DISQUS

I recently read an interesting article debunking many of Florida's assertions at http://www.thestar.com/article/656837 - a useful counterpoint to assess Florida's body of work.

I'm not sure this is what Anish meant about 'floating the company' ;)

Hey Fred - there's also a great ITP-like design school that used to be on the outskirts of the city (the Ivrea Institute - http://interactionivrea.org/) now merged with the city's Domus Academy (http://www.domusacademy.com/) - well worth a visit next time you're in Europe.

If we'd had more time during your trip to Leeds in the Summer, you might have iiked to see the Milan-inspired covered arcades in the downtown area. The city's chief architect took inspiration from Milan's arcades and Leeds' own history in designing covered arcades and public spaces throughout the city's shopping districts :)

Never mind the San Siro - we must get you to the home of Europe's champions at Old Trafford in Manchester next year!

Hey Fred, that looks like a great movie and one I only just discovered a couple days ago, I can't wait until it's released here in the UK in January. There's a lotta talk about Danny Boyle getting his first Oscar nod for Best Picture...

Perhaps you find that funny Mark - but I'd like to disavow you of your prejudice. I'm also from Bradford and have had a successful career for over a decade working in tech startups between London, Yorkshire, Boston and San Francisco. I'm doing things to help extend those opportunities to others. Cynical sniping at the efforts of others trying to make a difference isn't helpful.

Drop me an email - I'll be happy to illustrate how the region is transforming itself and the historical contribution it has made to the internet industry.

Hey Fred, I think Yahoo's Berkeley R&D labs did something similar a couple years ago called 'Zonetag' (http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/)

OK...on incorporating in the UK - great idea and if you'd like a UK registered office, I can sort you out in Leeds at the prestigious Old Broadcasting House!

Companies House (http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/) and BusinessLink are good places to start for advice on the mechanics of incorporating. It shouldn't cost more than £50 and a few working days to setup.

For your board structure I'd keep your 'recruited' legal directors (non-executive directors) of the company to 2-3 non-executive directors at a maximum, maybe with 5% equity stakes to begin with. One of them should be a good administrator or company secretary.

However, an advisory board doesn't have to be compensated or a legal entity. It's basically a mechanism of adding friends and helpful advisors of the company...exposure in return for access to knowledge. I wouldn't make them legal directors.

In compensating your staff...purely performance-based is sorta harsh! Give a mixture of a fixed fee based on their time-input and then a bonus based on the success of your event. That way everyone gets paid fairly for their effort, but you can share a huge success equitably too without people going hungry!

'The UK and Israel have had strong women lead their countries and we should be open to that...' - as have Pakistan, the Philippines, India and Sri Lanka :)

(though, I'm sure Thatcher was a man...!)

I'm really excited for you Steph - from what you've told me, it'll be a lotta fun and pretty challenging too...gimme a shout if you need any help :)

Hey Fred, I've been using Paparazzi (http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/) for OS X lately. it handily gives you a preview, lets you set a time delay to let widgets load, as well as set various capture and crop sizes.

Dead useful, if you're using a Mac.

Nicely put Paul :) When I started out in the dotcom industry, I saw a lotta my colleagues and I become wealthy very rapidly.

Every day someone would come back from lunch with some shiny new toy. Sadly, a couple years later when the bubble burst, many of the same people were scrobbling around to service their possessions and debts as they lost their jobs.

I learned close up that I never wanted to be in that position - I wanted to feel free enough that I could leave most of my material possessions behind if I needed to.

I recently moved house, taking the opportunity to declutter my life - all I now own is a wardrobe of clothing, my Mac Book, some CDs, DVDs, an iPod, my cellphone and my books :)

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Something else worth observing is the availability of credit and booming home equity in the US and UK. Here, the UK is one of the world's most personally endebted society's - credit cards and remortgages are fuelling an unprecedented consumer boom. People are literally able to purchase anything they want. The advent of almost friction-free eBay-esque markets also means, we all find it easier to dispose of our possessions in order to finance our next great buy...

Andrew Marr's recent documentary essay on the 'History of Modern Britain' concluded that throughout the post-WW2 era Britain (the Cold War, Thatcherism, union issues, socialism) has gradually displaced political life with shopping!

A couple of years ago, some colleagues and I were working on a mechanism for tagging people in the context of a general purpose social network...that work will be launching soon as Orange's Metamaki service.

However, you can read a few of our thoughts at
http://imran.typepad.com/blog/2005/02/tagging_p... and http://www.librarytechtonics.info/archives/2006...>

I'd like the ability to drag'n'drop my friends into more convenient locations :)

I'm on their side with this...I've never had any trouble at either Vancouver or Toronto...but then I actually knew where I was going and had numbers...!

Somebody make him stop...

Games are supposed to be fun...

In the interests of balanced reporting - 'I fucking hate London'.

My friend Mark (http://www.kronkhifi.com/) is friends with the guy behind Vector Lovers - both from York. I might have some of their tracks from various singles and EPs as well as the album...lemme know and I'll fire 'em over to you.

Probably not rich enough to be a learning aid, but there's some great work along similar lines being done at MIT Media Lab. Todd Machover's 'Opera Of The Future' (http://www.media.mit.edu/research/ResearchPubWeb.pl?ID=35)research programme examines where digital media can help teach music composition. The Hyperscore and Toy symphony projects are great examples of this :)

Yeh OK, when I see you doing 'Force Lightning' with your Chi or lifting your BMW out of a river by twinkling your fingers - then I'll be impressed...

Mate, this happens *all* the time here. One afternoon I was watchin TV and THREE birds one after another whammed into the window. We managed to get one airborne again, but the other two unfrotunately died on impact...