When Google Streetview was given the green-light by the UK’s Information Commissioner last July, it appeared as if sanity had prevailed. Despite the protests of Privacy International, which pops up like a Meerkat every time Google or another tech company tries do do something innovative, the Commissioner ruled that it was “satisfied” that Google’s Street View photo-mapping would have safeguards to avoid risking anyone’s privacy or safety. But then Google made two major errors when it launched Street View last week. It has not covered up the faces of many people on the maps, or the number plates on their cars. And it has not photographed the house of Google’s UK MD - because he lives in a private road. As we say in tech: FAIL.

Given how the largely right-wing UK press would act once it smelt blood, Google is now facing a perfect storm of protest that could hobble Street View - but with it the chances for Europe to join the tide of positive innovation that the release of publicly editable data is going to have on society.

Now a formal complaint about Google’s Street View has been sent to the Information Commissioner (ICO) by Privacy International citing more than 200 reports from members of the public identifiable via the service, and it now wants the ICO to look again at how Street View works. As if it hadn’t already.

But as Google boss Eric Schmidt has said “We agree with the concerns over privacy. The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out and we do it as quickly as we possibly can.”

In other words, as fast as people complain to Google that they have been seen on SV standing on a street corner, or they found their house, Google is allowing them to be removed from the system. So how long will PI’s list of 200 last? Probably less than a week. But no matter. PI wants the whole thing switched off.

This is not to lightly dismiss some real concerns. The BBC reports that a woman who had moved house to escape a violent partner was recognisable outside her new home on Street View.

But do I wonder if Google is being disingenuous. Surely it’s system could have been more thoroughly checked before going live? Could it possibly have contemplated the idea that all this publicity would help break the whole story into the mainstream media? Going live and just telling a few tech blogs does not a national issue make.

If Google had wanted to avoid the controversy it could have double-checked its system before going live and conducted a public information campaign. It could have told every private householder in the UK that their property might appear on the Google database and that they’d have the right to take it off. But they did not. Is it not far easier and cheaper to release Street View “half-cocked”, create a storm of media interest, get public awareness and at the same time allow people to remove themselves?

This is, however, a dangerous strategy. In Europe we are obsessed with privacy (at least among the older generation - the younger generation is far more savvy about these things). Just look at Germany’s reaction to Street View.

Plus, Street View will have three powerful forces aligned against it:

- Our innate, culturally European desire for privacy.

- Our innate, culturally European fear of crime / burglars / nosey neighbours.

- Our perfectly legitimate concerns about terrorism, and anything which makes it easier for terrorists to check out locations (a matter which has historically rarely affected mainland North America and which people internally at Google will probably just not get)

- The desire of European governments - especially the current British one - to use any news at all to draw the masses away from blaming them for the Great Recession. They will happily join the mob and the press against Google and Street View.

Meanwhile the ICO is doing the smart thing and just telling Google to “ensure all vehicle registration marks and faces are satisfactorily blurred” and advising “individuals who feel that an image does identify them (and are unhappy with this) should contact Google direct to get the image removed.” Common sense.

And I’m seeing it happen. Traveling down a local street near my house on SV I am starting to come across blank patches where people must have asked to be removed (I live in an area of London where there are plenty of tech-savvy people). Just before the images reach a local school they stop. Someone at Google thought that through. I hope.

However, the system is by no means perfect. It took me 30 seconds to find a car number plate unblurred and another 20 mins to find a man with a face untouched. In other words, not a lot of effort. There is clearly work to be done.

But should we dismiss Street View so lightly?

The UK is one of the most heavily photographed nations on earth. There are more CCTV per square mile here than almost anywhere in the world. They are also always on. Google Street View however is only a snapshot, it does not show trends and we can edit it. That’s a significant difference.

Yes, Google is using these images for commercial purposes. But we can use them too. There are already startups piling in to Streetview to add value to their service

Property or venue recommendation companies will use it. Trusted Places and Qype will be able to integrate Street View.

IRLConnect will implement Google Street View to their presence-based network, to get conversation going around locations.

Novaloca didn’t even wait for Street View. They integrated images from Seety/ which has done it’s own drive around London with cameras. Has Privacy International heard of them? Perhaps it’s not high profile enough of a target.

There will be others: Local councils will be able to identify derelict houses, or map road problems faster and more cheaply than before. Society could actually, conceivably benefit from this technology - and isn’t that why we live in a democracy? To use it better than the bad guys?

So far I think the best one is both environmentally cool and a great idea:

ParkatmyHouse.com, the UK’s largest on-line parking space marketplace allows drivers to find cheaper alternatives to commercial parking lots and in turn, puts the money in home owner’s pockets rather than those of large corporations. Surely a business for our times? It has implemented Street View to allow drivers to view a parking space before they rent it. The implementation is here and you see it by clicking on the Street View tab above the map. This is one of the first commercial implementations of Street View in the UK which adds value to an existing service.

Meanwhile I sympathise with those, like Broadsight’s Alan Patrick, who found their car’s number plate on Streetview unblurred. But he has submitted his (anonymous) email address and asked it to be rubbed from the system. Yes, Alan, Google took a picture of your house without your permission or paying you. Does this contravene some rules on privacy? I’m not sure either, but to be frank, anyone can take a picture of my house and put it on the Internet and I’d be none the wiser. At least Google lets me ask for it to be removed. At least I have some control over this data, some recourse to action.

With one nation, under CCTV, I do not.

It looks like the VCs are buoyant about the future of online advertising, especially video, even if a few people aren’t right now. Kennet Partners, the pan-European venture private equity firm, is investing €6.5 million in GoViral, a global online distributor of branded video content. As part of the investment, Michael Elias from Kennet will join the board of GoViral, which is based in Copenhagen, with offices in London, Frankfurt and Paris.

GoViral serves branded video content across its proprietary online publisher network. The campaigns are distributed in local languages, on local sites and with local publishers. It works with creative and media planning agencies and publishers to create campaign strategies.

Michael Elias, managing director of Kennet (which has around $500 million in funds under management) reckons GoViral has “developed a first-mover advantage in a significant new market” which is VC-speak for “it’s going to scale fast and we’re going to do well out of it”. It also ticks a few other boxes: Transforming media? Check. Fast-growing? Check. Profitable? Check. Global market opportunity? Check. Capital-efficient? Check. Good management team? Check.

Jimmy Maymann, CEO of GoViral thinks “video advertising is a key consideration that will help the online channel become the most important advertising medium in the future.” That’s fair comment, given what we know about the rate at which online video is growing.

Privately-backed Touchnote, the startup which enables you to create a kind of postcard which stands up from any photo, is going all Web 2.0 on us. It’s launched an API that enables any third party website with visual content (photos, drawings, cartoons…) to enable their users to turn the images into Touchnote cards. This generates a ‘create a card’ widget/button on a partner site with the image dropped directly into Touchnote’s Flash card personaliser. I have to say, as well as providing another revenue share model for social sites with images, it beats the crap out of traditional card companies like Moonpig in the UK, plus they don’t have any annoying TV adverts.

And the site now seamlessly integrates with albums on Facebook and Picasa. The startup address a pretty simple market need - can you see photos when the computer is switched off, and what about older generations who don’t habitually have Facebook open? The product design allows the card to stand up so people keep them up longer than a traditional greeting card. Cards are green with 50% recycled card and their printers are about to become FSC certified. Speech bubbles and captions, write a message and then have it posted nationally or internationally. Customers can also get the card to for hand-signing if they want or use a gallery of images if they don’t have their own photo.

Some other bells and whistles they are adding include the ability to create a Touchnote from a special effect-manipulated image on Photofunia. Partner sites are also getting royalty for every card printed with one of their images, along with branding on the inside of the card - something which could be of interest to any web app out there that wants to monetise its visual content outside of T-shirts and mugs. Other partners to date include Someoneoncetoldme.com and FACEinHOLE.

Touchnote is seeing a lift in traffic from these partnerships and international orders now make up 20% of orders. With a small team which includes people from Skype, BSkyB, Expedia, WishingWell.com among others, Touchnote, which launched in November last year, counts Simon Murdoch (Friends Abroad, Bookpages/Amazon Europe) among it’s advisors.

FreeAgent Central, the money management and accounting tool aimed at small businesses, has secured an undisclosed amount of Angel funding for the service - though I understand it’s in the low six figures Sterling. The UK firm came out of beta in February last year and has users across the UK and US. The investors are Christoph Janz, Martin Armstrong and Sebastian Serfas.

