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Although there is a place for high technology, I sometimes wonder whether we are inventing uses for it purely so there is an excuse to have it!

I read with interest the article about Tim Berners Lee calling for internet access for all people around the world. The reasons he cites are the normal, idealistic and unrealistic ones you get from the often naive tech community: people will suddenly be educated, social and cultural walls will come crumbling down, healthcare will suddenly be accessible to all, global business will become more open and virtual and so on.

The truth is markedly different, of course.

In the UK, for instance, there is no evidence that the internet has improved education. In fact as the parent of teanagers I would say that it has become an obstacle as social media is far more fun than homework, but both are done on the same machine so you cant turn one off. You also need to be constantly vigilant that you are not learning complete rubbish. I have also noticed looking back to school geography that I did in the 60s and 70s that I was just as well versed with the world as is the modern teen.

The business community now takes more business flights than ever before meaning that true global business is not about the internet but about flying round the world for face to face meetings - flights may be cheaper but will remain far out of the league of people in developing countries for many years to come. In fact, the only business benefit for developing countries I see is companies servicing the internet and other IT structures - India is doing well on that one which does not bode well for a growing UK IT industry.

And as far as cultural walls coming down, I think it is no coincidence that the the growth of mass communications and cheaper travel has also seen a rise in nationalism and its big brother, racism. I would say that currently our world is attempting to break itself up into smaller, less well rounded and isolated chunks rather than becoming the utopia seen in internet dreams.

How does this then translate into UK based opportunities in the technology sector?

Well, the problem is that it doesn't. The final point made by Drew Curtis underlines the lie of the internet and the possible misadventure that over relying on an IT future may prove to be.

Despite the fact that Kentucky is a modern state and is properly connected into the World Wide Web, the geographical remoteness proved to be a problem for business growth - in other words, the internet it self has not been able to solve the very problem that it was meant for - to improve communications and bring down geographical barriers.

You are right to look at gaming as a possible growth industry. The internet is settling down not as a cultural tool or an educational tool, or even really as a political or media tool (compare how long most people spend on this website compared to Facebook), but as a leisure activity. Most people, most of the time, use the internet for fun. And where they do use it for, say, education, it is to look up texts that they could have read in the local library - it hasn't improved their education, just saved them a walk.

To rely on IT as an industry saviour for this country would, I believe, be a mistake. I think that many small companies could prove to do very well - IT seems to work particularly well as a cottage industry, a fact underlined by the growing scandal of how governments and other large organisations are being ripped off by monster sized IT companies. Even in the games sector you are seeing a rise in games like Wurm Online and Minecraft that are produced by tiny companies. Minecraft especially has a huge user-base, but is designed and run by just one person - the ultimate cottage industry.

But cottage industries sustain countries, they don't grow them. They can prove to be empowering for a tiny workforce, but they will not rescue a community that is bankrupt. For that you need huge multi-nationals and the UK has not produced one of those in the IT sector.

All I can say is: welcome to the rest of the UK. When people think of Belfast, they think of the Titanic or George Best and not about the technological excellence in the region especially in telecoms and mobile.

Government-funded initiatives such as Digital Circle have bound the local industry together and enabled the creation of clusters in mobile, e-learning, games development, digital marketing, connected health, sports technology and others. Work being done like StartVI, the development of a proto-digital hub, a popular co-working space and a vibrant grassroots community.

So, welcome to Belfast!

The industrial revolution started mainly north of Watford.

With the centre of gravity being London and the south east these days those out in the sticks are probably finding it harder.

Until we resolve this ever growing north/south divide, the UK will become weaker and weaker.

The IT sector is being particularly hard hit, not only by centralisation and clustering in the south east of England but also due to off-shoring.

We can’t all live in the south east of England and we don’t want to either.

If you are in London there is a wealth of expertise and knowledge on startups and tech around if you get ti the right meetings and chat to the right people.

However the quality of ideas is in no way better than outside and often the ideas that get funded are not as good.

Funding for business in this sector seems to take two forms:

Punt: it might make some money but it is a tax write off

Investment: higher investor confidence more money and requires much more initial resource

Personally I have found it hard to find good advice outside of London on tech startups. If your business is based in London there is help but outside the catchment and it's a whole lot harder.

It's not just about established industries but new ones too. The Billion Dollar industries come from innovative and speculative ideas. Google was speculative and essentially would have gone nowhere without funding. This is the gap that needs filling...

Oh and if I hear ROI spoken about in this sector...? ROI often comes out of great ideas not the other way around, see Google again!

The fundamental issue is not with companies or ideas (ideas are cheap, execution is key), it's with the red-tape and legal hoops in the creation and continual running of a successful enterprise.

Setting up a company for example. There's no "simple" guide, and you either wade into a sea of "Form 36A Part 11.1"-type legislation which, if you get wrong, could result in massive fines or court action. Or you pay through the nose for a lawyer, which, when it's possible to launch an internet start-up for a few hundred quid (coding knowledge, cheap cloud hosting and a family member willing to put you up for a few months is almost all free), why spend 3 times as much on talking to a lawyer just so the paperwork's in order?

