John Lamb's Week: Following the money trail around Britain and Britons

Feng Shui states there is usually a money generating area in any dwelling. Jerome Mol, founder of Gorilla Park, a European incubator company, seems to have discovered something altogether more interesting - a money trail. He'll be following it on Monday at the Wall Street Journal Europe's CEO Summit on Converging Technologies in London.

Mol and fellow panellists in the money trail session will discuss how technology companies in the current market can raise capital. "Smart companies know how to exploit every market condition to their advantage," confides Moll. "With a cool head and a creative approach you can utilise the same techniques to keep your team energised and your company on the path to success."

Also starting on Monday and running on until Tuesday is The Late Stage & IPO Forum, organised by Europe Unlimited. The conference is concerned with the end of the money trail - how technology firms can raise big money by going public.

This week the big conference and exhibition is Network telecom at that monument to exciting British architecture: the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. You can glean some idea of the mindset of the people who built the NEC from the fact that hotels on the complex have especially small rooms - well, no sense in spending more time in them than you have to.

With 500 exhibitors crammed into a big concrete box this has to be the largest and ugliest gathering of serious information and communications technology types in the UK. However, it is a minnow compared to shows elsewhere in the world, which is puzzling given the size and general liveliness of the IT scene here. Anyway the organisers have bagged the e-envoy Andrew Pinder as keynote speaker.

Pinder ruffled feathers recently by casting doubt on the viability of Tony Blair's target of 2005 for wiring up government, a key element in Labour's UKonline campaign for ebusiness. Pinder has announced his own target date. With a background at the Inland Revenue, Prudential and Citibank this is tough talking for such an establishment figure.

Maybe he is trying to head off recent criticism contained in a parliamentary Trade and Industry Select Committee report that branded him as an extension of Whitehall. Meanwhile, headline speakers at Network telecom will do little to showcase the UK's ecommerce talent - they are all American.

Among the web servers and broadband switches, the show will also feature a virtual operator system that uses voice recognition technology to answer, transfer and make telephone calls. Said to be the first system of its type in the UK, the Telephonetics Voice Dialler could spell the end of the switchboard operator.

You may have thought a national sizing survey would look at the ability of technologists to work out the size of systems needed for particular tasks. Not a bit of it. Tuesday sees the start of a project funded by retailers to scan in the body measurements of a sample of the British population.

This will be the largest survey of its kind and will provide a national web-based database of accurate sizing information on the population. The last survey of women - using hand measurements - was 50 years ago and this marks the first time ever for men. The survey is likely to reveal the average Brit is getting bigger and fatter.

On the products front, Wednesday sees Stratus Technologies officially launch the ftServer 5200, Europe's first fault tolerant Windows 2000 server, in an event together with Microsoft and Intel. And on Thursday evening the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) awards will take place in London.

Finally, it's beards and sandals weekend in Manchester. The Linux Developers' Conference starts on Friday and runs through to Sunday at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) conference centre. The programme will cover a variety of subjects, including kernel and desktop development, tools, applications, and networking.