Hull’s been in a tough economic situation for many years now.  The reasons behind this and the associated social impact are complex.  What’s clear though is the need for some sort of economic rejuvenation.  Many believe that at the heart of this rejuvenation is the growth of the Knowledge Economy.  The Knowledge Economy covers all sorts of IP-based disciplines such as law, accountancy and consulting, but I’m going to highlight four things that I think are key to growing the Knowledge Industry in the Tech Sector in Hull.

 1. Opportunity Not Investment

One of my contracts is as a consultant to a private investment fund, so I’ve seen many sorts of businesses that need investment for all sorts of reasons.  More often than not, I see businesses who think investment is the only answer to their growth… but it isn’t.

The vast majority of businesses that we turn down actually just need opportunity.  They’re great companies, doing great work, who just need a break.  The challenge to big business and public sector procurement in the city is to shop local.  Shopping local is not some sort of philanthropic act, but a recognition that you have a world class skill-set right on your doorstep.  Why not take a different view of how you commission your projects and think what’s important to the success of that project.  Do you want your new team to spend their time learning how to be the best, brightest and most knowledgeable team they can, or do you want them to spend their time learning how to play the procurement game and getting their Healthy & Safety and Environmental Policies paperwork in order?  Those sorts of things are important, but you have to see them in context.  If you’re a cash rich local company, do you need to squeeze your small business suppliers on 30, 60 or even 90 day payment runs?

 2. Collaboration

Collaboration is key.  Through collaboration we learn, grow, improve and develop.  Hull needs that collaboration, which is why groups such as HullDigital are vital.  A group of businesses willing to collaborate becomes an attractive thing, and will start (as we’ve seen in Leeds and Sheffield) to generate outside interest in the area.

Genuine collaboration and that willingness to share amongst businesses is difficult.  It requires a level of confidence and assurance around the value of your own IP.  It’s confidence that what you have has taken so much investment of your time and energy that  it becomes difficult to replicate.  My experience has always shown that those willing to share are often the ones sharing the most value.

That collaboration is not just for peer businesses though.  Big businesses can learn from small businesses.  That direct connection between the efficiency of your business and your mortgage repayments – fundamentally, that ‘Time Is Money’ is often lost as a business grows.  It’s often said that big business should be like small business, only bigger.  That’s one of the approaches that makes companies such as Apple so successful.  Steve Jobs stated the following in an Interview with Business Week in 2004:

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

Small business doesn’t have all the answers though.  Large businesses can share how they grew to that point, the lessons they learned on the way, and some of the fundamental things they do well such as payroll and accounting.  Perhaps some of those areas I outlined earlier (Health & Safety and Environmental Policies) which are important and that previously prohibited small businesses from procuring work with large businesses, could be something big businesses help with.

3. Connectivity

KC’s new Lightstream network is a hugely exciting development for Hull.  It will free up businesses to communicate and work in ways that had previously been impossible.  It will help enable that collaboration that is so vital to economic growth.  We’ll be able to free up hours of travel/meeting time and save hundreds in travel costs.  I’m convinced that Lightstream will form the backbone of business and education in the city for years to come.

4. Education

As locally grown businesses develop they will require new talent.  We’re fortunate to have a number of great educational establishments in the city.  Stopping the ‘brain drain’ to other cities by working with universities and schools to create a new workforce for the future is key.  Businesses can help shape and guide students into jobs or starting their own businesses.  It’s an exciting time to be in education with Computer Science and Programming in schools being the latest government trend.  It’s exciting to think of the possibility of a new generation of students who are grounded and equipped with fundamental computing skills – not the latest trend or technology, as Paul Dyson put in a recent tweet.

The Future

Tech businesses come in all shapes and sizes, many of whom have no idea what they’re doing in six weeks, let alone six months.  Hull’s problems have been growing for decades, so there’s no quick fix.  As the Knowledge Economy grows, things will slowly start to look and feel very different.

We’ll see small teams of independent specialists working in a Noded way.  That might not be ticking the boxes of traditional growth and direct job creation, but the chances are that they’ll be paying more tax and spending more of their income locally than the aggregate number of employees in a similar business with a similar number of employees.

Landlords and developers who in the past could rely on economic growth to increase demand for their property will need to rethink how they provide for the needs of those new tech businesses who are quite happy working remotely and who value flexibilty and growth and aren’t interested in long term leases.

What Hull will look like in five years from now is unclear.  What’s certain though is that if the Knowledge Economy does grow in Hull, how businesses look and feel with change.  If you have an economy where knowledge becomes as critical as other economic resources, then it will mean that those rules and practices that determined success in the traditional industries of Hull will need rewriting.

