This week Tamiz made wave with an appeal against Google, which he was trying to sue over defamatory comments about him made on Blogger posting. In a case that goes back to 2011, Tamiz had argued that Google was effectively the publisher of a series of comments calling him, falsely, a thief and a drug dealer, and should have deleted them as soon as they were made aware of them. Google did delete the comments, but only after a five week gap.

Tamiz is familiar with online controversy: one reason he was a lightning rod for angry comments in the first place was because, he stepped down as a local election candidate in 2011 after calling Margate’s women “sluts” on Facebook. And so, when he did not originally win his case — the first judge ruling that Google was not the publisher of the comments — he appealed to a higher court. There Google’s inaction was found to be troubling, though it did not actually overturn the libel ruling itself.

As the Financial Times reported:

Although Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Sullivan agreed with the original ruling that Google was not the primary or secondary publisher of the content it hosted, they said it was “at least arguable that some point after notification Google became liable for continued publication of the material”.

The Lords Justice likened the situation to a 1930s court case in which a golf club was held responsible for defamatory material left on its noticeboard because it failed to remove it after it was notified.

Cue the shrill sound of the press screeching into action. “Blogger.com libel case opens door for internet giant being required to monitor users’ posts”, squealed the Daily Mail with barely contained delight. Except, as it outlines in the story, the headline is essentially trolling — Tamiz was denied his libel claim and asked to pay 50 percent of Google’s legal costs: likely to be a tidy sum. And it’s a stretch to suggest, as much commentary does, that this is another step towards internet regulation — asking a company to respond to notices of illegal content may not be popular (just see the DMCA) but it is reasonable to expect them to comply with local jurisdiction.

Still, Tamiz — and the kerfuffle around his case — does show the amount of energy being expended around online libel in Britain right now.

Defamation laws in the U.K. are notoriously harsh, in large part because they lean in favor of the plaintiff and put the burden of proof on the defendant: it’s a case of “prove your comments were true” rather than “prove their comments were false”.

And the precedent for defamation in online publishing stretches back 15 years, to the case of Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, in which a physics lecturer sued an ISP over comments made in a Usenet group it hosted: the ISP settled the case, because a pre-trial ruling intimated that it was potentially culpable since, despite knowledge of the situation, refused to act for 10 days. Although the award was small — just £15,000 in 1997, the equivalent of around $33,000 today — it has laid the groundwork in Britain.

It’s one major reason many media companies employ battalions of comment moderators, and carefully police the comment threads on their own stories.

But remember, we are all media companies now. And that means that we are all open to the same set of rules. There have also been plenty of high-profile cases on Twitter and Facebook against individual users, but so far there has not been much success in taking on platform providers themselves. Just last week a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that while anonymous comments made on Facebook were defamatory, Facebook itself was not liable.

Still, with Godfrey in the background and more and more cases coming along, you can understand why people see Tamiz’s case as another push at a brick in the wall between platforms and publishing.

Yes, everyone’s a media company now: and eventually that will go for Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest as much as it does you and me.

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As my GigaOM colleague Bobbie Johnson pointed out in a recent post, the French government has been making some strong — and controversial — statements about what it wants the company to do after an outbreak of homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic comments erupted on Twitter. The minister for women’s rights, Najat Belkacem-Vallaud, wrote in a newspaper opinion piece that the government believes the service must “respect the values of the Republic” and take action to stop or censor hate speech. She said French authorities will be discussing how to do this with Twitter, and added (translation by Google):

“Even before the work is started, it should already be possible to act to remove tweets that are clearly illegal and, at the very least, make access impossible, so that the damage already done [to homosexuals, etc.] do not persist or do not cause additional problems with young people attracted by the publicity given to this unfortunate story.”

