Please let me take this opportunity to thank everyone who came to our 21st birthday party at the Museum of Brands in London. I hope you enjoyed the evening. Also thanks to those of you who couldn’t make it for your kind words of congratulation.

Emma’s choice of location for the party was truly inspired, not only because it’s the world we inhabit (all things brand) but also because it provided a common and fascinating topic of conversation.

Our industry, like so many others has undergone an amazing change over the past two decades. In 1987, the Apple Mac was still in its infancy, the DTP revolution was in the basement being planned and Flash was a floor cleaner not a software. To airbrush was to airbrush, ink and compressed air - not a pixel in sight. Magic markers, layout pads and Letraset, a great British invention, were ubiquitous. And how we were dependent on those “stuck in traffic” motorbike couriers. The fax was the height of technology.

A lot has changed, but a lot has stayed the same! A great creative idea is still a great idea. All that’s really different is the landscape in which the idea appears. This was driven home to me at the museum as I watched those classic commercials from the 70s and 80s. Heineken, refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach, and happiness is a cigar called Hamlet - a golden period for British advertising.

Thanks once again and especially to Andrew Gulland (07885 721 917) for taking all the wonderful pictures. A closing thought, “The only good ideas are the ones I can take credit for.” R. Stevens, Diesel Sweeties, 11-13-06

As so much of our creative work for Pitney Bowes MapInfo revolves around location intelligence and the power of mapping, I was struck by a new book The Atlas of the Real World. Produced by worldmapper.org, this reference book contains 366 digitally modified maps, known as cartograms. It shows the world in demographics using a wide range of categories from wealth and poverty to Internet use. Here are just a few examples of an atlas of the world as you’ve never seen it before.

Land area

The size of each territory represents its land area in proportion to that of the others. This gives us a very different perspective from the usual Mercator projection we usually see of the world.

Land area

Internet users in 1990

The size of each territory indicates the number of people who were using the Internet way back in 1990. Only 3 million people had access to the Internet then -  73 percent of these were in the United States and 15 percent in Western Europe.

Internet users in 1990

Internet users in 2002

The size of each territory indicates the number of Internet users in the world by 2002. There were 631 million with substantial numbers in Asia-Pacific, Australasia, South Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and China. Hasn’t the world changed?

Internet Users in 2002

The Atlas of the Real World is published by Thames and Hudson

The complexities of understanding what truly are ‘green technologies‘ were illustrated beautifully by the award to Toyota’s Prius, or as I prefer, Pious, as Greenest Technology of the Year award at the inaugural British Technology Awards. By what conceivable metric could the Pious be called green? Toyota refuses to disclose the amount of embedded energy (CO2) in the sourcing, building and recycling of the vehicle. This is a car with two electric motors and one internal combustion engine and a resource-intense nickel-metal hydride battery. Toyota admits that building (not disposing of) the Prius expends more energy, but then says that’s compensated by its better fuel consumption. Come on Toyota, publish the figures and let’s decide the car’s green credentials.

Technology will provide some of the solutions but in the meantime let’s consume less and preserve more.