Sam Michel's blog

The preparations for Digital Mission to New York continue apace. There'll be lots of handy information when the Digital Mission companies get to New York, but to help with planning, the lovely Aoife has been working her magic with Google Maps. The map below shows the main venues (so far).

Since I wrote about my sweary run-in with Captchas - those squiggly things at the bottom of forms that can only easily be read after too much coffee/beer - a week or so ago, I've been paying more attention to this technology.

Spam is still a pervasive issue and judging by a recent debate on the uk-netmarketing email discussion forum highlighted the problem isn't just a plague on inboxes, competition forms, surveys and any other web form is a target.

The Digital Pulse for July has just been published, showing an increase of 1.14% increase over June. That’s right, an increase in market confidence. Only small, but it’s there. The Digital Pulse is Chinwag's barometer of confidence across the digital sector.

Like any good web project, it always takes a fraction longer than you think it's going to.

The judging process is now over and the team are beavering away contacting the successful companies. With a bit of luck, a following wind and some fast and furious email activity the official list of successful Digital Mission companies will be released tomorrow.

OK, so it's probably time I caged my inner drama queen, but that shouldn't detract from a very important day in the build-up to the Digital Mission to NYC. Judgement day, of sorts.

There's only a short while left to get applications in for the Digital Mission to NYC (deadline today, Wed 23rd July) and there's been heaps of questions about the mission itself. The team have been working flat out over the last few days to respond to email and phone queries.

The main queries have been gathered together and summarised here, which hopefully will be useful for companies thinking about applying for the New York mission, but also those wanting to better understand the hows, whys and wherefores of the application process and the mission itself.

Wise counsel from external experts is certainly a factor in creating a successful business. Their mission is to help whittle down the applications (don't forget the deadline is Wed 23rd July to get yours in), and help shape the Digital Mission so that the successful companies get the absolute maximum benefit from the trip.

Digital Mission is extremely fortunate to benefit from the considerable wisdom of our expert advisory board...

Digital Mission partners, Seedcamp have just opened their application process, with entries accepted until 10th August. Details of the entry criteria and how to apply is available from their website and blog.

"It's alive!", as any good horror movie actor would scream. The application form for the Digital Mission to Web2.0 Expo in NYC is now officially open.

APPLY NOW
Closing Date: midnight, Wed, 23rd July

Great news for the Digital Mission to NYC, we're delighted to welcome Techcrunch UK our official blog partner. In addition to what we're anticipating will be a deluge of purple prose about the companies qualifying for the expedition, the inimitable Mike Butcher is lending his considerable skills to the advisory board.

I'm sitting innocently at my desk, chowing down on a sarnie from one of Soho's many fine eateries, flicking through the mountain of blog posts stacked up in Google Reader.

Now on it's third installment, I finally managed to escape the office for a couple of hours to attend Measurement Camp III. Sadly, I was concentrating too much to take much in the way of notes, but various people have promised to write up the information on the Measurement Camp wiki, under pain of Will getting grumpy ;-)

88 days ago, Chinwag launched the Digital Pulse, a confidence index for the digital industry.

Why did we do it? What's happened so far?

Early days...