Many governments want to use Twitter to control speech

Since French laws make hate speech illegal (as similar laws do in a number of other countries, including Canada), the minister is really just asking Twitter to do the same thing the German government did: that is, to censor speech that contravenes the laws of the country. In the case of Germany, it was tweets by a neo-Nazi group, since expressing Nazi ideologies is illegal there. Twitter explained at the time that it had no choice but to obey the laws of the countries it does business in, but that it would try to limit the impact on free speech by only blocking access to those tweets for residents of Germany — as permitted by the regional-censorship tools it announced about a year ago.

Although they haven’t gone as far as France or Germany, officials in Britain have also broached the idea of trying to restrict Twitter speech — and for what they say are similarly virtuous purposes: after the riots in London last year, the government argued that much of the violence was driven by social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry instant messaging. The authorities held discussions with most of the major players about how (or whether) they should regulate such conduct, but in the end no action was taken. Twitter has also been involved in some of that country’s infamous “super-injunction” cases, where even the mention of an injunction is considered illegal.

In some ways, the German example was the most clear-cut case Twitter could possibly have wanted: it referred to specific speech — expressing Nazi ideology — that is illegal, and is relatively easy to nail down. But this ability opens a vast can of worms for a company whose CEO and general counsel have both repeatedly referred to it as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

In Turkey, for example, it’s illegal to say or do anything that is seen as insulting to Turkishness — a law that the government has used to block YouTube videos, among other things. What if Turkey was to ask Twitter to block or ban tweets or accounts that engaged in anti-Turkish behavior? A similar kind of question came up during the recent hostilities between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, when both sides used Twitter to hurl threats at each other. What if Israel asked Twitter to ban or block Hamas accounts or tweets sympathetic to this illegal organization? What if Egypt had asked for censorship during the Arab Spring?

What qualifies as hate speech on Twitter?

The racist and homophobic tweets targeted by the French government are an even slipperier slope: even if hate speech is against the law, what 140-character messages would fall into that category? Would simply using a hashtag like #SiMonFilsEstGay (If my son was gay) or #UnBonJuif (A good Jew) qualify? If Twitter was supposed to be removing or blocking access to specific tweets, how would it determine which were genuinely hate speech? Would it have a list of banned words, or run some kind of sentiment algorithm filter on the entire stream?

In a very real sense, what the French government seems to want Twitter to do — or wants to help it do — is virtually impossible. Twitter sees almost half a billion tweets every day, and has difficulty even providing a search function that works over a longer period than about a week. How could it (or anyone else) manage to filter through those millions of tweets to remove or block access to ones that expressed specific thoughts or opinions? And even if it could, would that be the right thing to do? Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian makes a persuasive argument that it would not, although others have argued that France should renounce the “free-speech fetish” of the U.S.

As it becomes an increasingly global media entity, however — and one that controls its own platform, unlike the declining media giants of the past — this is an issue Twitter is going to have to confront head on. And how it handles these kinds of censorship demands will say a lot about how much trust we can have in this digital free-speech machine.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Shutterstock/Jirsak

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March 2008: Dopplr relocates to a sublet at Moo Studios, 100 City Road, directly overlooking the roundabout. We’re always bumping into startup friends in the street, the cafe life is great, and there are regular rooftop barbecues at nearby Last FM and Moo on Friday evenings.

23 July 2008: I’m chatting in the office with (probably) Russell Davies, Ben Terrett and Matt Jones. We’re talking about the neighborhoods our friends work in in other cities, and I jokingly suggest that Old Street has become Silicon Roundabout. It feels very British, slightly awkward and a bit silly. I put it on Twitter.

“Silicon Roundabout”: the ever-growing community of fun startups in London’s Old Street area

— Matt Biddulph (@mattb) July 23, 2008

24 July 2008: At the Moo Summer Party I bump into Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times. I mention the joke and say I should draw him a map so he can write about it. I don’t expect this to happen.

