You use your camera to shoot video. You use your phone to shoot video. You may even be capturing the world in high definition. Now's the time to get your footage working for you by entering our competition and scoring a great prize.

We have teamed up with Visual Networking experts, Cisco, to offer shedloads of cool prizes and all you have to do is show us a video that illustrates 'My Video Life'.

If you are a UK tech start up there's really only one place to be this week and that's on the Web Mission trip to Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Over the next few days reps from twenty or so UK companies will be networking like crazy, bashing the ears of top US VCs and meeting the odd web 2.0 superstar. I have managed to sneak along for the ride and will be blogging the event both here and on TechDigest.

It's an impressive list of companies too with some you will be familiar with, like video experts Coull and innovative music site Slicethepie , alongside some that are new including edocr which bills itself as the YouTube for web documents.

It'll be fascinating to watch all these companies swapping investor stories and comparing notes on business plans and even more interesting to see what the Americans make of it all. The trip formally kicks off on Saturday night with a cocktail or two in the Clift Hotel on Geary Street.

Btw if anyone fancies meeting up for a quick beer or breakfast to talk Shiny things (I am here until the 25th) email me on ashley@shinymedia.com

Here at Shiny Media we have always held the strong belief that the future of the web will be video-based. So even as far back as 2004 we were choosing .tv domains for what in those days we text only blog sites.

Shiny has also been a major player in the development of online video in the UK. In the last two years we have shot and uploaded to our sites over 1000 videos- much more than any other UK publisher.

We have now reached a pivotal point in the evolution of online video with viewing figures rocketing, imaginative new shows appearing on an almost daily basis and the migration of video advertising from TV to the web. We have also seen an explosion in the number of consumers creating their own videos with YouTube alone hosting almost 80 million clips.

In the US eMarketer Inc. predicts that the number of online video viewers will rise to 190 million by 2012 and will only start to tail off as Internet use reaches saturation level at nearly 90 percent of the population.

We are also convinced that video is going to permeate almost every aspect of the web which is why we have decided to partner with Cisco to undertake some research into how consumers engage with online video.

Cisco has coined the term Visual Networking to explain how consumers will be using web-based video not only as an entertainment tool, but also as the most important way of communicating.

At Shiny we completely buy into this view of the future. For example we are very excited by the concept of Telepresence, which has the potential to transform the way in which we communicate with each other.

Cisco also sees Visual Networking as the next chapter in the story of Social Networking. It believes that online communities will provide the engine by which consumers will discover video online. So instead of using traditional search engines, people will find new content through recommendations from their friends.

Over the next month or so look out for the questionnaire and competitions we are going to be running on our sites. The results will not only illustrate what our readers currently think about visual networking, but how they see it developing too. It should be fascinating.