It’s an exciting time to be in Hull, and a privilege to be working with some of the great minds who will be fundamental to the growth and success of Hull’s future.  Why not come along to a HullDigital Meet-Up and say hello to some of them?

RIP Steve 

Brendan will provide a rare insight into IBM’s appetite for organisational change and its success in transforming its business model while remaining true to its strategic vision. Add to that its aim to build a smarter planet….and that really is big thinking.

About the speaker
Brendan is responsible for developing and executing marketing campaigns that will deliver sales pipeline for the IBM Business across all products, services and sectors. Prior to taking up this position in July 2010, Brendan has held a variety of leadership positions in the UK, Ireland, South Africa and across Europe. These have included Director of Marketing and Communications for the Chairman of IBM in EMEA, and Director of 2012 Games for Think London – the Foreign Direct Investment Agency for London. You can see his Linkedin profile here.

Book your place
The event is free to attend and will feature a Q&A session, with refreshments and networking opportunities available from 6.00pm.
Book online to reserve your place by clicking here and for further information please contact Julie Arnold: j.arnold@hull.ac.uk

(As a quick note, the Hallmark group has done a superb job giving the previously woeful hotel a major overhaul and I would recommend it).

It was a good turn out, with support from Alan Johnson, who spoke about how important it is for the city and local area. Martin Lauer from The One Point gave an excellent talk about his experiences getting funding and support from Sirius – he had nothing but good things to say and reinforced that something like this can make a huge different to the success of a company.

We gave an overview of the exciting digital community in and around Hull and also talked about some of the huge shifts in technology we are seeing such as smart devices, the post-pc era and the rise of the ‘app’! What was noticeable was the attendance; whilst excellent, was mostly from established companies and possibly not from the type of fledgling businesses / people who are going to be the ones who are going to benefit from KC Invest.

However, the good news is that we hope to get Sean Royce along to a MeetUp in the very near future to explain to the digital / tech community just how easy it is to apply to the fund.

KC Invest is a bold step which makes a huge amount of sense and we wish it all the best.

Details of the fund can be found below:
 
Through the fund, called KC Invest, KC hopes to stimulate business growth in the region’s economy and help create new, sustainable jobs for local people.
 
The KC fund will be administered by two local enterprise agencies, the Acorn Fund and Sirius. They will each receive £150,000 from KC to distribute as loan financing to business start-ups and expanding businesses in the sectors KC is focusing its support on.
 
Both the Acorn Fund and Sirius are Community Development Finance Institutions that are able to deliver loans through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Because the financing provided by KC will be matched by ERDF, the total cash available to local businesses will be £600,000. 
 
People who apply for KC Invest funding through the Acorn Fund or Sirius will also have access to mentoring and support to make sure their fledgling business has the best possible chance of long-term success. Feasibility grants will also be available to fully explore business ideas where more market research is needed before financing is agreed.
 
Sean Royce, KC’s Finance and Commercial Director, said: “The ‘perfect storm’ caused by the banking crisis and public sector cuts mean that not only is the job market depressed, but it’s also harder than ever for people to obtain finance to set up their own businesses and create work for themselves and others.
 

“Yet we need those new businesses more than ever now to stimulate growth and help the country’s economic recovery.
 
“Through the KC Invest fund we want to give practical support to new business start-ups to help support the local economy and create new jobs.
 
“While we have the desire and resources to do this, we’re not experts in small business support, which is why we’re partnering with the Acorn Fund and Sirius, who both have excellent and long track records in supporting new business start-ups.”

 
Peter Sykes, Fund Manager at the Acorn Fund, said:

“KC’s commitment to the local enterprise economy is to be commended. We cannot have enough of this type of financial and hands-on support for new start-ups. It is to be hoped that the KC Invest fund can set an example of other leading local employers to get involved in the local community in a way that can help breathe new life into our economy.”
 

Alan Gordon-Freeman, Managing Director of Sirius, said:

“This is a fantastic opportunity for those involved in technology to develop and grow their own businesses. The funding can help to attract other forms of finance as well as bring other specialist support such as business management and marketing.”
 

People who are interested in applying for KC Invest finance can contact the Acorn Fund on 01482 324976 / www.hullbdf.com or Sirius at 01482 890146 / www.sirius-hull.co.uk. More information is available on KC’s website here.

“The cloud” is a wonderful place for developing your own products

It’s been just over 6 months since the Beta launch of Incentive Maker, a web based product that allows anyone to implement a professional staff incentive programme for their company, and just over 8 months since I first wrote a line of code for it.

Incentive Maker is the first SaaS product I’ve developed where the end client was myself and a business partner (Wildfire Advertising Ltd). This has given me a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to the technical architecture of the product and I’ve really made the most of this freedom.

