John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar and Disney, loves playing with the Spore Creature Creator according to Maxis, Pixar’s Bay Area neighbour.

But should he show alarm at what is being invented and uploaded online by others or welcome in a whole new generation of animators?

Spore is Maxis’s long-awaited follow-up to The Sims, launching on September 5, and the Creature Creator is an appetiser that allows players to build life forms that can be placed in the game later and used to evolve civilisations and take part in interplanetary expansion.

In the meantime, they can be uploaded to Sporepedia, a vast shareable online database of user creations. Electronic Arts, Maxis’s parent, said this week 2.5m copies of the Creator had either been downloaded for free or bought as a boxed version, while more than 2m creatures have been created so far.

I received a full demo of the game from Thomas Vu, a Maxis producer, this week. He showed me the flexibility of the Creature Creator in shaping backbones and bodies and attaching all manner of limbs and appendages. This was only one of eight Creators in the game as well, with others available to make objects such as vehicles and buildings.

I could imagine Mr Lasseter and his Pixar animators using the Creators to prototype future animation characters, such is the sophistication of the tools and the flexibility they allow.

In fact, as we flicked through Sporepedia, Mr Vu pointed out a very passable imitation of Pixar’s Wall-E character in the library, created by a player.

I wondered if Mr Lasseter would approve of this as adding extra buzz for his movie or be more inclined to reach for the phone and call his lawyer.

The possibilities in Spore for making realistic imitations have not been seen in video games before and the user-generated content it will create is going to launch it into the realm of YouTube in risking copyright complaints from intellectual-property owners.

It also means questionable content of another kind can be created, such as the flying genitalia that has struck the Second Life virtual world.

Maxis says there will be parental controls and the Spore community has been very good at policing itself and flagging such content for removal so far.

On the opportunity to reproduce accurately characters, buildings, cars and other trademarked products, the studio says it will adopt YouTube’s stance of taking objects down on requests from the copyright owners.

They could be kept very busy, Spore users have already created more species than exist on Earth with the Creature Creator, just imagine what they can do when they get more tools.

Intel has made its biggest deal yet for its Classmate PC - the low-cost notebook that has competed with One Laptop per Child and nComputing in bringing affordable computing to the classroom.

It is providing 500,000 Classmate PCs  to the Portuguese government for its primary school population, with units already arriving in time for the new school year.

Intel is also providing technology support for the “Magellan Initiative” as part of a long-term programme.

Intel said the government liked the Classmate PCs for their ruggedness, software availability and design for that particular age group. It said Portugal had looked at different options but it is not clear whether OLPC or nComputing were in competition with Intel.

Intel works with local manufacturers to make the Classmate PC, it now has 100 vendors in more than 50 countries.

I remain a little confused about how it sees this business. There seems to be a mixture of philanthropy, extending its brand in emerging markets and priming the pump for adoption of its low-power processors in low-cost laptops for the masses.
Arguably, it no longer needs to do this, now that Asus has led a charge of manufacturers into low-cost laptops with its eee PC.

The Classmate PC received an upgrade in April with a sleeker, more rugged design and better battery life for a selling price of around $350. Its new Atom microprocessor should be included in units later this year.

“This is a great example of how the Classmate PC can be used in mature markets,” Lila Ibrahim, vice president of Intel’s emerging market platforms group, told me, citing the growing reach into countries such as the US, Germany and Italy.

“It shows the range of emerging and mature markets we have and the scale and momentum that has happened over the past few months.”

‘Cloud computing’ is fast becoming this year’s ‘green data centre,’ if the recent excitement about technologies that allow people to perform increasingly complicated computing tasks over the internet  is any guide.

Compared with some other recent announcements, however, the cloud computing project announced on Tuesday by Yahoo, Intel and Hewlett-Packard appears to pack a particular punch.

In a joint press release, the companies said they would create a “test bed” of six data centres designed to promote open-source collaboration around intensive cloud computing. The array will allow companies, academics and other instiutions to conduct cloud computing experiments on a global scale.

