Under the covers

Now all the beans have been counted and totals added up, the great news is that we broke the £400,000 barrier for monies raised by the participants of this year's Byte Night event.

The most amazing thing of all is that with the dedication of the board, sponsors and NCH, the costs of staging the event worked out at less than 10% of the total.

Byte Night Local contributed around £40,000 with satellite events in Reading and Essex and we'll be pushing hard to expand on this next year.

A big thanks to all the teams involved and we're already looking forward to next year's event so be sure to put the 3rd October in your diary now

This year's Byte Night was the most successful yet with over £340,000 pounds raised by around 270 people from the IT industry sleeping out for the charity NCH.

We were in good company with Martin Linton, MP for Battersea, Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, actresses Lindsey Coulson and Jenny Agutter, Trinny Woodall critiqued our pyjamas and Sian Lloyd provided a weather report on the evening.

As predicted by Sian, the weather was kind to us with no rain and a pretty mild night for October and the Compound Media team managed to raise more than £4,000 with a last minute surge in donations meaning we beat our target.

I want to say a big thank you to the team and to all our sponsors who gave so generously, we're already planning how to raise even more next year...

On monday night I was at the CNET Networks UK Business Technology Awards at the Hilton in Park Lane to present the award for the IT Services Technology Project of the Year. It was a close run thing between the top names in the banking sector with the eventual winners being ABN Amro for their London message hub project.

It was a very enjoyable evening hosted by John Simpson, the BBC foreign affairs correspondent who shared several "interesting" anecdotes from his times with such differing personalities as George Bush and Colonel Gadaffi who apparently always conducted interviews from a distance in fear of being assassinated (surely not by the BBC?).

It was the first time Compound Media has sponsored anything like this and it was great to see such a big turnout with over 600 guests at the event. We also raised over £4000 for Byte Night during the evening.

How many times when you are out on the road have you wanted to quickly boot up your laptop to find a vital piece of information? An address, a quick look at an agenda for a meeting or a double check on something crucial in a Word document?

The trouble is, Laptops take forever to boot up, especially when you are in a hurry. Even though mine is only 9 months old and I'm pretty careful about what I load onto it, it takes at least 5-8 minutes to boot from cold.

Until now. I've discovered a great little utility that allows me to stagger the startup programs so that I can delay the loading of non-essential programs. Start Delay lets me specify what order programs load in and at what time. So for instance, I can delay the startup of Yahoo messenger for 5 minutes, i-Tunes Helper (whatever that is!) for 10 minutes etc. allowing me to quickly get to a point where I can start Outlook to look at a message or Word to check a document.

I have no idea how I lived without it! I'm constantly on the move with my laptop and boot it up 3-4 times on an average day so this little gem saves me loads of down-time waiting around for the hard disk to stop rattling around. Even better, it's free, go on, give it a try.

Last Friday I spent an enjoyable few hours locked in a small room with actress Jenny Agutter. Women of a certain age will remember her as the eldest daughter in “The Railway Children” but men of a similar age will remember her for the seminal film “Walkabout”. I clearly remember being taken to the local cinema on a school bus to see it when aged about 12. It was the first “Serious” film I ever saw and as such will always be clearly imprinted on my mind. Jenny is a long time supporter of NCH, the charity that that works to combat youth homelessness.

So imagine my excitement at being asked to represent the Byte Night Board at the recent “Radio Day” where Jenny and I were interviewed by 16 radio stations. We had a great time and had plenty of opportunity to plug not just the upcoming event in London but also a new initiative this year that lets people join in wherever they are based.

Byte Night Local means anybody can now participate in a great event. We’ve got a mini-Byte Night happening out in the UK Silicon Valley (OK, Reading!) and people sleeping in their gardens up and down the country.

If you want to join us, it’s not too late to sign up and spend a night under the stars on the 5th October. If that sounds like it might be too cold and wet for you then you could sponsor me, or the CNET team. And if you’re a man of a certain age then you might even like to sponsor Jenny.