imran*

More goodies…

• Ray Kurzwell – yes Ray Kurzwell – has been added to the roster of speakers for Newcastle’s Thinking Digital in May. I don’t think the Singularity will emerge from the North East, but it’s possible to argue that Newcastle United players are transhuman 😉 Oh yeah, <coughs> Greg Dyke too.

• Media Lab Europe lives! MLE alumni, Stefan Agamanolis – and leader of its Human Connectedness group –  relaunched much of MLE’s philosophy in the ‘Highlands & Islands‘ as the Distance Lab.
  OK, it’s waaaaay North, but it still counts 🙂

  Distance Lab has apparently been
  around a couple years, but I’m ashamed to admit I only discovered it today – thanks to Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. Stefan oversaw some of my favourite projects at MLE, including Desktop Subversibles, iCom and tunA and I’m sure the new lab will be doing equally great things. I always thought Negroponte picked the wrong country for MLE – the UK was a better home…though I woulda argued for Leeds or Manchester 😉

• Brian Teeman, founder of open source CMS Joomla, will be joining Digital Scarborough’s Code-a-thon on 15th March. Along with a week-long digital arts festival, Digital Scarborough sounds like it’s gonna be a fun place to hang next month.

• I’m hearing rumours that some Northern startups are joining Sun’s Startup Essentials programme…or is it Startup Camp? I wonder who…Thinkfold? Yuuguu? eDocr? Hmmm…should ensembli?

• Lastly, yesterday evening’s GeekUp Leeds kidnapping of Yahoo’s Christian Heilmann seemed to be really well received with a great turnout of what appeared to be around fifty people. Christian’s talk is available online at Slideshare.