As part of the first wave of Orange's new 'I Am' activity we've put together the Orange Unlit Tour.

Visit the blog and see what's going on right now.

Star-of-tomorrow Jont, and his trusty sidekick Dave are out on the road in their tour van. We've pimped it out with all the latest gizmos and gadgets so you can see every detail of their every move. Harnessing the power of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and a load of other handy web-stuff you'll be full to the brim with Jonty goodness.

But they're not on just any old tour. It's a tour with an Orange difference. It's a tour that's made by everyone. The venues are peoples' houses. And the support bands are acts who've got involved via MySpace.

The proper edited first gig will be online soon on MySpace TV - we'll stick it up here as soon as it's ready...

And if you want to follow where they're going and what they're up to there's a handy widget just like the one below...

Orange RockCorps is alive and kicking, making a difference in a community near you.

Thanks to our partners and friends at Orange, RockCorps, technical partner Dreambox Creations and to the volunteers who turn up every day to earn their ticket.

Now listen to Busta, get involved and bag a ticket to the gig of the year at the Royal Albert Hall on 26th September. We'll see you there!

You can view it here too.

Visit the Site: I Am Everyone

As part-payment for making the new Ottolenghi website we got a whole day with the guys being taught how to cook awesome things.

http://www.ottolenghi.co.uk/

If you're excited by, or interested in, photographs of people from Poke cooking (and who wouldn't be) you can see lots more here.

Here's David Elsewhere 'demonstrating' the ModeShift feature of the Moto E8 (ModeShift lets you switch the device between music player and phone mode in one simple click).

There's a few places you can go to see all the Motorola Rokr stuff we've just launched... 

• There's a YouTube Channel where you can see it all.
• Or the offical Motorola MotoRokr E8 Experience page. 

If you want to find out more about the device - head over here:
http://direct.motorola.com/hellomoto/rokre8/

To demonstrate the features of the new Motorola E8. Poke enlisted the help of legendary mover David Elsewhere (to call him a dancer doesn't really describe the half of it). We worked with Motorola to find a way that could combine content and product demo in a fresh way. Maybe even making it interesting enough that people might talk about (and distribute) a product demo...

To check all the videos visit the site at:

http://direct.motorola.com/hellomoto/rokre8/experience/

Most bands form at cool places like Cobham Community Art College or some kind of Fame School in South London. But not Crank. They met at Poke.

Their first performance was at the final ClubPub. If you weren't there it was good. Very good. And noisy. So very very noisy. (There's some photos and links here).

Now it's time for their final performance. Ever. Probably.

Like all the best bands Crank have been cut off in their prime through tragic circumstances: Nico is moving back to Sweden and Dave is buggering off to do whatever it is that the f**king saviour of f**king Rock and Roll does when they're not in the server room sorting stuff out.

It's the last chance saloon folks...

Thursday 17th July: 19.30 - late.
The Gramaphone Bar
60-62 Commercial Street,
London E1 6LT

Download the flyer (if you print it out it might be worth something one day).

Get a map to the venue here

Well after a week of ballooning around it's all over. Playballoonacy.com has closed down. The race is finished and the winners have been announced.

Reginald Ringtail the Raccoon came first followed closely by a couple of Dolphins.

There's a load of people to thank:

• Thanks to everyone who raced balloons - we hope you had fun.
• Thanks to all the people who let the race pass across their sites - we hope you got some new visitors who stuck around and checked out your page(s).
• Thanks to all the people who worked to make it happen (they know who they are and how much work it really took!).
• Thank you to the internet for not breaking ;-)
• And last of all thank you to Orange for taking a punt and believing in us (again).

The Balloon Race starts tomorrow.

We're all holding our breath. Or we would be if we had any left after blowing up all them balloons.

We were chuffed to find out this week that we've bagged the final big'un of the season, the Cannes Silver Cyber Lion! A tough and illusive catch and Poke's first. We've been extremely lucky this year with our Unlimited Rainbow for Orange. We're really happy you liked it.

Scoresheet

But for some real heroes check out the CFB Catch of the week .

Fancy yourself as a model? A stylist? A photographer?
Get down to Topshop and you can be all three. The Newton Machine is here and it's not just for 20-something fashionistas - there's all sorts; girls, boys, girls and boys, men and women - there's even a couple doing something rather dodgy from behind.

