I was at Bitcoin London Conf in 2012 and went to have a beer with friends to the nearest pub last evening. I met a guy there (don't remember his name. something like Jeff or John, maybe).
He told me about ring signatures and mentioned something about CryptoNote. I felt interested and tried to ask him for more details. He was with a company too(10 or 12 people meetup) so our conversation was rather short. We chatted a bit and he gave me a card with .onion website address. He said it would be a currency of the future and I had to mine it.

Another thing i just stumbled on is they mentioned a meeting somewhere in London around Sept. 2012. Around the same time there was a Bitcoin Conference in the same city.

https://sites.google.com/a/bitcoin2012.com/homepage/speakers