Minimal budget

At the start of the project we lacked two key things; money and users. The only thing we really had to give was time. My initial plan was to host the Incentive Maker code and databases on my MediaTemple server, however when it came to improving hardware performance, it was quite costly and it lacked smaller increments.

The other downside to hosting everything internally is the responsibility factor. We certainly weren’t in a position to employ someone to look after the servers on a full time basis, so we needed to do things differently.

After a bit of research we decided to use Heroku, a cloud application platform. Heroku is one of the many hosting services that are based on Amazon EC2 services. This has been a real eye opener for us. Throughout the initial development and Beta process we paid next to nothing for the service, due to the system coping with the small number of users just fine.

On top of the codebase hosting we have two database hosting solutions; MongoHQ and Redis To Go. At the start of the project, including the Beta period, we used the free plans for both of these services.

I’m certain you can see my point here on the costs side of things. Other than our time, we had very little invested in Incentive Maker, even during the Beta stage. If no clients bought into the idea, then our losses would be a minimal.

Hassle free scaling

After the Beta period, we had a few clients on board, with more still giving Incentive Maker some consideration. At this stage we knew we needed more hosting power and more database space. This is where the magic really started.

More power took a matter of seconds to sort out. It was just a case of logging in, dragging a slider up and clicking an apply button.

More database space was again a very simple process. We simply had to sign up to a larger price plan, press the ‘clone database’ button and change a config file on Heroku. Job done.

As a web developer I’ve never had hosting this easy. The costs savings, in terms of time, from these kinds of services is incredible. Some may think that Heroku looks expensive when you up the number of dynos, but it’s worth every penny, or cent in this case.

Easy application monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning

As will all web based products we wanted to have monitoring and error handling in place. I didn’t, however, want to spend time developing code to do this for us. Fortunately there are web based services out there that could already handle this. We decided to use Hoptoad and New Relic, even better they come as addons to the Heroku service, and the costs for using them is even cheaper with Heroku.

The amount of monitoring information New Relic supplies is simple breathtaking and they are always improving the service. The money spent on this service is well worth it, even better, in a recent update, the standard package comes for free with Heroku.

Concentrating on what’s important, our own codebase

All these cloud services have allowed us to concentrate on what’s important, our own codebase. What is more, because of all these services, the amount of code we have to maintain is actually quite small, so our maintenance costs are pretty minimal.

Conclusion

In the past, the idea of having everything so spread out across different services would have terrified me and sounded like a management nightmare. The Incentive Maker project has changed my opinion dramatically and I’ve fully embraced the idea of “the cloud”. It’s cost effective, a huge time saver, and removes a huge amount of hassle and stress.

We have no idea what our requirements are going to be in the future, but we can confidently say we can happily cope with scaling for larger number of users, adding in extra cloud services and even moving to different services, should a better service become available.

Any future product development I’m involved in, will definitely be using these, or similar services.

Known as the Centre for Digital Innovation or C4Di, the building could provide up to 6,700 sq m of space for businesses in the Fruit Market area of the city.

The project is being led by developers Wykeland Group, working with KCOM, Hull City Council, the University of Hull and Hull College.

This is a wonderful project, and one which could provide an amazing workspace and environment for many people and companies.

The partners involved want to get this right and they need your help to do so. If you could take a few minutes to fill in the survey below we would be very grateful.

>>> Click here to take the survey now <<<

(Approximately five minutes of your time).

Every response is put in a draw for £100 of Amazon vouchers. The winning survey response will be picked at random at the end of June 2011 and will be notified by email (make sure you fill on your email address!).

Take the survey!

For those of you who don’t know, it all blew up just over a week ago when people began to discover there was a location tracking database on their iPhone.

(If you want to know the ins and outs of how the iPhone knows where you are, then this is a must-read article by Glenn Fleishmann over at Macworld).

Now normally (most) people would a) not know about this b) not be able to access it and do much with it. In this instance, it was not the case. A simple application can be downloaded and used to visualise your movements and this is where things started to get messy.

An example of what this application shows is below:

Washington DC to New York from Alasdair Allan on Vimeo.

Pretty clever eh? So people were starting to become worried about if this database fell into the wrong hands, mischief could be made. However, it seems that this location data is not that accurate, so is there anything to be worried about?

The worry stems from the fact that people didn’t know it did this.

I’m not sure at this point. Apple have released a statement which you can read here. The first two items are below:

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

And what is very interesting, is the last point >> Software Update:

Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

- reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
- ceases backing up this cache, and
- deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

This is exactly what Gruber thought – it was something in the iOS software which was just missed. Rather than deleting this cache of location data every now and then, your iPhone stored it. Hence the ability to go and see “where you’ve been”.

