The Weekly Round-Up: 08.07.05

"You OK?"

Those two little words have been used a lot over these past 24 hours. For thousands of us they have been the entire text of some of the most important emails and text messages we've ever sent.

The process of writing the Round-Up each week starts around midday Thursday. At that time this week all of our minds were understandably elsewhere.

Over the past 24 hours details have become clearer about what happened but writing anything at this time has proven difficult - what to say, what not to say - but it seems the right thing to do to say something.

This appears to have been an attack intended to cause the greatest disruption to the life of our capital and its people at a time when London and the UK in general is very much in the spotlight.

So there comes a point when we believe it is the done thing to show we intend to carry on.

Sending out an email newsletter is not a defiant stand. Nor is an email newsletter a powerful statement but it is, for our own small part, what we do on Fridays. And today is still Friday whatever the events of yesterday. 'Resilience' is a word we're hearing a lot of. London is thick-skinned and has overcome far worse.

But first and foremost we extend our deepest sympathies to anybody affected by the attacks in the capital.

Working within the City ourselves, and aware that a great many of our friends and colleagues were travelling through the affected stations around the time of the explosions, we understand the concerns many will have felt. And we understand those concerns will continue for some time.

It is a curious sign of our times that much of the talk has been about mobile phones.

Anybody in London hoping to let relatives known they were OK will have experienced this soon after 9:30(BST). And anybody trying to get hold of friends and family within the capital from elsewhere will also have experienced this frustration. The outage appeared to last around three to four hours in some areas.

Of course we all coped in times of trouble in the past but the reliance we have developed upon an 'always on' communications infrastructure has become incredible.

In this instance it appeared the police were also moved to exercise a right to force operators to switch off what they regard as non-essential connectivity within specific locations in order to clear the airwaves for the emergency services and other parties who have specially chipped SIM cards for operation during such a black-out.

Operators were quick to deny, however, that the signals had been dropped over fears that mobile phones had been used to detonate bombs, and claimed they were doing everything within their powers to handle the unprecedented call demand.

Vodafone at one point made public appeals to customers asking them not to make non-essential calls to ease the strain on the network. O2, Orange and T-Mobile all confirmed their networks were creaking under the strain and there were calls that weren't completed when demand was high.

Following initial delays, the Metropolitan Police set up a dedicated help-line for those seeking information on loved ones who may be among the thousand or so injured or the rising number of those who have lost their lives. At its peak last night that phone line was handling around 42,000 calls per hour.

Another sign of our mobile-saturated times is the large amount of documentary footage being pieced together by broadcasters from videophone recordings as well as camera phone stills. The modern day ubiquity of camera phones took us all closer than ever to the heart of the unfolding tragedy, as people caught up in the attacks recorded the shocking and disturbing scenes they were witnessing.

Email systems around the world and across the UK also went into overdrive in the hours following the explosions.

As phones failed, email became the medium of choice for communication and the internet also came into its own to keep office workers updated with news from around the capital as the situation unfolded, while others were able to go 'old media' and find a television to gather around.

UK email filtering firm MessageLabs confirmed a near doubling of the average levels of email traffic it would have expected to see on a Thursday morning with an average 500,000 emails per hour over its network ramping up to one million per hour.

Alex Shipp from MessageLabs told silicon.com: "Sometime after 9:00am we saw email traffic rise. That's ignoring spam - that's half a million legitimate emails an hour, up to one million."

Of course the events of yesterday come at the end of a colossal week for the UK and for London in particular - with incredible highs and devastating lows.

It started last Saturday with Live 8 when London was at the epicentre of the events worldwide with 200,000 people attending the large open-air concert in Hyde Park.

As many of you will have noticed, among those who took to the stage in Hyde Park on Saturday was none other than Bill Gates, though as he walked out with a microphone in his hand the Round-Up can't have been the only one to think: "Oh no, what's he going to sing...?"

