Response to grants call

The response to this year's grants call has been pretty overwhelming - 128 bids were received by the close of play on Friday (about 30 more than last year).  That gives us 256 sides of A4 to read and review.

It is clear that our three themes (online identity, the open social graph, always-on Internet access and mobile computing) generated a lot of interest.

The next step is for us to ask about 15 of the bidders to come back to us with a more detailed proposals, of which we'll interview about half, and fund 3 or 4.

On that basis can I just say, "apologies in advance" to the ~124 of you that don't get funded :-(.