25 July 2008: To my surprise, Tim emails me. He says he pitched the story to his editors and they want it. I write back with a list of the first 15 or so companies that come into my head, mostly friends:

“Here’s a list off the top of startups and agencies based in Old Street/Hoxton/Shoreditch off the top of my head:

Dopplr, Moo, AMEE, Trampoline Systems, Redmonk, Last.fm, Skimbit, Techlightenment, Kizoom, Schulze & Webb, tinker.it, LShift, Cohesive FT, Poke, Consolidated Independent.

and these are supported by the San Francisco-style cafes with late hours, available power sockets and free wifi: Shoreditch Old Station, Coffee@whitecross st and LCB Surf.

My guesses for why it’s more than a coincidence:

It’s out of zone 1, so it’s cheaper and out of the way of commercial streets full of shoppers

It’s near enough to The City, the West End and Canary Wharf to get to meetings, but has more of a casual character and streetlife

Great food

It’s mid-gentrification and there are lots of good property deals on small rooms in soon-to-be-demolished office buildings

Easy to reach if you’re living in the cheaper areas of east and south-east london like Hackney”

27 July 2008: Tim asked for a map so I made one on Google Maps and tweeted about it.

28 July 2008:Mark Prigg of the Evening Standard gets in touch after seeing the tweet and says his editor wants to do a story in the paper tomorrow.

29 July 2008: Tim blogs about the idea for the FT, and the Evening Standard sends a photographer to take a picture of me by the roundabout. I register siliconroundabout.com and point it to a generic Ning social network that Matt Jones set up.

30 July 2008: The Evening Standard redraws the map with the same companies I listed, and writes about it on page 11.

The newsagent in Old Street underground has the story headline on the boards outside the shop:

I’m a bit surprised.

Techcrunch writes it up too.

August 2008: Many startups email me asking to be added to the map. The government’s Department of Trade and Industry emails asking if they can help Old Street companies expand their business overseas. Real estate companies email me offering kickbacks if I help them get companies into office space.

After this, it’s all a bit fuzzy.

Ben Terrett created some ironic merchandising shirts with a lovely design:

Wired did a big special in January 2010 with a helicopter shot and a new map with lots of companies on it.

Tech City happened.

I moved to Berlin in November 2009 and was a bit surprised at how big the whole thing was when I came back in November 2011. The unscientific original list of 15ish companies is often used to create false measures of growth — 15 companies listed in 2008 to 400 companies in Wired’s 2010 article means 25x growth!

Since then, the name has been cited in a Victoria and Albert Museum show on British Design. Thinktanks and academics have done studies. And there’s now a street just off the roundabout called Silicon Way.

All I really did was give an emerging community/movement a silly name that they somehow rallied behind. The community in the area goes back to the first dotcom boom, and Shoreditch has been a creative hub for decades.

Strong community people like Richard Moross and Michael Acton Smith have done much more than I ever did to throw parties, get people together and use the name as a banner. I think the Tech City initiative may have done a lot to cement the name, in what amounts to a classic display of British stubbornness: “the government comes in and calls it Tech City, but it’s our Silicon Roundabout”.

All photographs used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Matt Biddulph, except the Silicon Way photograph, which is copyright Matt Webb and used with permission

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Listen to the noises coming out of the local companies, and it’s clear that they feel good about this. Former Facebook executive Joanna Shields, now working for the government’s Tech City organization, said it would help turn a “vibrant community” into a “global leader in tech innovation”. And the head of Google Campus, the internet giant’s local bridge-building effort, said it would “help to establish London as a global center for tech entrepreneurs”.

London’s time, you’d assume, is now.

But here’s the message I took away from it all: it’s time to step things up.

Promised unfulfilled

Britain’s government has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of London’s nascent startup scene over the last few years. While the Old Street area has been a center for the country’s digital economy ever since the birth of interactive media, the decision to create an official “Tech City” movement has seen a concerted effort to court technology companies.

This is for a few reasons. It’s partly an attempt to find some light in the economic gloom. It’s partly an attempt by Prime Minister David Cameron to appear connected, forward-thinking and switched on (look at his relationship with Google to understand the positioning here). And it’s partly an attempt to turn the legacy of the Olympics into something more by enticing big tech firms to the area — even if they don’t contribute much in the way of tax revenue to the British economy.

