We tweeted this a few weeks ago, but we thought it was worth having a proper journal post. Our in-house web standards expert and enthusiast Inayaili was recently interviewed as part of “Please start from the beginning…”, the video series about the career and experiences of web professionals by Ryan Taylor. Read more about it on the Havoc Inspired website.

To show our clients, associates, suppliers and friends our appreciation for a great 2008 we have compiled a compendium of our favourite Christmas treats.  These Yuletide recipes herald from the four corners of the globe and represent the international make-up of FoxLand. Each of them feature prominently in the festive celebrations of the recipe’s author (except maybe Christian who, in true Ebenezer Scrooge fashion, isn’t really a fan of Christmas).

Do you have your own holiday recipe you would like to share? Please send it to us and we’d be delighted to add it to the compendium.

It just remains for us to say Feliz Natal, Glædelig Jul, Fröehliche Weihnachten and Merry Christmas from all at FoxLand.

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

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.