It looks like Apple have realised this was a mistake and have made the above moves to put people’s minds at rest. That saved database of location certainly made the tech and mobile headlines last week and it goes to show that location is still very important to people like Apple, but also consumers.

It’s not only in the background where smartphones are recording your location. A huge number of apps use it, especially for photography. Instagram, Twitter, flickr… they all use “location services” on the iPhone.

I’ll be very interested to know what you think about “broadcasting” your location.

Are you becoming more aware of it?
Are you choosing not to?
Do you think it is putting yourself at risk from nefarious other parties?
Do hardware and software companies need to make us more aware of location and what is, and what is not tracked?

Over to you.

JM

UPDATE

Apple have just released the new iOS 4.3.3 and as you can see below, it is addressing the database:

Yes!!! The Digital Survey launches today and you can help by filling it in….

>>> www.thedigitalsurvey.co.uk <<<

Pigeon Post or Broadband?

When it comes to broadband speeds in a rural area, the news story last week, about a race between a pigeon, carrying a USB Key over a distance of 120 kilometres and the time it took to download the same 300mb file online, was enlightening.  The pigeon got to its destination quicker than it was possible to download the full file using the broadband connections.   Although the stunt was used to highlight the need for better rural broadband it did touch on the whole idea of how we communicate today and the future communication needs of different communities.

The University of Hull’s Institute for Creativity and Innovation iHull, is now working with telephone and broadband provider KC   to go deeper into these issues and are planning to gather intelligence from both rural and urban communities to see how they currently communicate, the experiences they have online and what their communication needs might be in the future .

An online questionnaire has been devised to determine people’s communication habits such as online shopping habits, how much they use their home phone versus their mobile, and any frustrations they might have experienced when online.  The questionnaire can be found at www.thedigitalsurvey.co.uk.

Organisations, companies and individuals from across the country will be invited to take part in this survey so that regional comparisons can also be made.

All entries will be entered into a prize draw to win an Apple 16GB wifi iPad.

Leo Kolassa, Acting Business Development Manager for iHull said “Since iHull’s vision is to support and develop the region’s creative, digital and cultural industries, it is really important that we understand how people currently communicate and how they would like to communicate in the long term.

“We want to understand the issues facing internet users across the UK and the type of technologies and applications they are looking for in the future. Once we understand that we can then look at how we can service those needs.”

Nick Thompson, KC’s Director of Consumer Services, said: “As the region’s main provider of phone and broadband services, we already have a good insight to communication trends locally, and there is no doubt that the communications landscape has changed dramatically in recent years.

“However, we’re keen to know more about what people want and expect from phone and broadband services now and in the future so that we can better respond to our customers’ needs and play our part in equipping the region with the digital infrastructure it needs to thrive.”

As part of gaining a better understanding of the digital age,  iHull, the University of Hull and KC  are also partners of the digital and technology conference, HDLive,  organised by Jon Moss of Hull Digital, which takes place in Hull on the 4^th of November (see  www.hd-live.co.uk for details) Key note speaker  Peter Barron, Google’s European head of PR and Communications , will be talking about the Internet Revolution and highlighting some of the extraordinary products and trends we are currently seeing.

To participate in the survey go to www.thedigitalsurvey.co.uk.

The survey closes on the 15^th December 2010

The prize draw takes place on the 20^th of December 2010

Editors Notes

Established in September 2009 iHull coordinates the creative and cultural offering of the University of Hull, working in partnership with the creative sector in the Yorkshire and Humber Region to support, nurture and develop the region’s digital and cultural industries. For further details contact: Leo Kolassa: Email: l.kolassa@hull.ac.uk Tel:  01482 465645 Mobile:  07766 269685 Website www.hull.ac.uk

Jon Moss is the founder of Hull Digital, Hull & East Yorkshire’s digital community and also runs the HDLive Conferences. He helps businesses, brands and people be more successful online through his company, theappleofmyi. He speaks on local radio on technology and the online world. Contact details: Email jon@hulldigital.co.uk Tel 0113 815 5678, Mobile 07841 285 185 Twitter @jonmoss

KC provides telephone and internet services to customers throughout Hull and East Yorkshire. During its 105 year history, it has consistently been at the forefront of communications, achieving many milestones along the way including its famous untimed local calls, the creation of the original classified directory and being one of the founding UK providers of broadband internet.  Contact details: Kay Stevenson Email kay.stevenson@kcom.com Tel  01482 602396, Mobile 07595 525061 Website www.k-c.co.uk

Rather than just giving our thoughts, we thought the best idea is to get YOUR thoughts, and so we’ve prepared a very short survey below:

You can follow Mike on twitter here.

HDLive – Mike Butcher “Time to Start Up” from Hull Digital on Vimeo.