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Last week I made the pilgrimage, on my bike, in the rain to the Futuresonic conference and festival. Not a huge pilgrimage to be honest as it takes place in Manchester down at the Contact Theatre, but an important event nonetheless which collides the worlds of technology, music and art.

The conference this year felt very different to last time for a whole bunch of reasons, not least because the weather was appalling. It's testament to how far I've come personally that I knew an awful lot more people at the event including quite a few who I've only "met online" through twitter. I found myself flitting gazelle-like from fascinating conversation to conversation and if anything struggled a bit to take it all in and digest at the time. Digestion was also rather hampered by having a prior engagement down in Sussex on the Saturday, which otherwise would have been a good day to go to a few daytime gigs, relax and make some notes. But the connection and sense of community, over-stimulating as it might have been was really great. So here as best as I can are my highlights:

Meeting Stef Lewandowski and discussing accelerated serendipity, VSM and the taking of plunges. Also meeting David Hawdale and again discussing VSM - in fact the cybernetic angle was a very useful tool in any number of conversations as there was a lot of discussion of the organisations we work for and with and the internal and external communication issues that cause them to struggle.

I did much of pimping of the Gigometer including showing off the latest iPhone builds and got lots of "Yes I'd pay a quid for that, it's actually useful" comments. I went to a few business-oriented sessions and it was interesting to see and hear analysis of tech startups and their characteristics in terms of funding, lead times and organisational approaches. There was interesting debate here on the nature of venture capital and angel funding and how, bored philanthropists that they may be, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch (they will have their equity and eat it) and that such people can often scupper an exit strategy simply because their thresholds for when a deal is worth doing are much higher than the startups they are supporting. Ultimately if you've got a business model that works it's not worth going cap in hand.

Also some chatter over Digital Britain - one speaker describing the fibreing of the UK as inevitable but not in the short-term interests of the telcos or government. This gave me some pause for thought as I've been contributing to the Fake Digital Britain report, with some rather bullish assertions over what should be done and why, many of which were bourne out in the discussion. The deal for me is that as we shift from a web-for-consumers world to a network-of-producers world the issues of symmetry, latency, restriction and not to mention raw bandwidth have already started to become real problems. If it can be realised, a truly universal fibre-to-the-premises project in the UK will make mincemeat of this and have major untold (but I'd argue on balance positive) consequences for the economics and wellbeing of our population. Oh and it would mean that I'd be able to upload a set of photographs to my flickr account from my home broadband in less than half an hour and get all the pikey downloads I wanted, which would be nice :-) Information becomes free, people become the asset, and we're no-longer running a scarcity economy? All the goalposts of our digital economy shifted? I've been reading too much Stephenson, Stross and Doctorow! Bring on the cornucopia machine!

Speaking of cornucopiae I learned that Manchester is getting a FabLab, a high-tech publicly available facility for creating things. This is an excellent development and I hope will spur on the advent of micro-manufacturing in the region. I love the idea of being able to walk into such a place with a concept for a device and walk out again a few hours later with a functional item nestled in my pocket (though I expect it will take a little more time and effort until REAL cornucopiae come along). I've got a couple of projects in mind already for this and definitely intend to pursue them.

On devices I really enjoyed the presentation from Distance Lab and their using the fast-food (current commuincation technologies) vs slow-food (tactile, fluffy, considered, ambient technologies) analogy for potential future communications devices which give us the chance to lie back, take deep breaths and truly think and feel what we are doing.

There was art too: I went to the opening at the Cube gallery where a whole range of interesting and peculiar things were on offer. This year the festival's "theme" was Environment 2.0 and this was reflected heavily in the works, from Akousmaflore or dangling fronds of plants which made little noises as you brushed against them, to The 300 Oak Saplings to the musical knitting. My friend Ella has of course written an interesting review of the Futuresonic art programme on her blog Runpaintrunrun

The music programme sadly I didn't find quite so stimulating this year. Perhaps I made some wrong choices, perhaps it was the absence of Tullis the Boneist from the programming team, perhaps I'm getting cynical and jaded... Who knows. I quite enjoyed the tripped out experience of seeing Murkov and Anti-VJ however couldn't help thinking that it was a little bit completely over-the-top - and by placing a wall of digitally rendered stars in between the audience and performers in some ways at odds with the connectedness that was infusing the rest of things. Then there was the Seed Studios event which to be honest I found seriously embarrasing. And painful. And amateurish. And made me cringe. The "club" events were ok-ish but nothing to write home about for the most part.

If anything the environmental aspect of the conference, the economic climate, our new found connectedness and perhaps the fact that the name will be changed next year to "Future Everything" combined to give the event a bit of a subtext; There are a lot of screwed up things going on at the moment, but actually by innovating, using the technology, sharing and embracing all our talents and resources we can all shape our world more effectively than we could even last year. Welcome to Muppet Laboratories, where the future is being made today!