Things have moved incredibly quickly since Friday morning when, in heavy-handed fashion, Microsoft announced they wanted to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. Not only has it led News International to scramble around to get an offer in, Google has weighed in presumptuously offering help (Google clearly see themselves as the ‘good guys’, even now) and all-in-all very few people relish the idea of the internet institution getting swallowed up by the still-powerful but unloved Microsoft machine.

The deal throws an enormous amount of questions in to the air – questions the legion of voices on the web have been attempting to answer over the last few days. Just one example: the two companies have profoundly different ways of using technology. Yahoo! is a firm supporter of open-source, whether it is through their use of PHP/FreeBSD/Linux or the sharing of their own technologies, while Microsoft use their own proprietary software. When Microsoft bought Hotmail the switch over from open-source to Microsoft technologies was a long and painful process. Will the same happen again for Yahoo!’s multitude of products, a much more complex switch-over?

What is most depressing about it all is that this does not feel like an exciting deal that will lead to new innovation and business ideas, but is instead two companies struggling to understand and deal with their ongoing lacklustre performance on the web. This is a situation that will excite Wall Street, but few other people. That said, Yahoo!, with a new CEO, a restructured organisation, and still huge amounts of design and engineering talent have a very good chance of recovery - which would not be realised if they bow to the pressure to sell.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Global DataPoint’s corporate website. Global DataPoint are the supplier of the most comprehensive events database in the UK, and are now expanding their operations to data feeds of international arts events. This is the third element of our ongoing work with the company - the first being an overhaul of their brand, and the second being an overhaul of their event search user interface (screenshots of which can be seen around the site). We have developed the site from the ground up from initial design concepts through to a full CMS backend. Many thanks to everyone who has been involved in putting it together.

This week saw the launch of the CIH Conference and Housing Exhibition site we created for the Chartered Institute of Housing. The event - taking place in Harrogate next June - boasts a strong line-up of speakers, including Rt. Hon. Michael Portillo, Diane Abbott MP, David Smith – Economics Editor of the Sunday Times and leading US Economist David Shepherdson.

The CIH is the professional body for people working in housing across the UK and its conference and exhibition is the UK’s ultimate housing event. With Gordon Brown announcing an £8bn investment in housing in his first spending review, the conference will look at how the sector can deliver the government’s objective of decent and affordable housing for all.

Working closely with our partners at Zebra Crossing, the site was built using WordPress and includes online booking functionality. More exciting functionality will be added to the site as the event draws closer - so watch this space!

We are pleased to announce that the updated Dragon Brands website we have been working on recently has now gone live. While we worked on their last version, it was hamstrung by legacy systems and databases. Working closely with the design team at Dragon we have developed a flexible, but simple, content-managed system that kept the distinctive ‘letterbox’ design.

“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.

We are very pleased to announce that we have just won a significant project to update the brand and website of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) - “the kitemark of medical journals”. COPE are an international organisation working towards high ethical standards of biomedical journals. Founded in 1997 their goal is to educate and advance knowledge in methods of safeguarding the integrity of the scientific record.