Firstly, a small admission. As an Englishman, and a lifelong rugby fan, I have historically not been keen on seeing Gareth Thomas happy. In fact the happier he gets, the more likely I am to be in something of a sulk. Because there’s a fair chance the reason for his buoyant mood will be related to a performance he’s just inflicted on the English Rugby team.

As professional rugby player, and former highly capped Welsh international, Thomas is a remarkable man – physically imposing, capable of showing the opposition a clean pair of heels even at international level, and with a reputation as committed and popular teammate. He is also, according to Sports Illustrated, the world’s only current professional male athlete in a team sport who is openly gay. Take a moment on that. The only one.

This struggle with his sexuality, how he came to terms with it personally, and then publicly, formed the foundation of Channel 4’s “In Conversation with Gareth Thomas” hosted at their London headquarters, as part of their Diversity Week. To describe Thomas’s talk as brave and honest is to barely scratch the surface. Displaying startling raw emotion, along with a keen sense of humour, Thomas spoke movingly of his journey from denial to acceptance, from living a lie, to “coming out” into the open.

Living as a straight man, married, and immersed in the intensely macho world of professional rugby, Thomas spoke of his life a being a series of lies. Concealing who he knew himself to be from his wife, family and closest friends, and how this torment led him to the brink of suicide.

But far from being a plea for sympathy, Thomas’s talk was a tale of freedom, optimism and pride. Pride in oneself, in those around you, and in our capacity to overcome. There were several points throughout the evening that had the audience reaching for their tissues, but they were upbeat notes. Thomas was clear – he dreaded the public response to his coming out. The day he did so, he ran out for the Cardiff Blues to play Toulouse on their home ground, feeling like everything was in the balance. As the names of each of his teammates were called out, 50,000 Frenchmen booed. Until they read out the name Gareth Thomas; and 50,000 Frenchmen cheered. The emotional impact of this, even now, is etched on the big man’s face as he struggles to retain control.

The point of this evening of storytelling, beyond moving and inspiring everyone in the room, was to announce the launch of The Gareth Thomas Foundation. An organisation whose aim is “to allow young people and those from marginalised groups to fulfil their potential, addressing the challenges of diversity and using role models from the wider sports world.”

During the lively Q&A with Tabitha Jackson, Commissioning Editor of Arts at Channel 4, Thomas spoke movingly on his wish to leave a legacy, to make it easier for people to walk the path he has trod. He clearly feels a responsibility, and has embraced the need to drive change, within and beyond the sporting world. Having seen Thomas ride roughshod over defenses all over the world, I would not expect him to be easily stopped. And it will be a pleasure to be cheering him on for once.

There’s only 6 more weeks left!

The Veolia Environment “Wildlife Photographer of the Year” Exhibition, the best exhibition of the year, every year, without fail!

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/wpy/exhibition/

This is a truly international and wholly inclusive photographic competition of which we should be immensely proud and fully supportive. There is no exclusivity or snobbery regarding admittance, anyone with a camera, a passion, a good eye and endless patience and dedication can apply.

The competition also encourages young photographers by having three separate age categories for the nearly adult, although personally I question whether such patronage is necessary as the breath-taking quality of this section is completely on a par with that of the “oldies”.

Just look at Haijun Pei’s wonderful “Golden Monkey” capturing the beauty & gentleness of one of our simian cousins, perfectly cropped & balanced.

I defy you to tell me you could see it was taken by a young man aged 10 years or less!

The exhibition gives a platform to showcase conservation issues , highlighting
man’s inane cruelty to our creature-neighbours with whom we share this amazing planet.

If Jordi Chias Pujol’s “Turtle In Trouble” does not play upon your heart strings
then I pity you because you have a soul which lives without music.

(fret not, for Jordi freed the turtle immediately after capturing its plight)

For me, in no other exhibition is there such a consistently high standard of work,
whether it’s a beautiful landscape like Jochen Schlenker’s “Sharp  Reflection”

or Maurizio Biancarelli’s shot of the Veliki Prstvaci waterfalls in Plitvica Lakes National Park
(Been there! Absolutely jaw dropping – do it before you die, your eyes and your heart will love you for it.)

For a shot of nature’s wilder side, try Jürgen Ross’ “A Carcass-Eye View”.

