Paul Miller

I had a little preview of the violence we’ve seen over the last few days as I walked home on Thursday last week. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cyclist going faster than normal and then I saw four more. Five kids, teenagers at least, came streaming down the road towards the traffic lights. One of them turned left and the others tried to follow but they were going too fast and the road was slippery from the rain. The final cyclist skidded as he rounded the bend and fell against the bonnet of a stationery car waiting at the traffic lights. He was fine. It was a slow crash.

But then the shouting started.

Ah, Startup Britain, that was a fun week. I don’t think it went exactly according to plan. My take on why the launch went so badly wrong is that there’s no such thing as a single startup community in the UK. There are hundreds of smaller loosely joined communities with their own subcultures and attitudes [...]

It was on the tip of everybody’s tongue, Matt Biddulph just gave it a name. Silicon Roundabout has actually been thriving for over a decade, with hundreds if not thousands of digital businesses in the East End starting up, thriving, failing and starting up again. I’m a fan of the Government’s idea of a tech [...]

Long Now Foundation fans might be interested to know that co-founder Stewart Brand is doing a talk at the ICA about his new book – Whole Earth Discipline on the 30th January. Do come along. The meetup group will also be hanging out in the cafe for a couple of hours after the talk if [...]

Films Moon – Duncan Jones’s debut is just stunning. I’ve watched it again on DVD now and there are so many clever bits you don’t notice first time around. Also best original soundtrack for quite some time by Stourbridge’s finest Clint Mansell. It’s been adopted as favourite coding music at Everything HQ. Anvil – this [...]

Great little film (which took a lot of work I imagine) by Chris Searson. Rush Hour London from Chris Searson on Vimeo.

Saw one of these on my way to work this morning. Encouraging.

I love Meetup and there’s a great piece in the FT Weekend Magazine that explains quite what it is that makes it work. It really started to come together for me a few weeks ago when we had a fantastic Long Now London Meetup. Up until then it had just been people I knew, but [...]

I went to a really interesting dinner chat on Wednesday night organised by Saul Klein for Fred Wilson the VC who was over from New York. I left a bit unsatisfied with the story we told Fred about London, so in the bar afterwards and on the bus home I tried to work out why. [...]

I went along to Russell Davies’ Interesting 2008 on Saturday. Up there with Social Innovation Camp as one of the best events I’ve been to this year. So many things I could mention but this was definitely one highlight: