ReadWriteWeb

A settlement for nearly 2,000 years, London is today the most populous greater metropolitan area in Europe with over 13 million residents. Home to popular tourist locations such as Big Ben, The London Eye and Buckingham Palace, London's skyline is unmistakable. While London often serves as the representative bridge from Europe to the United States, it also is the seat of Europe's rapidly expanding entrepreneurial landscape.

The London startup scene saw its first major consumer Internet success in 1998 with LastMinute, a travel site similar to Expdedia that eventually traded publicly on the London Stock Exchange beginning in 2000. UK companies like LastMinute were largely able to avoid the doom and gloom of the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century due to the nature of the venture funding scene.

Britain's Conservative Party plans to offer a £1 million taxpayer-funded prize for a website that can "harness the wisdom" of voters. The price will be given to the team that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies. According to the Guardian, some of the ideas for this site include services that help to identify wasteful government spending or rate the quality of schools and hospitals. It is worth noting, though, that the Conservatives will only give this prize away if they win the 2010 elections.

Today, the UK government finally released its long-awaited Digital Britain report, which, among other things, confirms the government's intention to provide broadband access at 2Mbps to every household in the UK by 2012. According to the report, about 11% of all households in the UK cannot currently get broadband service at this speed. The British government plans to deliver this 'Universal Service Commitment' through a mix of existing technologies and expects to provide £200 million in public funding for this project.