But Cameron’s commitment to bolstering the startup economy is actually even deeper than that.

Right now, I think the British government — or at least it’s gov.uk team, which is rebuilding government services to be “digital by default” — is actually the most exciting startup in the country.

It’s dealing with big problems in a smart way, tackling and operating in a lean, mean, aggressive manner: a world-leading approach that Tim O’Reilly recently said set the standard for governments. And to do that, it’s hired some of the most impressive coding, design and strategic talent around. Over the last couple of years a sequence of great talent — mainly from London, many of them friends of mine — have been sucked into the gov.uk machine as they try to reinvent the way Britons connect to their public services.

Don’t get me wrong: tackling big problems is great, and the work that Government Digital Service is doing is extremely important. But I think it’s an indictment of the local scene that so many great people are choosing to work for the civil service, and that the apparently thriving scene around Old Street seems to be more and more reliant on government boosters.

So how do you fix that?

The challenge to Britain’s startup community

A few months ago, I wrote that London’s tech community was looking at “golden moment”: a confluence of circumstances that could see the region really push on and make good on its promise.

Now, however, I’m less optimistic. There are lots of great companies and strong ideas floating around the UK startup scene, but right now there are too many poseurs and very few world beaters. The latent potential is not being achieved, and the signal is being crowded out by all the noise of bearded startup hipsters tapping away aimlessly in local coffee shops.

Still, I believe this is a glass-half-full situation. Those who are really taking the bit between their teeth and developing serious businesses are doing very well. Moshi Monsters has turned into a massive children’s brand; online loans company Wonga is doing things that banks can’t; innovative smaller outfits like BERG and Makie and others are making waves in their industries.

But the scene needs an injection of real talent and ambition — in part from the same people who have been subsumed into the government’s digital efforts. While they get down to Important Public Service stuff, the hangers-on have fallen into a self-congratulatory funk, drunk on applause from boosters and ego massages from investors looking to pump up their own interests.

Fortunately, most some of the talented individuals working on gov.uk are contractors, not staff. When their time is up, they’ll be back out. Let’s hope they do something great when they’re free again.

In the meantime, listen up, Silicon Roundabout: don’t buy into the mirage of success. It’s time to stop combing your mustaches and build something important.

Update: Mike Bracken, who heads the GDS project, has been in touch to say “most of our people are civil servants, as we’ve removed loads of contractors as per government policy”.

Glass of wine photo courtesy of Flickr user Davide Restivo

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But the fall, when it came, was fast and relentless.

Less than a month after the deal was struck, its architect, HP boss Leo Apotheker, was on his way out, replaced by Meg Whitman. A few months later, Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch walked the plank too. And this week things exploded as Whitman announced an $8.8 billion writedown of the deal amid claims of fraud and misleading accounting that the SEC and FBI are investigating.

Whatever the realities of the deal — and Lynch vigorously denies Whitman’s claims — the damage has already been done. And it’s not just to Autonomy and HP, either.

Transatlantic tough times

Here’s one deep, abiding result of this debacle that shouldn’t be ignored: it’s likely to sour any future dealings between America’s technology giants and their European counterparts. What Silicon Valley CEO, faced with a potential acquisition of a British company, is not going to remember Meg Whitman’s claims? And what acquirer will not let the fear of being undone — just like Apotheker was — color their decisions?

For anyone skeptically minded, Autonomy underscores an unhappy trend for transatlantic technology deals. So many of the biggest European tech exits have ended in ignominy, or at the very least obscurity. MySQL was bought by Sun for $1 billion shortly before it went supernova and got snapped up by Oracle. In 2008, Microsoft spent $1.2 billion buying Norwegian search company Fast; a few months later the company was charged with fraud for violating accounting rules.

