Energy levels are higher than ever at Speed as the eleven person team of climbers and support crew prepare for the Three Peaks challenge at the end of this week.

We’re covering all our costs and raising cash for Macmillan Cancer Research. It’s a personal choice for many of us. Cancer is a bloody awful disease that touches almost everyone and needs to be better understood.

A huge thanks to everyone that has sponsored us so far. We’ve close to hitting £2,000 and have our sights set on £3,000. If you haven’t chipped in and Macmillan Cancer Research is close to your heart we’d urge you please to consider doing so via our JustGiving page.

The challenge could not be simpler. Climb the highest mountains in the Wales (Snowdon), England (Scafell Pike) and Scotland (Ben Nevis) in 24 hours.

We’ll be tackling them in that order leaving London around 4am on Friday morning to start the challenge at the foot of Snowdon at 9am and aiming end the challenge 24 hours later at the foot of Ben Nevis.

We’ve got form: a team from Rainier PR, one of Speed’s predecessor agencies successfully completed the challenge three years ago in 22 hours 10 minutes.

We’ll be tweeting the challenge throughout Friday and the early hours of Saturday using the hash tag #speed3peaks.

Photo: Ben Nevis via bradbox.

The BBC has a unique business model he explained.

“The audience pays its license fee or goes to jail. It’s just not very transferable to other media organisations,” he quipped.

Photo: Richard Sambrook (mohamedn via Flickr).

Here are video highlights from this morning’s wild swim at the Hampstead mixed ponds at 7.30am. It was part of our preparation for the Three Peaks Challenge next month.

We’re raising money for Macmillian Cancer because cancer is a bloody awful, seemingly indiscriminate disease that touches everyone. All donations gratefully received.

Thanks.

We’ll be donning our speedos and heading to Hampstead Heath Swimming Ponds next Tuesday morning (17 May) at 730am for a 100m freestyle race before work.

It’s less than five weeks to go to the Speed Three Peaks Challenge. Our duel will be one of a series of fundraisers along the way to help us raise £3,000 for Macmillan Cancer Support.

If you fancy showing your support head to our Justgiving page; John has said he’ll wear a bikini if we raise £250. I know better than to make such rash commitments.

The Ponds are one of London’s hidden gems and are one of the capital’s few wild swimming locations. If you fancy joining us we’ll be heading to the Mixed Pond.

Thanks to Gruenemann via Flickr for the photo.

We were inspired last month to read of a Japanese firm that was selling seed tablets that enabled you to grow tiny plants in bottle tops on your desk. Of course we had to have a go. Here’s the result using milk bottle caps and micro-veg seed from UK-firm Marshalls.

At TEDxObserver in March the Young Foundation’s Geoff Mulgan said that if you give someone a plant to tend it improves their well being and longevity. He forget to add that it also provides you with something for your sandwiches at lunchtime.

Katie and I completed the Northumberland Coastal Challenge this weekend: 26.2 miles walking along the stunning Northumberland coast from Bamburgh to Alnmouth.

A big thanks to to everyone that sponsored us. There’s is still a chance to chip in to HospiceCare North Northumberland, a local community nurse-led service, if you haven’t already.

I first heard Robinson speaking at TED where his thesis was that our education system takes a conveyor belt approach to uniformly teaching core subjects and fails to help kids recognise their passions.

Robinson believes that everyone is born with extraordinary capability and that unlocking that talent is the key to realising our true potential. Here he delivers a secular sermon as part of the School of Life series and challenges the audience to identify its passion.

If you like that you might also like a family project we’ve set up at home. We’ve installed web cams in a couple of bird boxes and alongside nests in the garden and are uploading images to a Posterous site and tweeting at @tweetingbox.

Here’s the [highly motivated] team of 10 Speed climbers and support lined up to take on the Three Peaks Challenge of 10 June.

It could not be simpler: climb the highest mountains in the Wales (Snowdon), England (Scafell Pike) and Scotland (Ben Nevis) in 24 hours.

We’ll be tackling them in that order leaving London around 4am to start the challenge at the foot of Snowdon at 9am and aiming end the challenge 24 hours later at the foot of Ben Nevis. Along the way the team will complete 3,400m of climbing: approx 14 miles up and 14 miles down

We’ve got form: a team from Rainier PR, one of Speed’s predecessor agencies successfully completed the challenge three years ago in 22 hours 10 minutes, thanks mainly to the athleticism of former colleagues Chris Lee and Tim Hoang.

We’re aiming to raise £3,000 for Macmillan Cancer and I’ll be personally planting trees in Northumberland to offset our carbon footprint.

Clare English and I had a coffee yesterday with Cliff Eldridge at The Team to discuss ways that social media is being used as a means of internal engagement. Employees as organising themselves on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, so why would a brand build its own network?

Beyond this Cliff reckons that there is a huge opportunity for brands to connect the virtual world with the physical world and vice versa as a means of educating and engaging with audiences internally within an organisation.

He cited QR codes which are starting to be used to connect print with online. Scanning a printed 2D code with a smart phone typically returns data or links to web site. Cliff exploring ways that QR codes can be used to help people explore a physical space.

Neville Hobson recently spotted this Flickr group of QR codes in the wild and blogged that despite an apparent surge in the use of QR codes smart phone penetration and consumer awareness remain the main barrier to use.

I’d add interesting applications to Neville’s list. I spotted a QR code on the back of a Pizza Express flyer at lunch today. Scanning the code with my iPhone launched an application with information about pizzas and pizza dough. Its fun but its not compelling enough to persuade me to use QR codes as a matter of course.