Or for something more gentle, Olivier Puccia’s “Sunset Moment” offers a moment of quiet contemplation.

The collection transports you from the depths of our oceans – Tony Wu’s “The Big Four”

to the stars – Chris Linder’s “Desert Icon”

or just the bottom of your street – Chris O’Reilly’s “Street-Walker”.

If its the subtlety of Black & White which pleases your palate – Morkel Erasmus’ “Desert Survivor”

or if the intensity of colour which rocks your boat – Edwin Giesbers’ “Out of the Blue”

I promise you will leave uplifted and enthused, your head awash with wonder and beauty
and a strong desire to immediately book a holiday to somewhere nice (if you’re anything like my girlfriend…)

What a joy and an honour it must be to be a judge in this competition (Dear Jim, can you fixit for me…)
although how you define “the best” from such an ocean of brilliance I do not know. Probably why the wrong one always wins!

My favourite? Peter Cairns’ “Floodwater Tapestry”.

Well done sir! Such delicate beauty. How I wish I’d taken that photograph.
The Winner? Shan’t tell. Go see for yourself!

The Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition

22 October 2010 – 11 March 2011

Entry fee £9.00 for adults,  child & concessions £4.50

The Natural History Museum
(one of the most beautiful buildings in London)
Cromwell Road
London SW7 5BD
South Kensington tube

Go in by the Exhibition Road entrance as the queues for the security bag search are shorter and you’ll get the chance to admire the newly cleaned side façade of the Victoria & Albert Museum too. Stunning!
Book your tickets in advance or try to go early because it gets busy.

NB. Even this pure pursuit has not been without scandal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/20/wolf-wildlife-photographer-award-stripped

Almost 10 billion downloads. That is the epic figure that has been facilitated by Apple and realised by its customers.

Apps are being downloaded by the 100s every second. This represents Apple’s domination of the handheld device market and the success of the App Store framework. Users must enter payment details on registering for an iTunes account, vital for users of Apple devices. This process embeds the ease of use of the store from the outset. At a click, users can download Apps, free or paid, with most loaded and ready to open in a few minutes. This accessibility coupled with the Apps integration with the device creates a secure and comfortable environment for spending! And the figures show, with an estimated $6.8 billion dollars revenue in 2010.

One of the standout successes of the App Store is the game, Angry Birds. The hit game by Rovio, a small Finnish company, is an unlikely pop-culture craze, demonstrating that anyone with coding skills, an idea, and good characters can launch a product that catches on without spending millions for marketing. In 2010 it topped the charts in its free, paid and iPad variants.

Angry Birds’ success is perhaps based on two elements. Accessibility and time.

Users can understand the concept instantly and the learning curve is as short as catapulting the first bird. It is engaging for children and adults alike, with universal satisfaction. There are no long-winded intros or stories to distract from the action, pigs and birds are what you get! As for time, a single round of the game can satisfy and while away less than a minute. However, for those seeking further challenge, hours could be spent tossing the birds in ever more complex structures.

We can learn from this simple application’s success. Consumers want something instantly engaging and easy to use. The tactile action of touch screen can allow complex controls to be simplified into a finger swipe, and understanding the concept is instant. Mastering it, however, is where the application’s persistent appeal lies. Keep it simple and keep it easy.

Corporate users require the same principles but have different needs. Where do our insights come from? From our own work with our clients – talking the talk, walking the walk.  We developed Pantheon, our  iPad and web platform that takes the same principles – you know how it works when you open the app, its engaging and delivers.  In a geographically dispersed business, working across multiple time zones, and dealing with complex and detailed subject matter, how can communication occur with clarity and precision? How can human warmth and information be combined with convenience and immediacy?

Pantheon enables teams to meet in a walled garden, a community protected and catered for with a private network of content and data, enabling attendees to enjoy a deeper meeting experience.

The platform is intuitive, easy to use and supports everything from project teams coming together to collaborate and problem solve, through to scheduled meetings and supporting collateral.

Putting the warmth and humanity back into the time-poor business community, within a secure environment.

Keep it simple. Keep it easy. So users can get on with their business. And get back some of their life, maybe for some more Angry Bird time. Their choice. At least they now have the option.