Janz co-founded German Internet startup DealPilot back in 1997, one of the first comparison shopping services, funded by Bertelsmann and later acquired by Shopping.com. In 2005 he co-founded Pageflakes the personalizable homepage backed by Balderton Capital and recently acquired by LiveUniverse.

FreeAgent says it is is onboarding customers at a good clip and signing strategic partnerships with professional accountants, both for co-marketing and deeper relationships.

Run out of Edinburgh, FreeAgent Central costs up to £25 per month but in theory you could buy an off the shelf accounting product for £100. Why spend three times as much for software that doesn’t update? It’s built to address ’spreadsheet hell’ and double entry book-keeping and do all the grunt work in the background while giving your professional accountant the figures needed to prepare regulatory accounts.

It’s also attempting to get into the business of predicting cashflow, and giving a heads up on your tax position before your professional advisor. The UK account for the UK tax regime costs sole traders £15 per month, UK Partnerships/LLPs £20 and Ltd companies £25. The Universal Account can be used by anyone costs US $20 per month and uses all the sites features but without the tax functionality, although this is going to be rolled out.

Competitors in the ‘light-weight invoicing’ and small biz management arena - mainly in the US - include Freshbooks, BillMyClients and Blinksale, but FAC claims it has more features geared to smaller operations and allows freelancers to know their financial position in a more ongoing basis. In the UK there is also Bionicbooks, and ClearBooks - but these seem to be less ambitious in scope.

Founder and CEO Ed Molyneux says Freeagent is seeing more people come from Word and Excel than other competitors, though there is competition from Kashflow.co.uk, also UK-based, and xero.com in New Zealand. He says people are now leaving paid employment and expect more than being handed a spreadsheet by their accountant.

This makes an awful lot of sense to me and should have the likes of Sage and Microsoft on the back foot. Cloud apps like FreeAgent Central are the kind of thing that will lead to a death by a thousand cuts for the incumbents in this business.

Jive.ly is a new app in full beta, billing itself as a Twitter-like site for mobile. Created by UK-based developer Martin Buhr, the app is designed as a place to update your social network accounts with images and videos from a mobile without having to hook up third party services like Twitpic.

It enables quick, simple posting of video, images and text to your user feed from any mobile device via email or MMS with twitter-like replies, hashtags and trending. In other words it’s quite like Twitter, but this does MMS and video as the site will auto-embed content from Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr and other web sites from posted links and synchronise with your Twitter and Tumblr accounts. Or just post plain text if you like. You can also set up notifications for search terms you are interested in and then have it notify you via mobile. The service also has an API. Here’s my profile.

Buhr wanted to be able to just post videos straight to the web and although it’s possible to do this with Youtube, that won’t update a Twitter or Facebook status with the new media - jive.ly can. He calls it “Twitter, without the $55 million price tag ;-).”

Business model-wise Buhr says Jive.ly will offer white-label accounts to businesses that want to have live-media on their own sites for a fee, using the site API (for example News organisations that want instant UGC with little to no development or server costs on their end); “single tweet” advertising and content-licensing. Buhr is looking for funding.

If there are comparisons to be made you might compare it to Utterli or the now defunct Jaiku or perhaps Moblog.net (though the latter does not have the ‘follow’ model of Twitter). However, all of those are a lot longer in the tooth and are wrapped in, shall we say, a much better design.

It’s my pleasure to announce a grand day out for tech startups old and new to share real, hard-core knowledge about their experiences on April 21st - an event we’ve dubbed “Geek ‘n Rolla” in a light-hearted homage to a certain movie which also pulls no punches. You can buy early-bird tickets already here.

Geek’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts.

This is as much an event for would-be entrepreneurs as it is for startups already ‘doing the business’. If you are passionate about being disruptive and thinking big, this is your event. With the economy on a major downer, one of the few uppers left is the zest and creative energy tech startups bring to the world - that’s what Geek ‘n Rolla is setting out to showcase and celebrate.

Our speaker line-up is probably the best ever for an event of this nature.

Our speakers include:

Leisa Reichelt, Freelance user experience consultant

The day will include a series of panel discussions, interactive sessions, keynote presentations and, at the end a TechCrunch Pitch! competition, followed by an evening party. The event is designed to bring together startups, investors and key industry players for great networking, TechCrunch style.