Also the EU, for example, would like to class venture capital in the same legal-risk league as hedge-funds, meaning greater legal costs for start-ups wishing to pursue this avenue. Scaring off those investors who were beginning to dabble in the internet space.

The easier it is to launch a business, the more likely people are to do it, and the easier it is to run, the more likely they are to succeed.

There are smart people all around this country. It just feels that sometimes the legal structure is designed to hold them back.

As someone running a tech startup in the Scottish Highlands, our biggest problems are access to capital (we simply don't have the connections available in Silicon Valley, b) skills availability, the incompetence and hostility to enterprise of the local council and, above all, the hopeless and archaic communications infrastructure of the UK as a whole and Scotland in particular. Apart from those, everything is rosy....

"The business community now takes more business flights than ever before meaning that true global business is not about the internet but about flying round the world for face to face meetings"

Due respect, this isn't the general picture. In fact I've found it to be nonsense, of course technically illiterate CEOs, MDs et al do cos they gotta have their free corporate jollies and whatnot. But that's totally different to how real employees are communicating.

We have offices in the UK, US, Ukraine and then remote workers spread around the planet. We talk to each other constantly at zero cost, via guess what.

That's no coincidence and it would have been unheard of not 10 years ago. The truth is of course that the internet as a public entity is young, and as somebody who writes software for the internet - we're still figuring out what we need and how to do it.

Streaky, what you say is generally right, that essentially globalisation means junkets for sales and senior management types, and outsourcing and longer hours for anyone who actually does any work, in order to deliver cost savings to fund these trips.

Oddly, back in the nineties it was more about kicking off working relationships by site visits: today that is the privilege only of the 'business development' parasites.

As the owner of a rapidly growing web-based IT solutions business dealing in a very specialised area of EU regulation and based in the wilds East Lancashire, the conundrum is that I am generating healthy revenues and even healthier profits with just 4 employees - red tape can be good for business when applied to other people...

The downside (for employment) is that I can do ten times the business with the same staffing complement - all our web hosting services are outsourced and we develop the one application irrespective of whether 20 customers use it (as now) or 200, hopefully in the near future.

The plus side is that we are addressing a global issue so 63% of our revenues are in euros, 10% in US dollars and the remainder in sterling.

Being "out of the loop" geographically in terms of connections and access to capital is a problem, so I take the point of the article and successful hi-techs can start anywhere, but there again, we haven't needed to raise any capital yet so it might be different if your business requires large dollops of it.

Oh, and tax too much and we will move to somewhere where it rains less...

"In fact as the parent of teanagers I would say that [the internet] has become an obstacle as social media is far more fun than homework, but both are done on the same machine so you cant turn one off."

Surely this speaks to your ability to monitor your teenagers' activities online as opposed to any inherent problem with the internet?
There are mechanisms out there that enable you to control what websites your children can access (here is one: [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator] - I recommend that you make use of them rather than write disingenuous posts like that.

Can IT kick start the corpse - perhaps,

But also consider now badly implemented IT can kill the economy too!

Presently a policy of the HMRC to implement a compulsory electronic IT system (which is untested and un-piloted) will force all 2 million UK companies to spend upwards of £1000 sending in their accounts electronically - that is this untested system will take 2 BILLION pounds out of the pockets of small British businesses this year. (I am referring to XBRL ONLY filing requirements.)

Is this wise or rational? And furthermore shouldn't it have been better thought through by HM Treasury and HMRC? (And they have been warned, just as the same organisation was warned about the inflationary bubble that substantially caused the crash.)

The UK venture capital community is so appallingly risk averse on tech new ventures, we really shouldn't rely on tech to push the UK out of recession. The government likewise is only really willing to provide R&D funds to established firms (i.e. who can provide 50-60% of the fund for R&D themselves). This is why (despite the computer and Internet being invented by Brits), the UK is far far far behind the US, Taiwan, Israel, Singapore, etc. on tech innovation and investment.

@streaky

I work in mass media as a composer and the internet allows all kinds of collaboration that was not possible 10 years ago, let alone 30 years ago.

Except, actually it doesn't.

Exactly the same collaboration happens, but we do it differently. The costs are lower now in some ways (much better sampling meaning less musicians), but if you want a class product, you still use musicians.

I am very capable of working with singers down the line, but line delays mean we cannot be perfectly in sync, so it is better face to face and makes for a nicer working relationship.

When it comes to sales, I deal with commercial radio stations and they do the selling to the client - vast amounts of selling.

NONE OF THEM work via the internet except email. The small and large clients want to be visited, they want to see who they are paying, they want to be presented to - all of which is far more efficient face to face.