So, 2011 is proving to be one helluva busy time here at The Lighthouse. As you may have seen, we just opened up our new 2,500sq feet of tech lab and gallery space, which in itself is a really exciting development for us, but one thing we’ve had up our sleeves and have been just busting at the seems to tell everyone about is the launch of Radio ditto.

Our very own radio station will be officially launching at our next Campfire on the 20th January to coincide with a talk from world renowned DJ Greg Wilson. We’ll be streaming the Campfire live on the night, and be hosting a number of other shows and amazing ditto-esque things in the coming weeks and months, everything from fireside chats with special guest interviews to streaming the latest, greatest (and weirdest) music finds from our own team.

With this in mind, it seemed fairly serendipitous that whilst looking over the Guardian news feeds this morning, I came across an article claiming that Universal and Sony Music plan on beating piracy withsomething called ‘instant pop’. The idea? Well, they plan on implementing an initiative that I honestly thought already happened – I’m either forward thinking or out of touch I’m not sure which – in that they will put music on sale simultaneously with it hitting the airwaves and playlists of radio stations.

So, a touch over a decade after the Pandora’s box that was Napster was opened, it seems the music industry is catching onto the idea of instant. Realising that whether it be the X-Factor generation or your regular music lover, people want music now, not to hear it on the radio and then wait for six weeks for the single release and then even longer for the album release.

The article quotes Universal Music chief executive David Joseph, who says; “’Wait’ is not a word in the vocabulary of the current generation. It’s out of date to think that you can build up demand for a song by playing it for several weeks on radio in advance.” Common sense right?

I’m working on the same principle that I’ve been working on, pretty much, since the launch of Naspter, in one form or another: hear song > shazam song > spotify song > buy album. I find it completely bizarre the concept of this ‘lead up time’. Okay, its the traditional model for building up a song on the airwaves, getting the stores stocked with product and then hitting the release button to a big fanfare, but if there’s one thing that we know about the music industry today, it’s that their old systems don’t work, but they are somewhat resistant to change. The fact that there’s only ONE dedicated music retailer on the high-street today might be a hint of the way things have been going.

So, Sony and Universal have come to realise – or admit – that people want instant gratification, and are going with a ‘on air, on sale’ policy. The belief that this will help reduce piracy and make the charts a more fertile ground of slowly climbing records, rather than short lived instant spikes of new entries, is one that I actually share. This is definitely a move in the right direction, and whilst piracy continues to be a problem for the industry itself, with sales continuing to drop year on year, at least now if someone wants music when they hear it, they might be able to get it.

In the temple of design heroes there are a few figures who bathe in glorious light; Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Milton Glaser, David Carson, Neville Brody to name a few… but I recently discovered another inspirational figure who seems to have received less popular attention so far — Alvin Lustig. The name may be familiar to some but for a designer such as myself who appreciates the modernist style and philosophy, it was a revelation to discover the delights of his catalogue of work.

I chanced upon the recently published “Born Modern: The Life & Design of Alvin Lustig” whilst reviewing my “Wish List” on Amazon and was instantly taken by the cover art — “Never judge a book by its cover” they say but I have made many treasured purchases by disregarding the adage. Although his name was unfamiliar and I was unable to “Search inside this book” (the Amazon website function for prospective buyers) I decided to take a chance based upon the cover. The punt paid off and I am delighted with this fascinating compendium.

A beautifully designed hardback, weighing in at 208 pages, it is lovingly written by Alvin’s wife Elaine, who gives us a fond and personal introduction to a talented and driven innovator — a

designer whose career was sadly cut short at age 40 by kidney disease caused by the diabetes he developed as a teenager — the condition had also blinded him towards the end of his life.

In this short time, however, he left behind a prolific legacy encompassing books, magazines, textiles and interiors, whilst also finding the time to teach. He challenged the design conventions of his day, bringing elements of modern and abstract art to the structures of book design. One of his finest pieces of work is the jacket design for “Three Tragedies” by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca — published in 1949, the design looks fresh enough to have been published in 2011. Stunning composition of stark black & white photography and handwritten lettering make for an untiring visual delight which is still in print today. And on that thought, I’m off to Amazon again right now to go disregard that book-cover wisdom once again and pick up a copy so I can admire Lustig’s work in the tangible sense, as it’s meant to be.

The start of 2011 signals the start of a new era for the film and video department, and indeed for ditto.