And then there’s Skype. Rightly paraded as one of the great European software success stories, it has a checkered history. Before it was bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, of course, it had been acquired and then jettisoned by eBay, which wrote its original bumper purchase price down by $1.4 billion.

Negative patterns are hard to shake, and in meeting rooms from San Jose up to San Francisco, you can bet anyone talking to a British entrepreneur about a possible buyout is going to think of Autonomy and this mess.

And yet, and yet. The story is so much more complex. After all, eBay’s troubled purchase of Skype happened under the leadership of… Meg Whitman. Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, the Autonomy buy wasn’t just Apotheker’s deal: it also took place on the watch of HP’s board — a hyper-connected, super-smart group of the Valley’s best and brightest. I’m not just talking about Whitman herself, but also Marc Andreessen, the man worshipped by many as the new leader of the pack. Then there’s Ray Lane of KPCB, once a bright star now having his role reduced, and Alcatel-Lucent’s Patricia Russo — who, as the head of a French-American firm, has particular experience of the European-American situation. Let’s hope pressure continues on those individuals to see why they got things so very wrong.

Truth is, attempting to draw lessons from HP-Autonomy doesn’t get you far. The British company may be tarnished by the accusations, but HP is a mess, switching from one disastrous strategy to another without understanding what is happening to it. And because it’s impossible to separate the misinformed decisions from the bad ones, coming to a broader conclusion about how fit European technology companies really are would be terrible. Each deal should be looked at on its own merits, not in some gigantic cultural context stuffed with lies, fraud and unproven accusations.

Yet we know human nature, and we know it is a fickle, arbitrary thing. What a shame for everyone.

Meg Whitman photo courtesy of Shutterstock user drserg

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The rise of open source, cloud computing and the newly created distribution channels has also dramatically changed how solutions and businesses are created – known as “lean methodology” – and has been embodied by The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

In a similar manner, the costs associated with startups that include a hardware component are also going through a rapid decline.

And at the same time as these cost reductions, Kickstarter has created a marketplace for the crowd funding of hardware projects. More importantly, it has created a framework for startups to essentially run “smoke tests” — as advocated by Ries — to ascertain whether there is demand for a product or service, as well as the price points that the market might accept.

So why does hardware or Internet of Things need an accelerator?

While many of the conditions are highly conducive to support the rise of Maker communities, it’s still a relatively immature ecosystem. Much of the activity and noise is focused on just hacking around rather than having a commercial focus. It’s a good thing and encourages innovation, but tapping into this high energy Maker culture with a guiding hand from experienced mentors has the potential of spawning new ideas – the black swans for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

More interestingly, this emerging market is also attracting some extremely smart entrepreneurs who avoid the trends and fashions of others and like to play on the edges. The technical complexities associated with hardware – the things that make it hard – immediately limits participation to only the brightest engineers.

But it’s not all a bed of roses. It has been previously highlighted that technology projects have one of the lowest success rates among all Kickstarter categories, with only 29% percent being successful. Only fashion projects do worse. In addition, not every project goes well. Delays occur, especially with more complex projects. Some teams over stretch themselves and fail to deal with many aspects of the delivery that are new to them. Even Kickstarter has been forced to admit that “it’s not uncommon for things to take longer than expected.”

And this is where accelerators can help to nurture and support the best and the brightest in this emerging Maker community. As entrepreneurs with domain experience and expertise, mentors can provide first hand knowledge in managing the complexities associated with designing, prototyping, building and the manufacturing of physical devices — which reduces the operational and investment risks of projects.

There are other ways that an accelerator can help, too.

Being a hardware entrepreneur is also a very lonely existence, unlike our more popular and mainstream web service cousins. The peer to peer learning and cohort effect of getting the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the same sector working alongside each other cannot be underestimated, both during the program and in the future.

Finally, there are real practical differences between hardware and software which make being part of a dedicated accelerator even more valuable.

Hardware development has specific resource requirements that include access to a workshop space that with, say, 2D laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers and so on as well as support from industrial designers and engineers. Any of these individual resources might be prohibitively expensive or difficult to source, but within the framework of an accelerator their shared cost and accessibility can be invaluable.

