We stayed at the City Inn, which turned out to be a refreshingly modern and simple hotel with free ethernet in the room (courtesy of a lovely pink CAT5 cable). We rallied the troops for a fun night on the town, taking advantage of The Commercial House's pretty fantastic pint, burger, and chips for £4.95. Tuesday morning saw us up bright and early for a walk to the University of Bristol campus, to pay a vist to 3CResearch, a member company doing "convergent technology research for digital media processing and communciations" (in case you're wondering — and I certainly was — the three C's are Communications, Content, and Creativity). We were given a demo of their Visualise project, which delivers streaming video to mobile devices (currently over WiFi but soon over faster and more pervasive delivery channels like HSDPA and WiMax). It was designed to offer a better experience to fans of events like rally racing, which generally involves standing in a cold, wet field for hours on end in the hopes that a car will hurtle past you for an exhilirating 15 seconds. Visualise means you can still stand in the same damp glen, but now you can watch the race from multiple viewpoints on your mobile, as well as peruse stats and driver info (assuming the touchscreen still responds to your frozen fingers). In all seriousness, the technology can be applied to any kind of event and would be great for things like music festivals like Coachella, at which you would need to clone yourself several times over just to catch half the bands you wanted to see. The demo was followed by a presentation by Dr. Geraint Jones about a number of the other 3CResearch projects, including Intelligent Content Based Retrieval (ICBR) (analyze video archives and index based on content, motion, etc.) and Motion Ripper (extract motion data from video and apply captured motion signals to computer animation — i.e.: analyze a video of birds flying and animate an electronic bird). Their research is very interesting, if not entirely cutting edge, but I thought the more interesting part was the conversation which erupted over licensing of technology and how pure research facilities can successfully commercialize their ventures. Sutha suggested they take a look at the MIT Media Lab model, which is basically pay-for-play (i.e.: companies can pay an upfront and quite large fee and then have access to all of the research), and I would think there's a lot to be learned from the MaRS Discovery District and from the University of Toronto's Innovations Group.

We spent the late afternoon and evening at Watershed Media Centre, a facility that reminded me of The Bookshelf in Guelph, a favourite haunt during my University years. Watershed includes a few cinemas, a caf&eaccute; and some meeting facilities, and was our home for a great mini-trade show event which consisted of 40 South West companies meeting and greeting our Canadian crew. Steve Collett (International Trade Advisor from UKTI) started us off, Ian Kelso (from Interactive Ontario) gave a quick state the union of New Media in the New World, and I followed him with a quick Introducing the Canadians rundown of the companies in the mission (and including a photo of a polar bear cub, two bears making out in the woods, and the poster from South Park: draw your own conclusions). I was followed by Mark Leaver (Director of Development from South West Screen), who mirrored Ian's talk but focused on the South West region of the UK, and then we were treated to a fantastic presentation by Adam Montandon, Director of HMC Interactive, who have built some truly amazing interactive experiences for Cadbury's Purple Planet and The Royal Obeservatory. He also has the excuisitely good taste to have fallen in love with a Canadian girl and is working on a (longish) term plan to move to our fair lands to be with her. I cornered him after and insisted that we line up a DemoCamp demo on his next visit, which he heartily agreed to (or maybe defensively, so I'd let him out of the corner — hard to tell). The trade show was a great success and I met a number of interesting people doing interesting things in which we might well take an interest, including John Bradford from jbsh, LLC (who are working on an educational product for the Canadian market), Paul Bason from University College Falmouth (who was delighted by Michael Wesch's latest and who was really interested to hear what we looked for in students and in whether we'd be into a distance-learning based partnership), David Karney from Potential Difference (a swank Bristol web shop who are basically Radiant Core's British counterparts, but on .NET), and James Ovenden from Ball Fusion (who are marketing an amazing video on street soccer skills — check out some of the tricks on their homepage). Apologies to the gentleman from Sanoodi, whose slightly odd application name I've managed to easily remember but whose much less odd personal name I've completely forgotten (owing to his lack of business cards, of course). We had a great chat about his app and where it's headed, and I showed him Toronto's own Planet Eye and the Specialized Riders Club (run by our friend Chris Matthews) for some inspiration. We ended the evening with a delicious dinner for fourteen at the Severn Shed (don't worry Mike: I didn't pick up the tab!), during which I had the pleasure of chatting about documentaries, music, books, and television with Julia Bennett (from White Pine Productions), Jason Krogh (from Zinc Roe), and Paige Chambers (from the Canadian Business College).

Stay tuned for Day 3, which will mostly be a train ride to Glasgow!

Back in early July, I was having a coffee with Ian Forrester from the BBC Backstage at our local Balzac's, when in strode Ian Kelso from Interactive Ontario. Ian to Ian (i2i?) introductions were made, and Mr. Kelso (my former boss from many moons ago!) laughingly suggested that we should join them on the Trade Mission they had just announced so that Mr. Forrester could buy me a coffee in his hometown. And here we are, three months later, sitting in the Tower 1 Meeting Room at The Tower Hotel in London, listening to John Davies, Technology & Strategy Adviser from United Kingdom Trade & Investment, talking about his country's strategic direction.

So, we're here until this afternoon, then off to lovely Bristol for a tour of 3C Research and a mini-trade show, then to beautiful Glasgow on Wednesday for some networking and a tour of the Hillington Innovation Centre on Thursday. I've got a criminally early train on Friday (5:50 am!) back to London, where I will sadly not have coffee with Mr. Forrester (who will be en route to Berlin) but rather lunch with his colleagues, a pint or two with Ian Hayward from Glaxstar (the company, not the alien galaxy), and a lovely dinner with the team from eBay UK (with whom we did the eBay Firefox Companion and are now working on a top secret new project).

I've got my trusty Rebel XTI and have been trying to capture some shots while keeping it out of the rain (no mean feat), which I'll make sure to post and link to. Many thanks to Sutha Kamal for playing tour guide yesterday and showing me around the banks of Thames, the Tate Modern, a few Starbucks (a charming little chain of coffee shops!), an historic pub (Lamb and Flag, which has been around since Charles II), and a great Vietnamese dinner at Cay Tre. More as it happens!