As we near the launch there are some great pieces starting to hit the wire…

Currybet start with this great set of predictions, of which I’d love to see more - then follows up with an interesting commentary on the DRM debate.

In a nutshell, my opinion for the last decade has been;
DRM has never, nor will ever, have anything to do with technology 

It’s like putting your content into those emergency “break glass to access hammer to smash window” containers (except they serve a purpose and work better).  There are smarter, better, open, cheaper ways of protecting revenue/making money to either recoup your investment or to invest in more things.

I wish everyone the best for the (long awaited) launch, and hope that the various people who make policy decisions listen to their development teams, before they throttle the rest of the life out of their own people and innovation at the beeb

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change.”
(unsourced, but attributed to Darwin)

More congrat’s to MySociety on their continuous setting of the bar on social engagement - this is the 3rd year they’ve won the Civic Society award. They’re a tough bunch to beat, what with their great ideas and obsessive dedication - now, who’s going to start competing with them?

At the ceremony last night we were discussing that everyone attending drives projects forward without even realising how motiviated they are - especially hard when you are trying to pass on the running of projects to others…

How can the awards end up with some funding for both the winners and the nominees to help incentivise and nurture more projects?

The “Number 10 petitions site” won the Modernising Government award, and FixMyStreet won the Contribution to Civic Society award.

“The judges were impressed at the open source nature of the petitions site, and the “deceptive simplicity” of FixMyStreet. “

I sold my streaming media company, Tornado, to Servecast in 2003 in a cash deal.  At the time Tornado had doubled its revenues year-on-year since 1999. For a variety of reasons, we sold at what was probably the low point of the whole market.

This cash deal of £22m is based on just £2.5m revenues from Servecast. In 2003, Tornado’s turnover was about a quarter of that and I had substantial equity.

It’s been amazing to see the industry turn around and accelerate so quickly, and a pity sold when we did.

[added to list of almost-millionaire stories]

Courtesy of The Economist (click for hi-res).

The USA is the number one for petrol consumption at just under 1.4 billion liters a day.

Live Earth is live. I’m wondering what it’d be like if it’d been held by Global Cool instead of Al Gore… my weekend would certainly have been a bit more stressful for a start - the original reason GC hired me was to put together a webcast “not dissimilar” to Live Earth, but GC didn’t make it happen.

A bit weird to see a lot of the ideas we put together 12-18 months ago on screen.

Also interesting to see sponsors MSN and Chevy - and Chevy really plugging their new “eco friendly” 30mpg cars… 30mpg… it’s amazing to see 30mpg plugged as in any way “good performance”. MSN seems to just be plugging the Zune (sigh), but good to see Philips doing the light bulb “pledge”, albeit using a multi-megabyte flash animation instead of Pledgebank…

Still, I’m very intrigued to find out how much tangible difference an event of this scale might make. It’s certainly not easy to predict.

One geek factoid - MSN are also heavily plugging Internet Explorer in the webcast, with a different version for non-IE browsers. Screenshots below (click for full resolution);

The welcome screen on Firefox:

The webcast console on Firefox:

The webcast console on Internet Explorer: