camera so I can interview every.single.attendee on film and get it up on to the site the following week.
Not only will there be — I hope — a good bit of networking, but we’ll be bringing the wider MIR audience something of value: Direct, unfiltered introductions, overview and perspective from London’s mobile developers.
We’ll be duplicating this in Paris in March (independently of our MIR Show trips abroad – Rome this Saturday).
It’s all made possible by the wickedly good support of DeviceAnywhere. I’ve asked two of their British representatives to pop by and bring along a laptop showing off the service working. As an added bonus, I’ve got Sam and David from DeviceAnywhere to offer al attendees an extended free trial of the service. That’ll be useful for anyone who does mobile development and wants to know how their service works on a huge range of handsets internationally.
We were entirely full but one chap’s had to go back to Scotland urgently and the other is no longer in the country — so if you’d like to come along, please shoot me over an email and we’ll get you on the list. I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.
To qualify you need to work for a company that develops ‘stuff’ in the mobile industry. Applications, services — that sort of thing. And you need to be able to get to London on Thursday evening.
As a reminder, we’re holding the event at Members’ Club, One Alfred Place. We’ve got one of the board rooms (minus the board tables for the evening) so it’ll be intimate — in the context of being able to meet everyone — and we’ll also have food and drink.
I’m just working out what sort of ‘canapes’ we want. I’m leaning HEAVILY toward the mini cheeseburgers. My heart always jumps when I’m at an event being faced with some sort of mushroom/pate/volevont/crab/monstrosity when a waiter brings out a massive plateful of mini burgers. COME ON.
So we’ll have food and drink. We’ll have the video camera setup. The MIR team will be on hand, we’ll have some cool DeviceAnywhere stuff to poke about with and we’ll have talented mobile geniuses to talk to. Bring it on.