We’re working with Provokateur on a project called ACME Climate Action. More information coming soon…

“Look for things that are evil, broken or stupid. These are usually great opportunities.” Paul Graham, Y Combinator

Last Monday I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford event at the Saïd Business School, part of Oxford University. For those of you unaware it does exactly what it says on the can: it brings a wide range of entrepreneurs, thinkers and investors from Silicon Valley companies. It was a fun, stimulating and inspirational day, infused with a great enthusiasm and optimism imported directly from California.

Guests included Chris Sacca from Google, Biz Stone from Blogger/Twitter, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn, and a whole host of others.

The most exciting element to all this was the pervasive sense of excitement that everyone speaking at the event still had for the web and it’s possibilities. Their were many events throughout the day, but in particular Paul Graham and Jerry Sanders stood-out. It made me yearn to move out to Silicon Valley and soak up some of that pure optimism.

The most depressing element was realising what a terrible place Britain is for starting web companies and gaining investment relative to Silicon Valley. It was made clear that access to possibilities are so much greater there than here. A group of ex-pat ex-Oxford students from Auctomatic and YouNoodle were there discussing their start-up experiences in the UK and then Silicon Valley. They tried to find positives about the UK culture, but they were not easy to find. Why is this? No one seemed to have a clear answer, but themes of fear of failure, cynicism, bureaucracy and lack of ambition kept on coming up. Sadly I can only find this too easy to believe. Maybe that’s just the way we are.

The culture of the UK media and the web is still so different to the US. While this is clearly a good thing in some respects (we should not become homogenous with the US or indulge ourselves in ‘groupthink’), we appear to fixate on gimmicks and tabloid-style stories. Meanwhile, the US mainstream media takes the web business and innovation much more seriously. In general (and what FoxLand mainly caters towards), the UK’s web business is based around what existing organisations are doing with the web. For our own Silicon Valley-style business culture to really take-off, we need to start acting and thinking big, with more ambition and less concern about failure.

As an aside, the day included a ‘garage’ event wherein I sat in with university students brainstorming the conundrum of how to make start-ups more attractive than large corporates. While this was not a problem I would have anticipated – I would have guessed that to students a start-up would have been an easy choice over a giant anonymous company – I was wrong. Apparently it is hard to persuade Oxford graduates of the benefits to do anything beyond law, accountancy and the big consultancies.

More about the event can be read on the Guardian’s PDA blog, The Telegraph, and New Scientist.

Many thanks to the journalist Sarah Barrell who I came with as a guest.

Update: the BBC on the event.

TPdb (Targeted Proteins Database) is a project we have been working on since September 2006 and we are finally able to begin to reveal some of its features and design. The first fruit of our work is a marketing tool, called “What is TPdb?”. It includes various screenshots of the application’s interface, as well as descriptions of what it does and how.

A post from Lines & Colors, a blog about artists and illustrators, on the frustration of many artist’s websites, but there are many points that ring true for anyone.

Along with a whole host of new tidbits about upcoming software at their WWDC, Apple also relaunched their website. Not only have they updated their rather tired looking global navigation, there is a huge range of effective Ajax-style elements that (mostly) add to the usability of their site. Their (possibly Google-powered - if you check their code) search is a particularly nice example which offers popular shortcuts even before you’ve pressed return. The amount of work and attention-to-detail that has gone into this is very impressive.

Google’s Street View, a new Google Maps feature that uses vehicle cameras to take 360 degree street-level views of major urban areas (so far only in the US), has set the Web buzzing with talk about its privacy implications. The photos are so detailed that one lady, whose cat Monty is clearly visible sitting in her living room window, contacted Google and asked for the image to be removed. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged,” said the perplexed Ms. Kalin-Casey from Oakland, CA.

Websites are making the most of the images captured too. The Wired blog has started a contest on the most interesting photos found using the new Google Tool that now includes sunbathing coeds, alleged drug deals, and the Google van itself. And the site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.

It does raise an interesting question: should Google be allowed to publish detailed intimate snap shots on the internet of people’s private lives? The images are taken in a public place so legally Google is doing nothing wrong - but is it right ethically? Well, we can’t answer that. But what we can do is marvel at Google’s technology.

It’s great seeing such debate about the 2012 logo out there on the web. All the usual arguments are being trotted out, but one of the best pro-arguments can be found at Coudal. Worth a read.

In case you’ve somehow missed the furore - the new Olympics 2012 logo has been revealed. It was devised with help from Wolff Olins (a company some of us have worked with in the past), and they are in the midst of a huge wave of controversy.

We are split as to how we feel about the logo. Some of us dislike it, seeing it as clumsy and patronising in its attempt at appealing to the ‘MySpace’ generation. There was an extreme example of cognitive dissonance in the sight of Seb Coe announcing the logo in a suit and tie. It is like a logo for a nu rave band, the scene of the moment, and it may well feel dated within 6 months.

That said, it is rare for such a high profile logo to be so bold and look so (no other word for it) bonkers - so much so, it would be great if we all ended up loving it. The thinking behind it is solid, and it would have been dull for the logo to have been a polite tasteful design that as Coe put it, would have comfortably sat on corporate polo shirts. A logo is not the brand, so it will be interesting to see how it develops over the years.

Update: Worthwhile further discussion about the logo can be found at Speak Up.

Microsoft has just launched an ‘interactive table’ called Microsoft Surface. The web will be abuzz with this all day, discussing the ins and outs of how this will work in application. Time will tell whether it will only be found in hotel lobbies and shops, or whether it will be genuinely useful at home. Whatever - it opens up interesting new ways of interacting with information and even objects, and it will be worth watching how it impacts on the industry (especially Apple). Found via Techcrunch and Crunchgear.

The new look Faculty of 1000 Medicine marketing site we designed was launched last week. This saw the completion of the first phase of the F1000 website rebrand and redesign project we are working on. F1000 Medicine is an innovative database application that evaluates influential medical papers using a 2500-strong ‘faculty’ of the world’s top international researchers and clinicians. We are now working on the next phase of the project which involves a redesign of the look and functionality of the application itself.

Naresh Ramchandani discusses the much linked to website by Miranda July advertising her book “No one belongs here more than you” in The Guardian. He makes the case that it is important sometimes to do things simply, with an individual humour and creativity, rather than going for the big slick advertising schtick.

Jeff Jarvis in The Guardian discusses the papers recent homepage redesign and where news websites might go next (registration required).

Rob Gifford’s book “China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power” has been released in the States and to coincide our website has been launched.

Rob Gifford is a journalist who has worked for NPR (National Public Radio) and the BBC and has spent much of the last 20 years studying and reporting on China. He is now NPR’s London bureau chief. China Road is the story of a roadtrip he conducted with the photographer Patrick Fraser on Route 312, the Chinese equivalent of Route 66, through the heart of the country, the Gobi Desert and onto the Silk Road.

A discussion as to why web appilcations should not try too hard to look like a desktop application by Bill Higgins (via Signal vs. Noise).

New and very good review site that manages to show graphically a good overview of how much reviewers like and dislike a product (via Kottke and Daring Fireball).