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Just got over last week’s RipCurl Boardmasters music and surf event where we launched MPORA.TV with great success.

The Boardmasters is part of the WQS surf competition with surfers competing to rack up points and boost their world rankings and European standing in the global competition to become the world’s best competitive surfer.

Alongside the surfing, in some surprisingly good waves, MPORA.TV filmed interviews with bands including the Pigeon Detectives, the Futureheads and the Young Knives, insane vert skateboarding, BMX demos and natural bikini beauties.

Chameleon’s consumer division secured coverage for MPORA.TV with media including the Mirror, Kiss, the Daily Star, MSN, VirginMedia.com, The Times, A1 Surf, Men’s Fitness, Maxim, Zoo and Marketing Week, as well as entertaining some very nice journos.

Some of us managed to get a couple of surfs in, which was a bonus too. Many thanks to everyone involved for a fantastic experience. It was a hard job but we all did it!

Last week BT published details of its proposed fibre-to-the home network with broadband connection speeds up to 10 times faster than its ADSL for 10 million homes throughout the UK within four years.

It will be able to invest in the fibre network by making a 10% return from ISPs wanting to provide their own services through the network. Like the roll out of ADSL “broadband” to other ISPs, BT still holds the keys to the motorway network.

10ish years ago, I worked with a Swede called Morre, who set up Sweden’s first website and advised its government on ecommerce and the internet. Around this time ADSL was rolling out in the UK. Morre said that the problem the UK had (and will have) is that the government doesn’t run the motorway network but BT does. If the government owned the dark fibre infrastructure outright and encouraged BT and its competitors to provide competitive “A-road” services on top, then the UK would have true broadband service and not the slow speeds we, as good British citizens, continue to put up with.

BT’s spokesmen argues that some broadband connections are slow because “ISPs have not bought enough bandwidth”. I imagine that’s because of the prices BT charges and it’s not in the company’s interest for them to enable competitors to offer superfast and efficient services.

I posted a while ago after an eForum conference that the problems the internet has should be left up to the brilliant minds that have created some of the greatest internet businesses to solve.

But I want to make clear that while I agree with a light regulatory touch so as not to stifle innovation on the Web, I don’t agree with businesses using the “technical excuse” to maintain a monopoly or widen the digital divide. (The technical excuse is when businesses say to government “oh no, it’s far too technical for you, let us sort it out..”)

We need some intervention now so that we don’t end up with a wider digital divide in terms of access speed and so we don’t continue to fall behind the Far East.

11 million UK internet users visted social media websites at least once last month according to eMarketer stats, from Marketing Vox

Will Google use Jaiku to kill Twitter, from TechCrunch UK - if it works for more than one million users then very likely!

YouTube amateur instruction video successes and stats, from the Guardian

Firms missing benefits from social media, from BBC Online based on new Gartner research report - more consolidation of disparate social media properties should help in the future

So we all crossed the finish line, well those who started! The rest cheered us from the pub. Yes, a bunch of us, very kindly sponsored by our clients hobbled across the finish line of the Crisis Square Mile run on Thursday evening. Here are some pictures to show the hardship, from limbering up in the taxi on the way to the start to reading the paper whilst running, we couldn’t resist! Thanks to everyone who sponsored us, we raised £425!

Great post from Ryan Carson demonstrating the benefits of Quik or Seesmic for the instant interview

Online ad spending in Europe maturing, from survey by IABEurope on eMarketer

Latest live onlinevideo numbers, from Ustream via Readwriteweb

Mobile web stats, from Computerworld report

10 mobile social networks, from RWW

Mobile phones expose human behaviour, from BBC Online

And in case you didn’t see all the coverage Chameleon got for Sniff here’s the Telegraph’s take

I came back from holiday last week to the usual mass of emails, conscious that I’d not really read any news while away (which was nice) and thinking “I need to update the blog”. Travelling to London on the Monday morning, I was gifted a lovely example of how internal communications needs to be improved in large organisations so employees understand how super-connected the world is.

I was sat on the train opposite a “high flyer” from one of the UK’s largest communications companies (x) who was on a conference call about a deal with one of the world’s largest business intelligence companies (y). She didn’t wish to be quiet on her call and announced to the whole carriage: “Well it sounds like y is as good as managing its data as x”.

I had my mobile with me and could have posted this annoucement straight to Twitter. I was still in holiday mode though and thought this would be cruel at the time. But a hardened hack might not be so charitable, particularly if the conversation is about something more juicy than data.

I’m sure there’s loads of examples of overhead conversations on trains but it’s similar to when you present at an event now, remember it’s not just to the 30 people in the room or in the carriage you’re talking to!

I attended the above conference today to hear what the presitgious speaker line up had to say about innovation. Here are a handful of comments from the likes of Chris Powell, Jonathan Kestenbaum, Tim Berners Lee (what a nice guy), Sir Bob Geldof, Sam Pitrada, Helen Alexander, and Rt Hon Gordon Brown. You choose which ones you support!

Chris Powell, Chairman, NESTA

Innovation is a necessity to address the social and economic difficulties faced today
Need to stimulate and push innovation

Johnathan Kestenbaum, CEO, NESTA

Liberate innovation in the UK
NESTA is the source of authority on how innovation can flourish in this country

Quoted Rober Kennedy “The future belongs to those with passion, reason, courage.”

Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the world wide web

Took his inspiration from a book called ‘Enquire Within for Everything’
Commenting on him journalist Jonathan Freedland said “he’s done more to change the world than any politician”
TBL said the following:
Give your people innovation time. Most ideas come from the boss not saying yes but more importantly not saying no!
Technology should be neutral and not intefere with how people want to interact
I want the web to support society and democracy
There are more web pages than neurons in your brain
I made the web to solve working in dispersed groups
Innovation is a collective rather than about individuals
It’s about collaboration

Sir Bob Geldof

This is a small crowd for me as I’m a global megastar (tongue in cheek - he’d just arrived from Germany where he’d played to millions)
Necessity must be the mother of innovation. A mother’s desparation is the father of necessity.
We are running out of everything, air, water, food, so never more than before innovation is everything
Poverty is shit
Has Britain become a risk averse nation?
We so fear failure no one tries anymore - the essence of entrepeneurialism is to try and fail
Innovation is about collaboration
The political climate doesn’t give it to us anymore
Political and social paradym must be about dialogue and cooperation
You don’t die of drout you die of politics
We need our social entrepeneurs to be innovating and progressing, our politicians and financial institutions supporting it. Is this happening? No.
All change comes from the self

Sam Pitroda, Chairman, National Knowledge Commission, India

India has 10m new phones every month
Invention is for mankind
Innovation requires a lot of collaboration
Innovation is creativity, curiosity and collaboration
There’s too much greed in this world

The panel, when asked the one thing Gordon Brown should do, answered as follows:

Sam Pitroda - encourage risk takers, visionaries
Helen Alexander (CEO The Economist Group) - get out of the way……clarified with get the 60 year olds out of the way, be less institutionalised
Bob Geldof - all of the above plus - to put his intelligence to find a political rhetoric to match the absolute needs of this country in words that make sense

Rt Hon Gordon Brown, Prime Minister

I pledge to you that we will do our best to break down the barriers that exist [to innovation]

Google’s Friend Connect launched this week with big claims to socialise every website, from BBC Online

Did Twitter break China earthquake news?, from BBC Online

Techcrunch confirmed Comcast bought Plaxo this week

Disqus and Seesmic launch video comments, from a VC

Twitter app Twitbuzz

Facebook raises $100m to expand servers from Mark Sweeney at the Guardian

Interesting take on our generation of Web heads, from Readwriteweb

Engaging post on Web 2.0/social media by Dennis Howlett who works entirely “in the cloud”

Jack Dangermond of ESRI Inc gave a keynote speech at Where 2.0 this week on the future of GIS, here he is interviewed on Government Technology earlier in the year giving his vision

We went to watch an amazing performance this week at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol that merges dance, theatre and video. If you get a chance to see it or the theatre company, Precarious, it’s well worth it. The production seamlessly merges video images within the choreography and acting of the troupe, providing an artistic reminder of how intertwined our real lives are with the virtual world. The video above gives a taster. Wait until two minutes or more in to get a real idea of how the projections are used including the woman’s dance in a birdcage.

Google possibly launching Friend Connect platform tomorrow to push profile information into third party websites, from Techcrunch

…following MySpace annoucement on data portability this week, from BBC Online

Lots of social search engines getting hype this week like Flock and Yahoo Glue beta

Facebook counteracts privacy bandwagon with child safety announcement, from BBC Online

European mobile TV stats from New York Times

Couple of interesting P2P stories from Readwriteweb who says (like Skype) P2P may be the only model that could disrupt Google and stats on latest traffic from Wired via Jemima Kiss
Couldn’t post without a Twitter story, stats on microblogs, from RWW

Last another facsinating New York Times story about journalist, Michelle Slatalla, and her 10 year old daughter’s social media habits, via Danah Boyd