Hardware is hard. But that’s what makes it fun and highly investable – given the right resources, environment and support structures. Why shouldn’t the Internet of Things have a dedicated acceleration program?

Jon Bradford is the CEO and co-founder of Springboard, which launched its SpringboardIoT accelerator this week. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is the founder of Good Night Lamp, a new Internet of Things startup.

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And yet the ambition is there — and company he runs, online vacation rental company HouseTrip, is doing well right now. It just raised $40 million and is even pushing the much-vaunted Airbnb into second place in parts of Europe.

The businesses are not exact rivals — HouseTrip focuses on helping people rent entire homes for their breaks, rather than rooms — but they are both taking the continent seriously. There are a number of different ways you can compare the two companies, and in many cases Airbnb comes out on top: it’s certainly the biggest beast in some of the popular urban destinations around Europe, even when you strip out the room-only listings.

But at a national level, Housetrip is ahead in many countries across the continent — with far better coverage of rural locations and out-of-the-way hotspots that appeal to families on vacation, rather than urban travelers on short breaks. In its home market of France, for example, Housetrip emerges narrowly ahead in volume, while in other popular destinations (Spain, Croatia and others) it boasts a greater lead in its number of listings.

In a highly competitive market that includes rivals like Wimdu, OneFineStay and many, many more, that’s no mean feat.

And the fact that Bertrand cuts against the grain is, perhaps, part of the reason for that success.

The Insider

After all, unlike most of the people fighting for this market, he didn’t end up in the business by accident: he started out in the world of hotels. The idea for HouseTrip came to him and his wife, Junjun Chen, while they were studying at Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, the oldest and most famous hospitality school in the world.

“When I studied hospitality over five years I guess what you really understand is service — how to make people feel welcome,” he says.

“If you ask the team I’m very, very detail-oriented, and the product is all in the detail. What gave me that focus on the details, certainly, was studying hospitality. In Paris hotels, if one pillow is not perfect, or one knife is not exactly two centimeters from the edge of the table, it’s a big, big deal.”

Hidden underneath his crop of curly red hair, it seems, is a mind focused on getting it right and almost nothing else.

The company, which started in Switzerland but now has its HQ in London, became unique when it took on its latest funding. The round was led by Accel, making HouseTrip the only company that all three of Europe’s leading venture firms — Accel, Balderton and Index — have backed. They’re all on board because they see a massive opportunity, and (perhaps) a chance for Europe to exert its power over foreign competition.

This, says Bertrand, plays to the continent’s natural strengths.

“When you look at most of the big travel companies, they’re European-based,” he explains. “By far the biggest is Booking.com, which is a Dutch startup. Travel is different maybe because that’s our DNA in Europe: Most of the market is European; Most of the schemes for decades have been European; We invented the hospitality industry, and so on.”

He may be overstating the case a little (Booking.com is a powerhouse, but it was acquired by the Connecticut-based Priceline back in 2005) but Europe is definitely HouseTrip’s stronghold right now. Its biggest cities include Paris, Barcelona, London and Berlin, where demand is high and the company is working hard to keep its supply of listings closely matched.

But while Bertrand says those large locations are profitable — Paris, he claims, hit breakeven nearly two years ago — the company is taking on a lot of funding: near $60 million at last count. He is using venture money, he says, to try and achieve scale. This means opening up new destinations and bringing on fresh listings, which can be an expensive, arduous task.

“Destinations that are big and have reached critical mass are profitable, but we’re expanding to lots of new places at any one time and that’s what really costs the money — but that’s what gives us so much growth,” he says.

“We could decide tomorrow that we’re happy with the existing destinations we have and become much more profitable, but we still think there is huge room for growth, so we want to capture the opportunities.”

Focus, focus, focus

For now, however, that need to grow is tempered by the desire to keep quality up — his obsession with quality. That means that although cities outside Europe, like New York, are growing fast, the company is primarily sticking to what it knows best.