In a further sign that the initiative is more than just PR pap, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the top US computer science schools, is among the institutions that will host the project, along with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority. HP Labs and Intel Research will also contribute, with the assistance of software tools from Yahoo.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research, summed up the effort thusly: “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment.”

As GigaOm points out, the effort can also be seen as an attempt by HP, Yahoo and Intel to create a sandbox for researchers to rival a similar offering from Google, which laid down its marker in cloud computing in partnership with IBM in October. Microsoft has also recently declared its intention to become a superpower in cloud computing.

A world in which companies and people can ‘plug in’ to computing resources just like they do electricity is still a long way off. But Tuesday’s initiative looks like it could be useful to researchers looking for ways to move beyond the relatively simple tasks that can be performed in the cloud today - like sales force management and other types of productivity applications - to bigger, more resource-intensive processes.

Ribbit, which introduced itself only last December as Silicon Valley’s first phone company, has been bought by one of the world’s oldest phone companies for $105m.

BT, the UK operator which began as a telegraphic service in 1868, aims to use Ribbit as a platform for services on the national Internet-Protocol 21st century network it has been building, called 21CN.

In an interview with us this morning, JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT, made reference to two other Silicon Valley telecoms platforms - the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android project.

“We could have built a device-specific platform like Apple did, we could have built a platform for creating ads - Google might call it Android but I guess we think it should be spelt Ad-droid - or we could have been like AT&T and just provided the pipes for these people to work from,” he said.

“But we felt telephony and software were now one and the same thing, and we wanted to be with people who had that same vision that it was going to be a converged world.”

So BT’s argument is that it is a more open platform, not tied to use on just the iPhone and not part of some Trojan horse for Google to sell more ads.

The problem is that Ribbit may now be perceived to be tied to one carrier and one country even, rather than being seen as a global platform open to all.

And while BT is a big company, it does not have the pulling power of Apple’s iconic device nor of a Google to persuade developers to flock to it in droves.

It may be happy enough anyway folding Ribbit into the software and services it is planning to sell businesses on its IP network, but Ribbit itself insisted today it was retaining its autonomy and would be allowed to partner with others.

Ted Griggs, chief executive, told me Ribbit had realised it needed access to a global network to grow and BT gave it immediate access to 178 countries.

“We’ve established a lot of different relationships in the enterprise and with other carriers,” he said.

“We feel BT will benefit because they want to push the software side of the business, we’ll continue to establish partnerships and BT is encouraging us to do so.”

Ribbit’s key technology is a “SmartSwitch” that handles the complexities of mobile, fixed and internet telephony, allowing developers to master just a few simple commands to bring voice to any web page or web application.

It remains to be seen how Ribbit’s 5,000 developers will react to news of its acquisition. In a blog note today to them, Ribbit said it would mean more features such as text messaging and call flow management.

Move over Silicon Valley. New York’s Silicon Alley is a Web 1.0 relic. And Cambridge’s Silicon Fen is just SO pre-crunch. Now Silicon Roundabout is staking its claim as the new tech start-up hub of the moment.

Previously known as the busy junction where London’s Old Street meets City Road, Silicon Roundabout is not the most salubrious of locations for budding entrepreneurs. But a coalescence of young web and tech companies in EC1 dates back to dotcom days. Alongside cheaper rents and a surfeit of bars, tapping into that experience is part of the area’s appeal for many of its newer residents.

Many will be hoping to follow the example of local hero Last.fm. The online music community was bought by CBS for $280m (£140m) last year, one of the largest UK web company buyouts of recent years.

“Old Street was a seemingly unlikely place to build a web company when we came here six years ago, but there’s no doubt it’s now becoming a hive of tech activity,” says Martin Stiksel, Last.fm’s co-founder. “The noise, vibrancy, and underground attitude of East London certainly rubs off on you, and inspires fresh perspectives – something I think all these start-ups share. It’s a million miles from sterile, air-conditioned Silicon Valley, literally and metaphorically.”

