Festival News: Organisers of festivals including Womad, Creamfields, Bestival, Electric Picnic and Big Chill have joined forces to take on their bigger rivals. They have agreed to work together to help make events better for fans, greener and more cost-effective. Bestival promoter Rob da Bank said it was important to "ride out the problems and make them better for the customer". Creamfields owner James Barton said it was a good idea because "smaller festivals are also often overlooked". He added: "There is a real opportunity to combine our spending power to deliver exciting business ideas. "It's important we now have a voice to influence decisions being made that impact on our business."
Environmental News: The Cornish town of Redruth has implemented an innovative lighting renovation plan - lighting the exteriors of its historical and architecturally significant buildings with LED lamps. Sustainable lighting company Greenled is rolling out the new lighting programme through the Redruth Economic Arts Partnership (REAP) who is coordinating the initiative to provide lighting throughout the town.
Internet News: The net's regulators will vote on Thursday to decide if the strict rules on so-called top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can be relaxed. If approved, it could allow companies to turn their brands into domain names while individuals could also carve out their own corner of the net. Top level domains are currently limited to individual countries, such as .it (Italy), as well as to commerce - .com - and to institutional organisations, such as .net, or .org. To get around the restrictions, some companies have used the current system to their own ends. For example, the Polynesia island nation Tuvalu, has leased the use of the .tv address to many television firms. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which acts a sort of regulator for the net, as well as overseeing the domain name system, has been working towards opening up net addresses for the last three years.
(Jim Evans)
