Richard Giles

Martin Well, from Tangler, flicked me an email the other day.

On a recent trip to the valley I attended a STIRR Mixer. It was a fantastic; great people and a fun format. I’ve known the organizer, Sanford Barr, for a while and really like the spirit of what he’s trying to do – help entrepreneurs – so rather than reinvent the wheel, Sanford and I decided it would be better for us to just host a STIRR event in Sydney (the first outside the valley).

So STIRR Sydney will be held on Wednesday 6th of December starting at 7pm. It’ll be standup, with finger food supplied, and a whole bunch of interesting and entertaining ‘startup games’ for the night.

We’re also inviting 3 to 5 startups to show off their stuff. If you have a startup, or know of one who would like to get involved, please let me know.

What you need to do:

1. Go to the wiki page (http://stirr.dinner20.com) and register yourself (it’s first come first served so hurry up)

2. Pass this email on to people you think would be good to have at the event.

3. Think of an aussie internet startup that would like to demo and have them contact me.

4. Send me a web 2.0 joke. (Or simply provide an answer to “How many web 2.0 startups does it take to change a light bulb?”)

Also, a big thanks to the event sponsors:
· Tech Venture Partners (http://www.tvp.com.au)
· Atlassian (http://www.atlassian.com)
· Tangler (http://www.tangler.com)

I’d like to go, but we’re still to early to be showing of our project.

Boing Boing has picked up the story that Australian cricket supporters, The Fanatics, are being threatened by EMI because they say they “breached copyright because it included altered lyrics to songs such as Go West by the Village People and Daydream Believer by The Monkees.” (quote from an ABC article)

I found a copy by hunting through Google. If you want to see how ridiculous such a move by EMI is, then you can grab it here.

I suggest everyone download a copy, print it out, share it, post it to your blog or website.

UPDATE: Here is a torrent of the PDF.

UPDATE: The Fanatics have announced that EMI have retracted the threat of legal action.

After a slight misunderstanding with our good friends at EMI, we’ve been reliably informed that the songbook isn’t in breach of any copyright laws and in turn the songbook is once ahead downloadable and fully legal.

I was interviewed this afternoon by Singapore’s 938 Live radio station about Microsoft’s Zune media player. We chatted about the negative reaction, and the future of media players merging with mobile phones.

Thought I’d share the MP3 here.