Check out what's going on at Newton Machine Topshop for our latest collaboration with everyone's High Street favourite.

Oh! - and you could win a trip to Berlin and stay in the super chic Lux 11 Hotel...

You can read more about it in the portfolio.

We've got some new toilets. Perhaps TMI for some. But they're really nice toilets. Our lovley friends at Household designed them for us. We sort of bartered the new loos for a new website.

They're the experts on toilet design (well spaces of all kinds really) so I nicked the description of the toilets off their site:

Each loo is personalised to reflect the mood of the user. There is a Dressing Room, Book Club, Workout (for the mind), Auditorium, Gallery and Glass house.

I love the thought of being a 'user' in this situation. And I have to say I'm very much enjoying user-testing each of the themed rooms.

Read Household's side of the story here.

We're proud to pre-launch the World's First Internet Balloon Race, to promote the launch of Orange's Animal tariffs for pay as you go customers.

As far as we're aware this is the first time that balloons have been set off across the web. And the balloons aren't just going to float over a little bit of the web. They're going to race over as much of the web as wants to take part - excluding sites that feature naked folk doing bad stuff.

To sign up for a balloon visit: http://www.playballoonacy.com

The person whose balloon goes the furthest over the 7 days of the race is going to get a killer prize. It's an £18,000 holiday to Ibiza for you and 7 mates. 18 grand gets you quite a bloody awesome holiday, even in Ibiza. And there's a load of daily prizes too.

If you've got a site / blog you can go here to get balloons to go over your site - we're hoping this will bring lots and lots of balloon fans to your pages once the race gets going.

Note: it's only in the registration stage just now - the real magic starts in a couple of weeks when the balloons set sail and the race begins...

Spot the Bull is back. And, it’s bigger and better than last year.

Orange were so pleased with Derek (the Bull) last year that they demanded a sequel. We auditioned far and wide, but couldn't do better than going back to the source. So, this year we're proud to present Winston - son of Derek. He's younger (obviously) and more nimble, so nailing exactly where he'll be at 3pm each day is a bit more challenging.

But by totally redesigning the site and adding these new features we've made it a whole lot more fun too.

• team play allowing you to win up to 8 tickets per group of friends
• live multi-cam video streaming from the field
• real time stats and bull-tracking - enabling strategic team play

If you want to win Glastonbury tickets - this is officially the biggest ticket givaway competition in the world - so get stuck in.

Play Spot the Bull now. Get your friends to play with you, and you’ll get a higher chances of winning those treasured tickets.

ClubPub has finally been laid to rest. Wigs were coiffured. Trousers were tightened. Guitars were crafted. The final evening saw an unscheduled guitar rock challenge that would have put most 14 year-old bedroom guitar gods to shame. Then the real heroes arrived - with the debut of Poke's own rock gods band - Crank - a LOUD, heavy-hitting set that made your ears bleed, yet beg for more. Awesome.

As if that wasn't enough Vasco and Dickon tuned out of rock through rave into acid with the arrival of ClubPub legend Acid Malc who delivered a storming acid infused Techno bosh-a-thon. Then Iain played music that offended the venue so much they decided to close early.

What next? Who knows? Who cares?

Those that were there can truly say "We came, we saw, we rocked a bit".

For a history of ClubPub in photos explore the clubpub tag on Flickr.

Awesome shots above by Jay ( and more here from Mr.Lomo )

Although it might look from our blog like all we ever do is work (and sometimes it feels a bit like that too), we do tend to have sporadic burst of fun while we're at it.

Here's some photos from the (ir)regular cake baking contest that went on recently.

Organising the bake-off wasn't that hard. Apart from the 6 weeks it took to decide what the rules were. Of which most of the time was spent re-visiting the old cake vs. biscuit debate.

But as we all now know:

A cake goes hard as it ages, a biscuit goes soft... 

Or something like that.

Pokenewyork.com has had a makeover. She now looks similar to Pokelondon.com. Which we hope is a good thing. They're not quite identical twins, but there is a bunch of shared DNA. Perhaps they're more like connected mutant offspring spawned from some evil gene-mangling experiment. In a nice way.

Go and see the lovely work they're doing and find out more about them.