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With Leeds’ bumper meetup month – OpenCoffees, BarCamps & GeekUps – behind us, what’s been happening throughout December…

• Last Thursday, Manoj Ranaweera’s NW Startup 2.0 held its first ‘demo’ event in Manchester. Manoj also seems to have plotted out a meetups agenda through to the end of 2008! The demo’ing companies included, Blinkbox, Blyk, D2See, eDocr (of course…) and a couple dozen more. Enterprise Ventures‘ Ed French thought the evening was valuable, despite a few technical hitches.

• Leeds Met’s Old Broadcasting House recently played host to local intellectual property Jedis John Lambert and Steve Baker  as they presented a two-fer on IP issues…

• John provided an Introduction to IP and Steve following with thoughts on Commercial Aspects of IP. John is a fascinating individual, we had a follow-on meeting where he described his plans for using collaboration technologies to make legal advice more accessible by connecting clients with cheaper lawyers in the developing world. John’s also observed first-hand the interesting alternate-ethnographics of communication technology in Africa…on hearing this I was breathlessly compelled to introduce him to the work of Nokia’s Jan Chipchase!

• Both Steve and John suggested that IP should only be secured if you have the financial means to defend and exploit it…often, resources are better spend building, marketing and engineering rather than patenting. Surprisingly, both seemed quite supportive of open source as a positive strategy for securing some form of IP leadership, if not protection. Also, curiously, Steve suggested keeping a log of what didn’t work…it can be as valuable as a positive outcome!

• Last Thursday, the University of Teeside hosted the Digitex07 digital futures conference. With speakers from NESTA, academia, Codeworks and the BBC, the programme appeared to have a palpably public sector angle. Despite this, the North East – like Manchester, Leeds & Sheffield – seems to be lighting up with the arrival of Refresh Newcastle, guys like Gareth Rushgrove and a handful of meetups…could this be the venue for BarCamp North East?

• Last week also saw the beta launch of Northcast, a bi-weekly podcast covering events, startups and interviews across the North, led by the ubiquitous Dom Hodgson.

• On the same day, Leeds Met hosted An Evening with Rory McLeish. Rory’s track record as a concept artist and digital designer is awesome. With a bunch of high profile videogames and movies (Stealth, Star Trek: Nemesis) under his belt, Rory is now looking to do more conceptual work…I’d love to engage him on some futures projects for Carbon 🙂 Come to think of it…we have a guy with a similar track record already…

• Last but most definitely not least I’ve been invited to attend the invitation-only Leeds: City Centre Vision Conference at the end of January, run by the city’s Chief Economic Services Officer. I’m planning to float a vision of Leeds hub of digital industries across the M62 corridor. The meet could be a quango, or it could lead to something profound…