Peter Crosby, COO of Viadeo, says: “We are delighted to be sponsoring such an important event in the UK tech calendar. Viadeo’s growth began with a small bunch of networking entrepreneurs and we are now the biggest professional network in China and one of the largest in the world. So we recognise just how vital it is to network, collaborate and get inspired.“

We are also working with UKTI to get startups up to speed with their pitches with some free training. See below for details.

Venue:
RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects)
66, Portland Place
London
W1B 1AD
Nearest Tube: Regents Park, Great Portland Street and Oxford Circus
Map

The venue/location for the networking party will be sent to registered attendees prior to the event.

Sponsorship
We still have a few sponsorship opportunities and there will be a dedicated exhibition area available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the event, please contact Petra Johansson on petra[at]twistedtree.co.uk

About Viadeo
Founded in June 2004, Viadeo quickly established itself as the place to be for professional networking in Europe and beyond. Since then, with more than 7 million members (as of January 2009). Viadeo is essential for those who want to:

• Increase their business opportunities (to discover new clients, staff and business partners)
• Enhance their visibility and their online reputation
• Manage and develop their network of professional contacts

Viadeo’s members consist of business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of businesses both start-up and well established. Each day Viadeo attracts more than 10,000 new members; 40,000 new connections are made and over one million profiles are viewed. Based in Paris (head office), Viadeo also has offices and teams in the UK (London), Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), Italy (Milan), China (Beijing), India (New Delhi) and Mexico (Mexico City). The company employs 200 staff worldwide. www.viadeo.com

UK Trade & Investment is the government organisation that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. We also help overseas companies bring their high quality investment to the UK’s dynamic economy – acknowledged as Europe’s best place from which to succeed in global business.

UK Trade & Investment offers expertise and contacts through its extensive network of specialists in the UK, and in British embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. We provide companies with the tools they require to be competitive on the world stage. For further information please visit www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7215 8000.

NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Its mission is to transform the UK’s capacity for innovation. NESTA Investments has the largest portfolios of early-stage businesses in the country and is a leading authority on how to grow new ideas. We have strict investment criteria, and work with companies that have high potential for growth, are at seed or start-up stage, and have the potential to attract syndicated support. When we do invest, we aim to maximise our investment by assigning mentors, part-time managers or specialist support. We also stimulate imaginative solutions to pressing social issues and shape policy to help the UK meet its national innovation challenges.www.nesta.org.uk

Programme: See here for the schedule

Pre-Geek ‘n Rolla Pitch! Workshop
Geek ‘n Rolla will provide a small number of start up companies with the opportunity to pitch to investors and key industry people. These people are frequently being pitched to and often complain about the quality of the presentations they see.

So if you need to brush up on those pitching skillz, sign up for the pre-event Pitch! workshop sponsored by UK Trade & Investment and supported by the British Libary and IP Centre.

Pitch! takes place on 7 April 2009 at the British Library where Julie Collins will cover all aspects of successful pitching, including preparation, delivery skills, overcoming nerves and networking the hell out of the opportunity.

To sign up, contact Petra Johansson via petra (at) twistedtree.co.uk.

Please note:
Only qualified startups may apply to participate in this workshop. Startups will be able to chose to join the morning session (10.00-13.00)or the afternoon session (14.00-17.00). A maximum of 2 participants per startup may attend. Please note that participation in the Pitch! workshop does not guarantee that your startup will be pitching at TechCrunch Pitch! on 21st April 2009. The TechCrunch editorial team reserves the right to select the pitching startups.

Geek ‘n Rolla is an event programmed by TechCrunch Europe and organised by TwistedTree in association with rassami.

Wuala, the Zurich-based peer-to-peer-storage startup owned by Caleido AG, has been taken over by LaCie, the French manufacturer of external storage devices in a deal which frankly makes a lot of sense. One has an application, the other has storage hardware.

They are calling it a merger, but Wuala is clearly a lot smaller than LaCie. The deal marks a high point for Wuala co-founder and CEO Dominik Grolimund, but rather confirms the usual course of European startups in exiting as early as they can rather than scaling their startups to a point that they become world-beaters. It also looks like they either didn’t go for the VC deals they were rumoured to be in discussion about, or that those talks never came to fruition.

