Updates From the Folks at Think London

A few updates from the folks at Think London.

A topic which is currently hot in is clean tech. London's Mayor Boris Johnson (one of THE TIME 100 Most Influential People) has declared he wants to make London the 'electric vehicle capital of Europe.'

Many of Think London's clean tech clients, such as Tesla Motors, are setting up in London because of the Mayor's clean tech and renewable energy policies.

They are planning quite a few events this year in the US, all based around business opportunities for US companies and the London 2012 Games. See the event schedule.

Another interesting development they are seeing, is the amount of Chinese companies setting up or expanding in London. They seem less affected by the economic crisis 'angst' and see it as a great opportunity to invest elsewhere.

Big Chinese financial services companies are particularly keen to set up or expand their operations in London, such as China Construction Bank and China Merchants Bank.

And, Think London is adopting all the social media tools to keep tabs on and in touch with people. More from them in the coming weeks and months.

A Train Sandwich

And I thought jumping on a bus in Romania in the early 90s was bad. Try China's trains.

Buddha With Thousand Hands

Check out this very moving video of 21 Chinese deaf dancers from the China Disabled Peoples Performance Art Troupe, shown on German TV last year, now available for viewing on YouTube for the rest of the world to see.

The dancers receive queues from guides/conductors from the sidelines. For more, try Googling the title and/or Tai Lihua.

MacKinnon & Mao on Censorship

On the Web 2.0 stage this week, Global Voices' Rebecca MacKinnon talks about the Web's Benevolent Dictators.

She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she teaches “New Media.” A long history with Asia, she covered China and Japan for CNN for over ten years, as well as Taiwan, Korea, and Pakistan.

She realized in starting this initiative that they had to do this with foundation money rather than VC money. Global Voices represents voices from bloggers around the world - everywhere except for Europe and North America. "It is not enough to link to other bloggers," she says, "we have to speak out for people's freedom of speech. And, its not just in china where content is filtered. There are various levels of social and political filtering around the world." And, more and more people who are speaking out are getting thrown in jail.

She shows us a blog editing screen for a post that could have should have been posted about Tiananmen Mothers.

After posting, the blogger receives a message that says: "Because it contains sensitive words, please wait for the community editors to approve it. Please don't re-post."

She notes that companies are being squeezed by governments and governments are being pressured to do things against human rights. She talks about the Global Network Initiative where the principles would set standards for freedom of speech while still engaging in markets. "There needs to be efforts from the industry to deal with these problems and the way to do a human rights assessment before an initiative goes live."

She asks us, "are we over-relying on the Web 2.0 giants? Everyone is using gmail and then suddenly its blocked. We're all using Skype and they claim our exchange is secure but it may in fact not be. Do we need to look at more grassroots alternatives? How do we hold these giants accountable?" Hear hear Rebecca.

Immediately following her talk, Chinese blogger Isaac Mao, founder of the Social Brain Foundation addresses the crowd.

In 2005, he started the movement for adopting Chinese bloggers on overseas servers. Mao is also a co-founder of CNBlog.org and a co-organizer of the Chinese Blogger Conference (2005 in Shanghai, 2006 in Hangzhou). He is also known for his open letter to Google, challenging them to change its strategy on China.