“I think Europe will still be our focus in the medium term. This market is a European market, and if you conquer Europe you can conquer the world.”

For all the drama and talk of competition between HouseTrip and Airbnb and the rest of them, though, it’s only a small part of a very large story. Holiday rental is a big industry — big enough to support a public company like Homeaway, which is currently valued at around $2 billion — but it’s dwarfed by the much larger hotel sector.

And long-term success may require a change in strategy for many of the players in the game. Like others in the collaborative consumption sector, I have spoken to, Bertrand believes that Airbnb is soon going to have to move sideways into some unexpected markets to maintain the growth its investors seek.

After all, there’s a certain kind of pressure that comes from the $220 million that Airbnb has now had pumped into it — maybe more soon, if rumors that Peter Thiel is interested in investing another $150 million pan out. Building a company that can match those expectations may mean expansion into areas like, say, car rental, or a deal with the hotel industry to offload empty rooms.

Bertrand doesn’t think the same sort of pressure will come to bear on HouseTrip, even with the bundles of cash it has taken. For a start, he says with a smile, his wife and co-founder Junjun is the CFO. But more importantly, his business fundamentals are more sound: renting entire homes means that the average booking on the site is higher than many of its rivals. And that, in turn, gives it a stronger position to attack new destinations, new places.

But more than that, it’s a philosophy.

“My whole vision from the beginning is that holiday rental is much better than hotels, more authentic, and a much better way to travel,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror.”

Still room at the inn

It’s clear that this game still has a long way to go, and the market in two or three years may look very different from today. The vast number of names currently in the mix are likely to consolidate, and perhaps one or two of them will get snapped up by the bigger travel giants.

Still, though, Bertrand says there’s a lot of headroom — even at the most basic levels.

“We’re still focusing on what we call internally the low hanging fruit — on the rental side, that’s people who have been renting out holiday rentals for a long time and are simply looking for a more efficient way of doing it. When you look at that market in Europe it’s 3 million properties, it’s massive and there’s a lot of room to grow in there.”

And how many of those 3 million properties would HouseTrip need to make Bertrand feel comfortable?

“Three million is the answer,” he says, without blinking.

Oh yeah. There’s that ambition again.

Update: This post has been edited and updated to clarify how Housetrip is “beating” Airbnb in Europe. More detail in the comments.

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On Tuesday Ofcom gave permission for the UK’s biggest mobile operator, Everything Everywhere, to re-use some of its old spectrum for a limited amount of 4G services instead of waiting for the official 4G spectrum auction early next year. From next month, it said, the company would have the ability to use part of its 1800 MHz range for high speed data services as a prelude to providing more services in the future.

That move — the result of a consultation — will get a limited amount of 4G to customers who are craving it. But it has caused angry reaction from rival operator Vodafone, which launched a vociferous attack on the decision.

In a statement saying that it was “frankly shocked” by the regulator’s decision, Vodafone said the fact that the biggest player was being given the nod to start ahead of its rivals would distort the market.

It continued:

“The regulator has shown a careless disregard for the best interests of consumers, businesses and the wider economy through its refusal to properly regard the competitive distortion created by allowing one operator to run services before the ground has been laid for a fully competitive 4G market.

“Ofcom’s timing is particularly bizarre given the reports that Everything Everywhere is currently in discussions to sell some of its spectrum to 3, which Ofcom has previously been at such pains to protect with its over-engineering of the 4G auction.

“This means the balance in the auction will fundamentally change.”

Vodafone has been working with another network, O2, to try and achieve 4G speeds ahead of the official auction, but said that it expected Everything Everywhere to now be encouraged to delay and block the official auction from taking place in order to gain an extra competitive advantage.

It’s particularly painful for Vodafone because one reason that Everything Everywhere has redundant spectrum is because it was formed by the merger of the British operations of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and France Telecom’s Orange back in 2010. When that was given the green light by regulators, Vodafone had been arguing that redundant spectrum should be released to new bids: instead, it looks like EE is getting to use it for its own benefit.

