I was woken up this morning by a text from Nik. Firstly, a big thank you to Nik for doing it by text, last time it was by hitting a gong (nobody knows where he got it from) four inches from my ear. The text was about the new plan, announced on the 11th of May by the government, to fit "smart metres" in every home in britain by 2020 at a total cost of £7 billion (original article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8042716.stm). 

On the surface this seems like good news, whilst Qonnectis main focus has been on their water metering product, they also provide smart metering systems for gas and electricity (http://www.qonnectis.com/Solutions/Energy-Utility/Default.aspx) and so could be a part of this. 

Security sold from the Money? What Money?'s investment portfolio:

Company Name: Autonomy Corporation PLC
Symbol: Au.
First Held: 14th February 2008
Holding Sold: 100%
Date Sold: 30th April 2009
Price: 1417 Pence
Profit: 38%

Summary:

Autonomy corporation has performed well in the 13 months since we first purchased them, developing a solid niche in the corporate information management market and consistently bringing out new products to compliment its existing systems.

MWM is of the view that after a period of steady growth, Autonomy will find it increasingly hard to expand further and will now enter a phase of consolidation. As their products become better known they will also experience steadily increasing competition from other – potentially much larger (read Google, Microsoft and Cisco) – companies. Their business being software based, patents will do little to prevent this.

In my last article, written in response to the pirate bay verdict, I suggested that the traditional business models of the music and film industries had passed their best and that if such firms wanted to survive, they would have to come up with something new and better. It's easy to look at their models from outside and point out that they have failed, it's much harder to come up with suggestions for what they should do to fix them.

The below article is written to try and explain why I find the Pirate Bay Verdict so unfair, all comments appreciated, please either use the comment system below or email them to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . I'll happily post other peoples versions or other opinions as separate articles if you submit them.  

Today the four men responsible for the torrent indexing site The Pirate Bay, were sentenced to 1 year in jail for assisting making available copyrighted content, they were also order to pay around $3.6 million in compensation to various record and film companies including Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.

This ruling drew a lot of anger from a lot of people, myself included. Some peoples reasoning is very simple, they like being able to download for free content they would normally have to pay for and dislike anything which interferes with that. For other people including myself, our support for the Pirate Bay and outrage at this verdict is a little more complicated.