A new home in the shape of a brand new, all singing, all dancing edit suite on the lower deck of the lighthouse, which includes a soundproof vocal booth, dedicated green screen room and interview studio. This new subterranean space seems to suit our sunlight dodging crew down to the ground, (I believe hibernation is the natural state for the editing species during the cold winter months.)

The new Film and Video space is only the tip of the iceberg in what is a huge metamorphosis for ditto and the Lighthouse, which has now achieved a new balance of yin and yang. In addition to the bright and airy heavenly qualities of the ground floor, we can now descend into the fiery red basement where the alchemy of ditto’s Tech Lab takes place. Alongside Tech Lab and the Film and Video space is our new collaboration and exhibition space – the realisation of which has exceeded even our own expectations.

There is an enormous free-hanging wall, comprised of 2,688 coloured plastic bottles, designed by our team and realised by Lee & Katy Cranston, which creates an interactive pathway into our expansive thinking space. Step inside and you will find a table formed of 6 beautiful Edwardian doors sealed in Perspex. These doors will act as a receptacle for artwork from around the world which will be visible throughout all of ditto’s daily client work, and which, once a month, will be transformed into a public gallery during our notorious Campfire evenings.

All this considered it seems only appropriate that the first piece of video to come out of our wonderful new edit suite should be a call to arms for established, and emerging artists to submit their work and ideas for exhibition on the ditto doors.

It’s with not a little pride that we are able to offer this opportunity to artists to help shape what is an exciting and inspiring space, and the next chapter of collaboration in our story.

Watch this space for your chance to get involved.

So, it’s that time of year again. The time when the Sin City becomes Geek Ground Zero and the nerdy masses from around the world gather in entertainment capital of the world, not for the gambling, not for the booze or the infamy, but for the gadgets.

It’s funny, for the town that coined the phrase ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,’ the amount of tweeting, live blogging, streaming, writing, interviews, reviews, unboxing’s, testing, updating and uploading that takes place in the five days that is CES 2011 is almost unparalleled. It is seen as the mecca of consumer electronics, with every manufacturer and independent inventor worth their salt putting their new wares on display and trying to impress the blogosphere enough to create that viral wave to ride into big time sales.

Our personal recommendations for keeping track of the latest and greatest, as well as some of the laughable failures, during the next couple of days would be:

Engadget – Probably the largest and most successful gadget and technology blog on the planet, they have their coverage broken down by sections, with a live stream, daily podcast’s, galleries, video and a breaking news section to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Gizmodo – Keen rival of Engadget, always hot on their heels with the latest gadget news, you know for sure that they’re going to beat Engadget to at least a few scoops, and between the two you’ll not miss a thing.

CrunchGear – Now, if Techcrunch is the Daddy of digital business news, from start-ups to down time, then CrunchGear is the hyperactive nephew that can’t sit still. A place where you’ll find a little more commentary than just the regurgitated gadget spec sheets of Engadget and Gizmodo, it’ll have all the news and more.

What’s the ditto take? Well, all the electronics, from super flat screen TV’s to 128GB super SD cards, are great, but what we’re watching closely is the development of tablet technology. As you may remember from one of our blog posts late last year, we’re currently expanding our own tech lab – we’ve just fitted out and equipped another 2,500sq feet for the purpose – and we’re embedding ourselves deeply into the conversation of website vs application and the future of browsing and the internet.

There are a lot of rumours over whether or not Apple will release the iPad II, or the CDMA iPhone at the event, but the betting is against the release, even if there has been a mock wrap-around case for the iPad II doing the rounds at the event. The other big tips however, are ASUS, Samsung, Motorola and Microsoft all releasing an array of new tablets and smart-phones. It seems clear now that the tablet isn’t just an expensive gadget for the early adopter or someone with too much time on their hands, it’s here to stay. There is clearly a consumer demand for tablet devices and as more and more consumers port their web experience from their desktop PC’s to their couch based, mobile tablets, the change in browsing experience and requirements will also continue to evolve. If you’re a smart-phone user today, you’re aware of applications, and as bespoke applications for individual requirements become the norm, tablets will become increasingly integral to the consumer experience.

We’re really excited about the potential for this CES to bring the tablet to the forefront of the consumer electronic agenda: with so many big company’s releasing such a wide selection of devices, they’re a smart bet for the future.