However, all props to Grolimund who has been on a four year journey from developing what became Wuala ago at the ETH Zurich to something that could end up being a reliable and secure cloud storage backed by millions of devices. Philippe Spruch, founder and CEO of LaCie thinks the Wuala deal will lead LaCie to transform from a hardware manufacturer to a “digital storage provider”. He may have something there.

We’ve previously written about Wuala at length here.

Seedcamp Warsaw wrapped up yesterday after a day of startup pitches and mentoring. It’s becoming apparent that there are gradually more startups appearing in the region - rather clumsily known as “Central and Eastern Europe”. The region is also well known for its strength in outsourcing companies who often work with Western European and US-based startups and I’m still here in Krakow finding out about a bunch of companies who do just that, many of whom appear to be Ruby On Rails gurus, including Lunar Logic, Applicake, Codesprinters, as well as Respectance, IIZT and Infinite Loop.

But without further ado, here are the Seedcamp winners.

HumanWay.pl: This is a “job applicant tracking system 2.0″. I liked this idea, assuming it can do everything it claims. It’s a working product already, which helps companies deal with the massive amounts of incoming material from jobs applicants - an increasing issue in these straightened times. HumanWay is a simple tool to create and distribute job requisitions and collect and manage applications. It screens applicants across social networks (it says here - sounds like a tough job) and generally take the heavy lifting out of recruiting. In all honesty? It sounds like may be trying to do too much and indeed, one of the judges criticisms was that some of the teams lacked focus. Still, something is working - HumanWay has already launched with 20 companies and so weren’t looking for money so much as sales and advisors / partners.

Joobili.com: Budapest based Joobili allows events and festivals organisers to input events. Then when you want inspiration for a holiday you work out what is on when. There appeared also to be a solcial element to it, in that you could see which of your friends were going to an event. The business model would include paid-for enhanced listings, affiiate sales etc. The famed Esther Dyson is a Seed investor and Mentor apparently. Since the public beta launched a month ago they have 1,000 European events in the database and a few partnerships signed.

MyPolitiq: This site works out which politicians match to your political views - though right now it’s just for Lithuania. Call it a”smart voting” site. At laast they freely admitted that they had no idea if the site had a business model or not, though - as the founders said - there are lots of EU government funds for this! They are looking to strenghten partnerships in Poland and have built a Poish version - Glosuje.com.pl. I believe the judges went for this as the team itself it pretty good and there are lots of ways to scale this across borders I think, in terms of a web app that gauges you political leanings.

SkryBot.pl: It turned out this was speech recognition software mainly targeted at consumer aplications like dictation, or navigation applications. However they saw it working in search engines, TV, GPS etc. The licenses are EUR 10,000. Perhaps rightly so this appeared to be a desktop application which didn’t have a lot of place being in a competition geared towards Internet startups, but if the software is as good as it’s supposed to be it feels like there’s scope for this to morph into a web app.

“In the last two days I’ve had better conversations about the technology we’ve developed than I’ve had in the past 2 years in London.” So said one of the UK entrepreneurs on the Digital Mission to me while we shared beers in a bar at one of the myriad events to happen at South By South West Interactive (SXSWi) in Austin Texas. But that doesn’t mean everyone there was firing on all cylinders.

SXSW is fairly unique. The majority of content at the event is created by the people attending. You submit an idea for a panel (plus your suggested panelists) and if it’s accepted by organisers you get to go to the event for free. Even then it only costs about $300 for the festival, and you can also get day passes. There are formal speeches as well - such as Facebook’s launch of its Facebook Connect API. But the the crowd-sourced nature of this content means that panels can be hit and miss. This is especially true of panels organised by friends and colleagues who have a tendency to agree with each other, rather than entering into vigorous debate.

Frustrated by the apparent lack of dissent on many panels, some renegage Brits - Richard Pope of FixMyStreet and the guys from the School of Everything - decided to run what was rapidly dubbed an ad-hoc “un-panel” titled “Not another social Media panel?!”. It started out serious - forget trying to monetise Facebook/Twitter and start trying to work out if social media can affect real change in the world, like fix problems on your local street for instance.

