As I tweeted late yesterday, Neelie Kroes revealed at the London Conference on Cyberspace on Tuesday that plans are afoot to create a digital champion in the Martha Lane Fox mould for every EU member state in a bid to get more people online.

Kroes, who is the European Commission vice president responsible for the Digital Agenda, claimed that a whopping 30 per cent of Europeans have never been online.

Of course, in countries such as the UK, the percentage will be much smaller. The latest figures put broadband penetration at around 90 per cent of all UK households, and the government is certainly on its way to achieving universal 2Mbit/s speeds by 2015.

But it's a different matter across Europe, where the digital divide is more of a yawning chasm especially in the region's many rural and impoverished areas.

No wonder, then, that Kroes has persuaded EC president José Manuel Barroso to ask all member states to follow the UK's lead in appointing a Lane Fox character to lead the race to get more European citizens online.

Cabinet minister Francis Maude joked subsequently that the job will be difficult given that "there's only one Martha Lane Fox", but the UK government will no doubt be pleased that one of its ideas - or at least one it is claiming for its own - is being held up as an example of best practice across Europe.

Race Online 2012, the campaign led by Lane Fox, aims to get the nearly nine million UK citizens who have never used the internet online. As prime minister David Cameron mentioned in his brief address to the conference on Tuesday, getting more people online equals more growth.

"Studies show it can create twice as many jobs as it destroys," said Cameron. "It's estimated that, for every 10 per cent increase in broadband penetration, global GDP will increase by an average of 1.3 per cent."

Dissatisfaction with the state of copyright and digital rights laws across Europe has been growing for some time, and self-proclaimed pirate parties have cropped up in several countries to confront what they see as unfair and heavy-handed legislation.

The UK arm even stood for election, with little success, but was given cause for optimism over the weekend after exit polls from state elections in Berlin indicated that the German pirate party had secured an amazing 8.9 per cent of the vote.

This entitled the Piraten Partei to 14 seats in the regional parliament, giving it the chance to vote on all sorts of future laws and regulations, including those relating to digital media and copyright.

The UK Pirate Party welcomed the historic news. Education spokesperson Tim Dobson, in attendance in Berlin, argued that it underlined demand across Europe for a new type of politician who understands the web.

"This result shows that the desire for a new politics and digital rights fit for the 21st century continues to grow throughout Europe. Equally, the people of Berlin have realised that it is about time their politicians understand the internet better," he said.

"Pirate Party UK is inspired by the hard work of all the activists that made this result possible, and sends its warmest congratulations. We will be following our German partner's success with new candidates and a more comprehensive policy platform."

Whether the UK public will follow the Germans is debatable given the group's poor showing at the polls in 2010, but the success of the Piraten Partei indicates an underlying frustration at how politicians deal with the new era of technology.

And with more young people growing up in a world where use of the internet and other technologies is second nature, there will be nowhere to hide for those in power who don't understand or embrace the rapid changes.

The fact that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day is just the icing on the cake, me hearties.

As the rush to embrace mobile-commerce grows ever stronger, Eurostar has become the latest big name to launch a smartphone app, this one designed to let travellers book and check in via mobile phone.

The Eurostar App, which is available for iPhone and Android devices, allows travellers to book journeys for up to six people and check in by scanning the electronic barcode which is sent after purchase. There is also the option to print the tickets at home or collect them from the station.

Other features of the app include live service updates and a personal profile page to store things like seating preferences.

Business travellers could benefit from the Express Exchange feature which allows them to change journey times and dates according to their schedule.

As part of its push into mobile, Eurostar also announced a mobile version of its eurostar.com site, also allowing travellers to book and manage journeys and check service updates.

"The new Eurostar App and mobile web site represent the start of many exciting mobile developments for Eurostar, which will help ensure we become the first choice operator of short haul travel from the UK to Europe," said Eurostar commercial director Nick Mercer.

V3.co.uk was lucky enough to be invited to the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) to see what lies behind one of the greatest technological and scientific projects on the planet. Here, groundbreaking experiments are being conducted in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), generating an entire petabyte of data every second.

We also snapped a few images along the way.

Straddling the border of France and Switzerland, the project at CERN represents a pinnacle in international scientific collaboration, with 20 nations supplying funding to the project to enable scientists to look for the origins of the universe.

There are four islands of computer banks at CERN for the management of the main tools, including the LHC, and this requires nine full time staff to be in the room every second of the year.

A cutaway of the LHC showing the two tubes through which particles are fired in opposite directions at just below the speed of light (299,792,458m/s) eventually meaning they can complete a 27km loop 11,000 times a second.

A replica model of what the LHC looks like underground. There are only eight entrace points to the tunnel, meaning staff may have to walk several kilometres to reach the fault they are trying to fix. Or they can take a bicycle.

The entire LHC is cooled to a temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C) so every piece of metal has to expand and contract - the entire machine becomes 80m longer or shorter depending on its heat, so building links into the metal like this is crucial.

Four machines capture the results of the impact at the four collision points, sending back huge amounts of data to the CERN control centre where it is stored for analysis.

This creates around 25PB of data which CERN needs to store, but rather than doing it all itself, the organisation stores around 20 per cent. It uses the Grid, a world network of datacentres and storage facilities that, in agreement with CERN, hosts the rest of the data.

With the European Commission publishing its first Digital Scorecard report, V3.co.uk picks out some of the most interesting graphs from the interactive data section of the report, to see how the UK is performing in comparison with the rest of the nations in the European Union.

As you can see, the UK has stayed consistently ahead of the curve for broadband access.

This has meant that most households in the UK have internet access at home, at a growth increase almost identical to that of Europe.

Since 3G coverage has been available within Europe the UK has been ahead of the trend, although that gap is closing.

Most firms are well aware of the benefits of having broadband connections to help facilitate their business, with only a fraction still on dial-up or not online at all.

Many large enterprises use online access to generate sales, although the UK was hit hard by the recession as many firms went out of business or cut down on online investments.

SMEs have also been quick to embrace the internet, but were also hit hard by the recession.

The government, always keen to try and promote online interaction with its citizens, has managed to entice a proportion of the population to contact it digitally, and is starting to pull away, for the second time, from its EU neighbours.

However, the UK is slipping when it comes to letting firms bid for tenders online, something the government has been criticised over before.

Since 2005 the UK has seen a notable decrease in the number of people yet to ever experience the internet, staying below the EU as it does so.

The UK are also a creative bunch, with more people creating and uploading content such as photos, videos and blogs than the EU average.

All images courtesy of the European Commission.