Right on Silicon Roundabout is Moo.com, which prints business cards based on photos from sites such as Flickr or Facebook, and other real-world products based on virtual content. One dotcom survivor is Moo’s chief technology officer, Stefan Magdalinski, who previously founded UpMyStreet, a local information site, and TheyWorkForYou.com, which helps UK voters find out more about their MPs.

Moo’s founder and chief executive Richard Moross also has a keen eye for a bargain – netting offices for a fraction of local rates because they’re due to be demolished in coming years – and “knows how to throw a party”, according to Matt Biddulph, a neighbour and CTO of Dopplr, a travel site. Indeed, Moo’s summer party last Thursday was abuzz with chatter about the newly anointed Silicon Roundabout, coined last week by Biddulph on micro-blogging service Twitter to describe the “ever-growing community of fun start-ups in London’s Old Street area”.

“For me it’s all about the community here,” Biddulph told the FT. “We moved in because our friends did too.”

He says Old Street appeals because it is away from the throngs of shoppers in Soho, where (for instance) Bebo is based, but near enough to the City and the West End for meetings with financiers or media types – as well as the cheaper areas of east London where shoestring-budgeted entrepreneurs may live. Plenty of hip cafés with free WiFi such as Shoreditch Old Station and Coffee@Whitecross Street are on hand to caffeinate developers.

“Critical mass comes from network of people,” says Biddulph. “There were some really interesting companies here in first dotcom boom, and a lot of the companies here are having their second time around. I’m at my first start-up, so it really matters to me to have people around who know how put a business together – and how to find cheap office space.”

The Dopplr CTO has plotted his fellow Roundabouters on (what else?) Google Maps to lend credence to the idea (see http://bit.ly/siliconroundabout). But Silicon Roundabout’s claim to be the heart of the London tech scene is already being challenged by Huddle, a provider of online collaboration software who is building a similar concentration of talent in Bermondsey Street, South London. Huddle, Moo and Dopplr are all involved in mentoring at Seedcamp, a London event which aims to foster the next generation of European entrepreneurs.

“There are two or three competing camps starting,” says Alastair Mitchell, Huddle co-founder and chief executive. “But competition is good. We’re all trying to grow this community.”

(Thanks to Matt Jones of Dopplr for the photo)

Despite its Irish roots and Google links, new search engine Cuil cannot say it is feeling lucky today.

Cuil has been down for much of its launch day, presumably from the weight of traffic - a victim of the media hype (including our own story) and perhaps its own hubris.

When we interviewed Tom Costello, the Irish-born founder and chief executive last week , he told us Cuil was going for a full launch on Monday, rather than a gradual one.

That is very un-Google like in its avoidance of long beta testing and the current “Search. We’re working on it” error page suggests the decision may have been a mistake.

If you do manage to load the proper page, there are a number of other un-Google.com features to observe:

• • A drop-down suggestion box as you type your query means a quicker route to your answer and fewer page-views for Cuil - but it has no ads to serve at present.
  • A magazine-style three-column layout with pictures and fuller text makes a refreshing change from Google’s list pages.
  • Results are not based on popularity or topicality but intrinsic content. “We are offering something that’s more about the content of the page rather than how much traffic it’s getting,” said Mr Costello. This takes some getting used to. Like most people, I prefer to get current, popular results. A vanity search on my name on Google produces my latest blog post, my linkedin profile and my Friendfeed lifestream as three of the first four links. On Cuil, there are no direct links to me, with only two out of 11 links mentioning me in passing. Cuil seems broader and deeper, almost encyclopaedic, but appears very lacking in focus. Having said that, the demo Cuil gave showed a search for “Harry”, which did provide focus in the shape of different tabs for Harry Potter, Harry Truman, Prince Harry etc for disambiguation purposes. However, this has clearly not been fully implemented.
  • As Cuil does not care about popularity and therefore what its users are searching for, it does not keep logs. As well as saving a lot of space and processing power, this means it has unimpeachable privacy standards compared to Google, as it has nothing to keep private.

