Blogger dinners are the new press conferences. They’re intimate. They encourage conversation. But more importantly, they create a very human bond between the people behind the brand and those covering the industry.

I was invited to attend a very special dinner at the Village Pub along with several prominent reporters, bloggers and online influencers hosted by FON.

The dinner served as a preview for the company’s new Fonera 2.0n WiFi Router that was officially introduced today.

The Fonera 2.0n WiFi router combines FON’s proprietary, unique WiFi sharing and money making features with integration and management of popular social services such as YouTube, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, BitTorrent, RapidShare, and other content — even while users’ PCs are off.

Now anyone can now upload, download and sync all of their Web apps while away from home or the office, without getting bogged down for hours waiting for something to load.

The Fonera 2.0n is available now.

I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story:

Michael Arrington and Loic Le Meur

Paul Boutin of VentureBeat/New York Times and Martin Varsavsky of FON

Martin Giles of The Economist

Dave McClure

Jennifer Leggio of ZDNet

Robert Scoble and Jeremiah Owyang

Loic, iJustine, Randi Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey

For additional pictures from the FON blogger dinner, please visit my album on Flickr.

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Now available! (click to purchase):

by Brian Solis

Robert Scoble and Louis Gray

Last night during a small, but memorable dinner, we all wondered who would leak the news, Robert Scoble was leaving FastCompany. The story is live on TechCrunch right now and according to the story, Scoble confirmed with Mike sometime before the evening was over.

Indeed Robert Scoble is leaving his full time job at FastCompany.tv to introduce, well, we’ll let him tell you at SXSW. He’ll continue to write a column for FastCompany in the future.

Scoble continues the story in his post, “Why I haven’t posted for two weeks.”

I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story…

(L to R) Brian Solis, Jeremiah Owyang, Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur, Barak Hachamov of My6Sense, Harry McCracken, Deb Schultz, Eliane Fiolet

JD Lasica

Harry McCracken

Deb Schultz

Hashtag

Yoav Shoham and Eliane Fiolet

To see the rest of the pictures from the My6Sense Blogger Dinner, please visit my album on Flickr.

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by Brian Solis

Julia Allison, Mary Rambin, Meghan Asha of NonSociety

The Ultimate Blogger Dinner during CES 2009 was a refreshing and enriching opportunity to connect with incredible bloggers, business leaders, social media professionals and everyone in between.

Hosted by Social Media Club and Lenovo at the Aquaknox restaurant in the Venetian during CES, the dinners and the ambiance inspired energizing conversations and fantastic pictures.

Scott Monty and Chris Heuer

Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford

Ford executive team

Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb

Tom Foremski

Jeffrey Sass

Wesley Faulkner of AMD

Cheryl Contee

Alan Mulally and and Chris Heuer

For more pictures, please visit my album on Flickr.

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by Brian Solis

The Ultimate Blogger Dinner is being hosted by Social Media Club and Lenovo at the Aquaknox restaurant in the Venetian during CES on Wednesday January 8, Thursday January 9 and Friday January 10. We are inviting a limited number of bloggers to join us from 830 pm to 11. You can request your invitation here.

Open Bar…

Open WiFi…

Open Kitchen…

During the day, the space is being used as a Lenovo meeting space, so Lenovo products and signage will be placed throughout the the room. However, there will not be any presentations, just conversations with other bloggers and social media professionals.

UPDATE: We have room for two more sponsors. The fees are extremely affordable and can go towards one, two, or all three nights. Please contact chris [at] socialmediaclub [dot] com . Thanks, we could use your support!

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