Of course, with Brits in charge (and I cannot tell a lie, I helped) the whole thing started to descend into good-natured farce, with panelists being voted on and off by the crowd and at one point an American panel volunteer declaring that she’d clearly been born in the wrong country.

Appropriately, the random hashtag of #kebab was applied an thus ended up trending on Twitter (check out the ongoing twitterstream here).

But the serious point of SXSW Interactive was more, well serious. The Brits were there as part of Digital Mission, a trade mission organised by Chinwag for UK Trade & Investment, designed to enable digital companies to expand into overseas markets and attract investment outside the UK. Check out the official pictures, the blog and the companies exhibiting. You should also check out the daily TechFluff episodes.

That’s the official story. For what it’s worth, here’s my 2 cents on why the Brits were there. SXSW is a chance to see Silicon Valley and US tech culture at play. And I mean at play. Some even call it “Spring Break for Geeks”. Whatever the case, it’s a great opportunity to arrange to see Valley people, if they’re in town, for a fraction of the price of other Silicon Valley events, and in a more casual environment.

There is of course the assessment of the ever cynical ValleyWag, that the difference between SXSW Interactive 10 years ago and now is that “Thanks to the delusions of public-market investors, there was actually money to be made from what Internet insiders admitted were inanities. Now there’s no money and no hope of making it. There’s just the frivolity left.” They were of course referring to the myriad parties around the event such as a well-oiled Facebook party, which featured bands, DJs and breakdancers, and even Valleywag’s own event. However, there is still clearly money of some description to be made if the swathes of consultants and ’social media marketers’ were anything to go by.

In truth the real point about SXSW is the sheer randomness of the event - advancing your thinking, making contacts and seeing another side to Silicon Valley and tech culture in the US. You had to be seriously dull not to get anything at all out of it.

And conversely, we were in a position to give something back. It became clear on day one that US tech people could use more educating about the tech scene outside the US. I was on the Saturday morning panel about starting up in Europe. It it quickly became apparent that although there was a smattering of knowledge, most questioners during the Q&A were largely unaware of any startup scene in Europe other than the high profile success stories behind Skype, for instance.

In a panel the next day, title “Ditch the Valley, run for the Hills” the conversation revolved largely around starting up outside the Valley - but still within the US. When others ventured that there might be some interesting companies and startup clusters outside the US - as Beijing-based renaissance man Kaiser Kuo did - the majority of the panel - including Robert Scoble who has notably toured Israel and China recently - roundly scoffed at the idea. Although there are incredibly sound reasons for doing a startup in the Valley - 50 years of innovation, huge numbers of VCs and tech people, need I say more - the panel discussion could have used a little more context to their discussion.

At least SXSWi did offer one vision of the future which could well go global - the trashing of the local mobile reception by thousands of mobile users, probably the majority of whom were on iPhones. For most of the five-day digital conference, AT&T subscribers - which has the iPhone contract - had sluggish service, dropped calls and outright outages. A missed opportunity for the cellphone network to put in more bandwidth. Instead it was being roundly trashed on Twitter by SXSW attendees. But then you haven’t really arrived until you’re trashed on Twitter have you?

Congratulations to Dan Hon and his team at Six To Start, one of the surprise winners at this year’s SXSW Interactive Web Awards, not least to themselves, apparently. The alternative reality gaming startup based in London won both the Experimental and Best of Show awards for its digital story-telling mashup with Penguin Books, We Tell Stories, which, at almost exactly this time last year, was launched as one of the most entertaining time-wasters around.

The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming

The site experiments with creating new forms of story designed especially for the internet, with Penguin commissioning six of its popular award-winning writers to retell some literary classics using story-telling elements that take advantage of immediacy, connectivity and interactivity.

Penguin UK’s marketing of the project included this immortal line: “These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.” Which perhaps verges on the superlative, especially when one of the stories — Mohsin Hamid’s The (Former) General In His Labyrinth bears a close resemblance to a Choose Your Own Adventure (remember those?) in digital form.

On the whole, though, it was a bold and pioneering experiment for a publisher in an industry that is very much still working on the problem of building a bridge to the future of profitable and sustainable content distribution - in whatever form or shape that content happens to be take.

Six To Start won £100k in funding from NESTA in February last year. NESTA has a 2008 interview with Dan about We Tell Stories here.