Then of course there is Cuil’s 120bn-page search index, which it claims is three times larger than Google’s and its technology that lets it use just a handful of servers for queries rather than the massed ranks of thousands used by Google per query.

This technology seems to be Cuil’s key advantage. It would have an easier job convincing other search engine companies to buy its cost-saving solution than persuading users to switch from Google, or use Cuil as their main alternative.

However, Mr Costello insisted Cuil was not just a showcase for its back-end technology.

“People need to have bigger ambitions, you have to try to change the world,” he said.

“The Silicon Valley venture capital thing is that it’s easy for people to say ‘Oh, I’ll build something to flip.’

“What we really care about is trying to build something which makes things better for people, which means the whole web is indexed, and if you create value for society, society hopefully will come back and reward you for it.”

Not as succinct as Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto, but his comment shows Cuil is at least Google-like in its altruistic aims.

A who’s who of European technology entrepreneurs will be providing guidance and mentoring to a new generation of start-ups at this year’s Seedcamp. Founded by Saul Klein of Index Ventures and run by Reshma Sohoni, formerly of 3i and Softbank Capital, Seedcamp aims to build and support a community of European tech entrepreneurs, culminating in its main event in London this September.

The best-known entrepreneurs on this year’s advisor list are Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype, the internet telephony service, and more recently Joost, a web video provider; and Brent Hoberman of travel site Lastminute.com and, latterly, Mydeco, an online furniture retailer.

The rest of the advisors are all big names on the European start-up scene too, as founders of many of Europe’s largest recent tech exits. They are: Michael Birch of social networking site Bebo and Kevin Cornils of online marketing provider Buy.at, both bought by AOL earlier this year; Martin Stiksel of Last.fm, an online community of music fans for which CBS paid $280m in May 2007; Marten Mickos, chief executive of open-source database provider MySQL, sold to Sun Microsystems for around $1bn in January; and Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku and Tommy Ahlers of Zyb, mobile application firms acquired by Google and Vodafone respectively.

Alongside UK entrepreneurs who have yet to flip their companies for millions of dollars, and representatives from the big US tech companies who’ve been writing the cheques, this group will bring contacts, business advice and generally help start-ups at the week-long conference to “think big and aim high”.

Since May, Ms Sohoni has travelled led mini-Seedcamp events in Paris, Berlin and Kiev. But in spite of increasing numbers of new tech companies springing up in eastern Europe, she says London remains the main event. “We see the UK and London as a critical hub for start-up activities,” she says, especially for European companies with global ambitions.

Common technological themes among the entrepreneurs presenting across Europe so far include online and mobile gaming, personal finance applications, open source and variations on the “semantic web” – “the idea of using natural language to bring intelligence out of the information that’s out there”, according to Ms Sohoni.

But for those teams still applying to one of the 20 places at Seedcamp, she notes a preference of investors for business models based on transactional payments rather than advertising. “Everybody likes to put [advertising] up on their slide as a business model,” she said. “We were careful about that last year but are even more so now.”

Ms Sohoni also warns that almost half of last year’s applications came from social networking sites – none of which received investment.

“We are looking for globally applicable businesses that can grow beyond their local languages,” she says.

Seedcamp Week runs from September 15 to 19. The deadline for entries is August 10. The Financial Times is a media partner at the event.

Zimbra Desktop is a web application disguised as a desktop one, or maybe it’s the other way around. I admit to being confused.

I have been playing with it since Yahoo announced the beta of the product on Thursday and it has some impressive features that could persuade some users they don’t need Microsoft’s Outlook anymore.

My trouble is that I decided that a long time ago, moving onto web email, contacts and calendar with Yahoo and then picking up on Google’s Calendar and Gmail.

Zimbra has also specialised as a browser-based mail/contacts/calendar service with a few bells and whistles that appeal to businesses. This encouraged Yahoo to buy it last year as a kind of “enterprise edition” of Yahoo Mail.

Zimbra is available for consumers and has moved onto the desktop using Mozilla’s Prism technology, which gives web-based services offline and desktop capabilities.