Fortunately it appeared the software tycoon was happy to just speak to the assembled crowd, some of whom were reportedly heckling him with jeers about the uptime of his operating system. The wags.

Gates was there to urge world leaders to do more to ease the problems of Africa's crippling debt and extreme poverty. His own conscience is surely clear given the vast amounts he himself donates and now he is calling on others who wield similar power to make a difference.

Gates' presence on a stage shared with the likes of the potty-mouthed rapper Snoop Dogg, the face-painted weirdness of REM and spaced-out rockers Velvet Revolver may have seemed out of place to some but he was also in the presence of famous friends and fellow humanitarians such as U2 singer Bono.

So he had somebody to chat to, which was nice.

He was far from the elder statesman on the bill, despite some of the younger participants questioning his 'cool' factor.

Gates told the crowd and a worldwide audience of millions: "If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act. The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world shows that."

Gates said, if successful, Live 8 will prove to be the "best thing humanity has ever done".

Of course the reason for Live 8 was the G8 summit this week whose participants it was hoping to sway into making improvements in aid donations and debt relief to Africa.

Arriving in Scotland, George W Bush continued a proud tradition of tumbles which began with his fall from the Segway Human Transporter, the SHT.

Going for an early evening cycle around the grounds of Gleneagles, Bush clattered into a policeman - apparently at speed - and caused himself a few minor scratches while hospitalising the bobby. (Still, his dad vomited in the lap of the Prime Minister of Japan, Kiichi Miyazawa, at a previous world leader get-together so it's swings and roundabouts really.)

The timing of Thursday's events was made all the more bitter by the fact London was still owed several days of celebration after clinching the right to stage the 2012 Olympics - which will also bring some seriously large-scale IT contracts to the UK.

Gloating rights should also have been active after pipping Le French to the post but all this rather soberly paled in importance.

And in such a historic week silicon.com also made some exciting - though less earth-shattering - announcements, with the launch of our new look website and the announcement of our seventh birthday.

You can find out more about the new look site here.

You may notice we've launched Photo Stories - an opportunity to give our keyboards a rest and work out whether pictures really can speak a thousand words.

At the moment we've got a few on the site already, including Bill Gates' appearance at Live 8 - which you'll have seen if you followed the above link - and a story about a life-sized game of London Monopoly.

For anybody who would let recent events take the sheen off the unrivalled spectacle of London this game is a timely reminder.

In a nutshell players sign up online and buy whatever properties they can afford on an updated Monopoly board which includes Canary Wharf, The London Eye and the City.

Then around the capital there is a fleet of taxis all fitted with global positioning technology. Players must choose their taxi driver. If an opponent's taxi driver lands on your property they owe you money. If your taxi driver lands on one of their properties you owe them money - you get the idea.

Of course if players have been building houses or hotels on those properties then the losses and gains are even greater.

Not that the silicon.com team have been addicted to this game this week but if we could give you one piece of advice we'd say two words: 'City' and 'hotel' and you'll enjoy some very profitable week days.

The drivers all have suitably London taxi-driver-style names (presumably because they're their real names), such as Dave, Barry and Brian, though there are no bonuses up for grabs for minutes spent discussing the state of the country or 'I'll tell you who should go directly jail and not pass Go or collect £200... '

As you may notice, one of the surviving properties from the original game is Regent Street and we chose the Apple Store as a recognisable landmark to take a picture of.

And Apple has been busy with its UK store strategy of late.

Having opened in Birmingham in April the company is also this weekend opening an Apple store in the Bluewater shopping centre - or 'Mecca' for the nation's chav-tastic class.

Whether Apple will be acknowledging this fact with the addition of a Burberry iPod in its Mini range is unclear... ok, unlikely.

Still, at least the Mini will slip easily into a tracksuit pocket.

One silicon.com staffer who actually hails from Kent, so feels entitled to comment, expressed great interest in how the company will manage to recruit staff for its 'Genius Bar' - the employees charged with answering tricky Mac questions.

We wish Apple the best of luck in Kent and until next week, go carefully.