“The regulator has spent several years refusing to carry out a fair and open auction” added Vodafone in its statement. “Now its decision today has granted the two most vociferous complainants during that entire process a massive incentive to further delay it.”

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It’s stuffed with factoids that may well induce depression. For example, not only were most of Europe’s biggest companies were built out of the industrial revolution but in fact continental Europe has produced just one of the world’s top 500 companies over the last 30 years (California alone, by comparison, has produced 26).

Europe produces plenty of corner shops, hairdressers and so on. What it doesn’t produce enough of is innovative companies that grow quickly and end up big. In 2003, analysing Europe’s entrepreneurial gap, the European Commission cited a study which showed that during the 1990s, 19% of mid-sized firms in America were classified as fast-growers, compared with an average of just 4% in six European Union countries.

[…]

If Europe were more entrepreneurial, says everyone from the commission down, it would not have been such a poor producer of big businesses. And it would have produced more successful new technology firms. Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be channelled through the tubes of the internet, but over the past few decades a great deal of it has been. That an economy so copiously provided with the technically educated as Germany’s has not produced a single globally important business-to-consumer internet company suggests a big problem with entrepreneurship.

So why exactly are things so dismal?

The article identifies a set of familiar problems: Europe suffers from a lack of risk-taking; its entrepreneurs have an inability to access larger funding rounds; there are more restrictive labor laws.

But it also identifies a few bright spots, such as the fact that governments are actually starting to take a more active — and actually helpful — role in promoting startups.

Go, read!

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Paul Chambers, 28, became the first person in the UK to be found guilty of a criminal offense for something written on Twitter back in 2010, when a court said a joke about a blowing up a local airport qualified as a public message of “menacing character”. But on Friday he learned that his latest attempt to get the conviction overturned had succeeded.

Things looked bleak for Chambers after two previous appeals had failed, but he was told by a judge in London that his conviction and fine would be overturned.

Chambers’ case — now known as the #twitterjoketrial — has become widely known, not least because it has drawn the support of many high-profile figures who say that the case is.

Their argument? That at worst, Chambers was guilty of poor taste — but nothing more.

Here’s what he said, so you can decide for yourself: after discovering that his local airport was closed due to bad weather, potentially preventing him from flying off to a romantic liaison, Chambers tweeted the following:

“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

Only 600 people who followed Chambers saw the tweet, and it was not until a week later when an off-duty airport manager sifting Twitter for comments about Robin Hood came across the joke. Even though it was identified as “not credible” in terms of a threat to the airport, the manager was obliged to contact police.

They took the case forward and in May 2010, he was found guilty, fined £385 ($600) and asked to pay £600 ($940) in court costs, with the local magistrate explaining that his tweet was “of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live.”

That view, it seems, was not held by the High Court.

In handing down his ruling (PDF), Lord Chief Justice the Lord Judge said the tweet “was not of a menacing character.”

“There was no evidence before the Crown Court to suggest that any of the followers of the appellant’s “tweet”, or indeed anyone else who may have seen the “tweet” posted on the appellant’s time line, found it to be of a menacing character or, at a time when the threat of terrorism is real, even minimally alarming.”

The UK has notoriously tricky laws around free speech, libel and threatening behavior, particularly in relation to social networks and online publishing.

A number of people have already been prosecuted for making racist comments. After last summer’s riots in London, meanwhile, politicians even suggested that social networking services could be closed down in case of a national emergency.

But while many agree that hate speech justifies prosecution, Chambers’ case has become the focus for a campaign that suggests the country’s speech restrictions are crossing over the line.

He’s won!!!!!!!!! #TwitterJokeTrial

— Al Murray (@ajhmurray) July 27, 2012

Just amazing. Can’t believe it. What great news. #TwitterJokeTrial

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) July 27, 2012

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