Zimbra seems like a desktop application in almost every respect - it has to be downloaded as a 40-megabyte file to begin with  and then there is the usual client installation process.

It then allowed me to fill in the details for my Yahoo, Gmail and AOL webmail accounts, before it began downloading their message databases and putting them in separate folders with the familiar inbox list-view and preview pane.

I found this very useful for Gmail, as I have never quite got used to its non-standard interface and it is in much need of a makeover anyway, similar to the drag-and-drop capabilities that the Oddpost acquisition added to Yahoo Mail.

I was also able to import a Google Calendar, but there is no syncing yet with this service, nor Yahoo’s Calendar, so the lack of automatic updating means this is of limited use.

Zimbra has differentiated itself with its “Zimlet” mash-ups - mousing over a date brings up your calendar,  or over a name brings up contact data. An address brings up a map window and driving directions, and a flight number can invoke a window telling you if it’s on time.

For all these useful features, I felt like I was taking a step back in installing Zimbra. It would work fine if I only used one computer, but using ones at home and at work and laptops and cellphones inbetween, it makes sense to be web-based where services can be accessed from any browser and always be up to date.

Web 2.0 companies may view enabling offline capabilities outside the browser as the final steps to giving them equality with Microsoft programs like Outlook. However, in most cases, as connectivity increases, they’re just not needed.

Vysr is a small browser plugin with a big ambition - to become a platform for web services and applications.

The Silicon Valley start-up took a significant step towards achieving that this week when it opened up its platform to third-party developers.

Vysr is a toolbar with a difference. It appears vertically in the bottom-right of the browser when needed and is contextually aware.

This means it can offer a translation or a definition of some highlighted text on a web page, a sample of music from a highlighted artist or a comparison from eBay of cameras on offer matching the one you may be looking at on Amazon.com.

Guda Venkatesh, chief executive, used to work at Bell Labs and then was an entrepreneur in the mobile phone sector. He says he found it difficult to sell to carriers and moved over to the Web in 2006 to develop Vysr.

He compares web browsing to being tethered to a landline phone, where users are tied to going to websites to get their information. Vysr is more user-centric, he says - they can get applications to come to them through its toolbar.

Developers may have a jaundiced view of developing applications for Vysr  - there are so many widgets and applications out there already developed for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, the iPhone and social networking services.

Mr Venkatesh insists there is still enthusiasm. He says there is a rush to create initial applications for a new platform as many developers feel their work becomes lost among the thousands of applications available for a service like Facebook.

Vysr expects to make money from contextual advertising and licensing the toolbar for media companies and others to brand it with their own services.

With capabilities including Voice over IP, there are plenty of possibilities, including instant messaging and voice chat and connections to all the popular social networks.

Fans of the very public form of corporate theatre practised by Carl Icahn will be disappointed to hear that the garrulous corporate raider has agreed to a gag order as part of his settlement with Yahoo (the condition is revealed in an agreement filed with the SEC late on Monday.) Pity.

Yahoo also used a standstill agreement to tie his hands in other ways, for instance forbidding him to “support, assist or facilitate” any future acquisition attempts by others.

Still, Icahn has managed to engineer some room for manoeuvre for the next stage in this saga (and yes, there is certain to be a next stage.) For the next year at least, he is guaranteed a seat on any board committee that Yahoo sets up to consider an acquisition or other material transaction. He can cut his 4.98 per cent stake in Yahoo to below 2.2 per cent before he has to give up his board representation. And he can still stir things up if he wants to, as this clause makes clear:

Nothing [in the agreement] shall prohibit any member of the Icahn Group or any Icahn Affiliate from engaging in private discussions with third parties regarding a potential transaction to be proposed by such third party or presenting any potential transaction to the Board on a private basis, in each case, in circumstances that would not reasonably be expected to require public disclosure…

Meanwhile, even if he can’t talk publicly, Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock aren’t likely to get an easy ride. As one person who has worked with Icahn in the past says of his hectoring style: “He’s impossible. You wouldn’t want him on your board. It’s true for his friends, too: he really wears you down.”