I also deal with multinationals. With the companies I deal with, it is not the waste-of-space senior staff going on jollies, but the ordinary sales staff, tech support, creatives and so on (depending on the type of business.) They have found the internet great at sending documentation, but hopeless for sowing up fine details; when you are working on a contract, you cannot beat sitting round a table, scribbling ideas on each others copy while still being able to watch and listen to everyone's reactions in clear, live detail.

The advertising sector is the fastest moving business sector in the world. Descisions are made at a furious rate, people take chances left right and centre and deals are made and remade minute by minute - and that is despite the fact that creative development can take months, even years (Gold Blend was in research for more than two years before they even tried to make the coffee).

And yet I see no difference to how the industry operates now to how it worked thirty years ago. The Internet has changed the technical method of communication (though we still seem to rank up huge voice phone bills!) but it has not changed the actual business. We dont produce more now than then, we dont work faster now, we are not more creative now.

However, one big thing has changed. Our office equipment bills have grown enormously. Our hardware expenditure has increased (and obsolescence means that we are continually pushed to change), software licensing is something we never had before, and again we have to continually invest in upgrades and so on (and for those people that yell "open source" at me, that is no good if you are not compatible with your clients or the OS version is not very good or the support stinks), and our electricity bills have gone through the roof.

Large companies try to justify these changes by pointing out that they probably employ less people, but that tends not to apply to small companies.

Don't get me wrong, I do not think that technology is a bad thing - I am surrounded by 5 computers in my private office/studio alone. However, it is being touted as a panacea for all ills, and in that way it is failing dismally.

I Wrote:

"In fact as the parent of teanagers I would say that [the internet] has become an obstacle as social media is far more fun than homework, but both are done on the same machine so you cant turn one off."

jamiet wrote:

Surely this speaks to your ability to monitor your teenagers' activities online as opposed to any inherent problem with the internet?
There are mechanisms out there that enable you to control what websites your children can access (here is one: [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator] - I recommend that you make use of them rather than write disingenuous posts like that.

I am wondering if you have kids at all, but thanks for the patronising reply. I run a business network at home, I use openDNS with various parental controls, I have administrator privileges on all machines (the kids don't) and the computers are kept in the living areas and not in the bedrooms. I can out program the whole lot of them (and I am just a composer).

But I do not hover over my kids while they are doing homework, and nor do I decide when and if they can connect to social networks - I think that is being a slave master, not a parent.

When I was young, there were plenty of things to distract me from my homework too - books, television, some interesting noise from outside, perhaps - but they were easily self managed simply because I could close a book, or walk into the next room, or shove some headphones on. As a teenager, this was all very difficult to do, of course.

Social Networking on the internet is invasive into a home and a private space (especially when it comes to weak willed kids like we all were) in a way that books or even TV has never managed. And the very fact that you can run more than one application at a time (say an instant messenger and a browser to a well known knowledge web site) means that you are going to try and do everything with several incompatible events competing for your time.

I have noticed that our kids find it impossible to login to the network without opening up their profile somewhere to see what useless bit of gibberish has been posted about them. Going by the huge quantity of their friends who are ALWAYS online too, it seems that this is pretty common.

That is the reality - nothing disingenuous about it.

sceptik wrote:

The UK venture capital community is so appallingly risk averse on tech new ventures, we really shouldn't rely on tech to push the UK out of recession.

I helped run an unsuccesful financial webiste ten years ago. The secret to our lack of success was that we were doing everything all the newest sites are now doing but at a time when connections were dirt slow and people had not got their heads round Web 2.0 (don't you hate that term?)

By that I mean we had regular audio broadcasts, blogs, forums, galleries, community membership and participation, satire, cartoons, the lot. But with many people on dial up still (including me as the radio producer for 3 months before my first BT ADSL at 521k), and chatting online being seen as something rather dirty, we could not get people to understand what we were doing. Being ahead of the game is not always the cleverest thing to be.

The main writer was a chap called Tim Price who still writes an excellent, though less satirical, blog.

At that time, most of what we covered was about dot coms over spending, over investing, being over optomistic and loosing millions. Some have survived - people forget that at that time Amazon had yet to make even a dollar in profit - but most fell apart, lost a fortune or, like us, just dissapeared between the cracks in the floorboards.

The whole period left a nasty taste in the mouth and a lot of investors feeling very burned.

Unsurprisingly, and even more so since the crunch, many of them are STILL very nervous!

###

(PS: I bought back our domain a few days ago .... tempting to try again. Anyone for some Moonrock Radio?)

My son has worked in video games since he left school 10 years ago. He's worked in Dewsbury, Nottingham, Gateshead and had an offers of jobs in Dundee, Iceland and Montreal. But two years ago he accepted a job at a games company in Cambridge and he's still there. Several of the businesses he's been with have gone bust and he's had a few periods back home jobsearching, so it's by no means an easy career path.

We really need our universities to come to an agreement on what criteria they have to meet with games dev courses. After easily passing the first year of a games dev degree course last year i have decided to drop out, as the course would not have trained me to industry standard let alone given me the skills i needed to start my own company.