“In a report by Capgemini carried out over two years, they quantified the digital advantage. In a global survey of nearly 400 large companies, they found that the digirati (digital elite) are 26% more profitable, drive 9% more revenue from their physical assets, and earn 12% higher market valuations than their peers in the same industry. Some companies excel in investing in technologies such as social media and analytics. Other firms have strong capabilities to manage transformation. The digirati excel in both dimensions, and achieve better performance than their competitors.

Our starting point is that digital maturity matters in every industry.”

Come along and hear how technology can transform your businesses and hear about exciting plans for the local digital economy. Sign up here now!

Speakers:

Lee Strafford: visionary and entrepreneurial leader who lead PlusNet from start-up to a £67m exit.
Jamie Coleman: Founder and Managing Director of TechCube, a technology incubator in Edinburgh.
David Keel: Managing Director of Trident

The second event is our HD MeetUp which is also being held on the 6th, but in the evening at 6.30pm. This has proven to be a very popular event and you can register over on the MeetUp site by clicking here. Both Lee and Jamie will be speaking and we’ll also be introducing the C4DI Beta to everyone.

There is some terrific content here so please do share it with friends and colleagues.

You can see all the videos by clicking here and I’ve embedded the highlights below.

HDLive 2012 Highlights from Hull Digital on Vimeo.

I’ve been loosely following the progress of the Makerbot over the past few years, mostly through the tweets and blog of my friend Brendan Dawes. To me he is Mr. 3D printing and has been tinkering away for while and has just received his latest machine, the Replicator 2.

This is what he has to say about his revolutionary journey:

I still remember the day my first Makerbot arrived at the end of 2010 – a box full of nuts and bolts and laser cut parts that I somehow had to make into a thing that makes other things. Even though I had no idea about 3D printing or building something like this I was very excited about the possibilities that were waiting for me inside that box. Now two years later, having just upgraded to a Replicator 2, that excitement has still not subsided. Here’s a machine that can make digital into physical. I don’t think we’ve really begun to truly understand how these machines could alter how we consume physical products in the future. Look at what’s happened to HMV and Blockbuster, all because those old business models no longer work. Will we be downloading objects from Amazon in the future to print out in our now homes? I think so. With electronics that are printed as well? Yes. I think we’ll see the continued rise of small niche hardware makers, building and selling things in their home manufacturing space.

You have to see the current range of desktop machines like the early PCs, but even with that they’ve come on leaps and bounds already – just compare the Thing-O-Matic to the Replicator 2. Right now I’m experimenting with the technology, in fact it may become a big part of my next solo exhibition following on from Cinema Redux. I have no idea what I’m doing and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

There are people all over the world who now have these wonderful machines, and some of them have even managed to launch a business through making a specific product. Now how good is that? Have a look at the video below:

Chris Milnes had never 3D printed anything when he invented an iPhone accessory he desperately needed. While the Square credit card reader makes his life easier as a business owner, it tends to spin and twist during use. His simple design, the Square Helper, connects the Square unit to an iPhone or iPad and prevents it from twisting, saving the merchant time and hassle. With his MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer, Chris has a factory on his desk for making high-resolution, durable units.

There seems to be a thriving industry starting to take shape, not only for selling these machines and the consumables they use, but also 3D printing services, where you can choose an object to be printed:

We offer 3d printing service for you, If you are an industrial designer, 3d printing enthusiastic or just want to own something unique. Then you are at the right place. We can print you objects in one of the following colours: white, black, red, green, blue, pink, orange or the ever favorite glow in the dark blue.

Thingiverse is a terrific site which shows what people are making, or rather printing. Although Makerbot is the original and most well known of these personal printers, the annual tech and gadget-fest that is CES has just seen a new entrant hit the market.

The Cube is a lot less money than the Replicator 2 and is aimed at a printing beginner. It certainly looks the part, being available in a number of colours, with wifi and being able to print objects up to 5.5″ x 5.5″ x 5.5″.

It’s not alone in this new market though. The Form 1 is a Kickstarter project which is not shipping yet, but looks very promising and raised a staggering $3million.

It works differently to the Replicator.

The printer’s base material is liquid, and it doesn’t require any heat. The Replicator and the cube use filament of which there are three main types. Instead, the Form1 has a pan at the bottom of the machine which fills with the liquid, and the design is drawn by a laser. As the laser hits the material, it hardens and produces your finished object. Boom!

One of the best scenarios for any 3D printer would be schools. How amazing would the ICT lesson be when you could be part of a team who design and then print something? Every school in the country should have one to show the possibilities of this printing revolution to excited children.

Does anyone else have a Makerbot? I’d love to hear from you if you do, and if you had, what would you print?

Is Hull connected? Is it a buzzing place? Can it counter the increasing concentration of economic activity in and around London?

These were some of the questions posed by BBC Radio 4 and Dragons’ Den presenter Evan Davis as he brought his analysis of the UK’s economic challenges home to an audience in Hull.

Speaking at the Hull Digital (HDLive) conference, he closed in from a helicopter view of the world economy and the UK’s place in an increasingly global marketplace to the prospects of Hull finding a prosperous future.

The key, he said, was “connectivity”. Successful places would be those with “physical, virtual and cultural connectivity” – places where businesses and business networks link to and learn from others.

A vibrant cultural life was vital, said Davis, to “sow the seeds of economic renaissance”. Cities had to make themselves attractive for entrepreneurs and employers to live in, as well as work, so that they say: “This is a buzzing place. I’ll set up a business here”.

Davis had words of encouragement for Hull. From what he had learned, the city had a chance. It had a “great broadband network and a growing cultural sector”. It had a thriving university and a student population that adds vibrancy to life in the city.

After those fundamentals, it was about the “mindset and view of the world” of the city’s business community, he said. “That’s where you come in”, Davis told his audience.

So, if it’s about connectivity, culture and attitude, the event that brought Davis to Hull augurs well. HDLive is an extraordinary home-grown success, bringing world-class technology experts to a city said to have the fastest-growing digital community outside London.

HDLive is the epitome of connectivity. It has grown out of Hull Digital, a connected community of digital start-ups and SMEs.  HDLive saw 250 people gather to link and learn. The event was a tweetfest as, throughout the day, members of the audience took to Twitter and blogging platforms to share their views and observations with connections inside and outside the lecture theatre at the University of Hull Business School.

During breaks, the air was buzzing with excited conversations as businesses forged and reinforced mutually beneficial connections. Many of those conversations set HD Live in the context of a city determined to challenge false perceptions of its cultural life and economic prospects.

Davis talked about the UK’s economy being at a crossroads. Manufacturing had been transferred abroad, as the UK focused on financial and commercial services. But, in the wake of the global crash, Britain was left with an economy that was “not broad enough to pay the bills”, said Davis. It was too dependent on service industries and too “clustered” in London and the South East.

So, he was asked, what would be the impact on Hull of Siemens investing in manufacturing – a wind turbine factory – in the city? Davis said it partly depended on the degree of commitment by Siemens to local employment and skills, but it would certainly raise the city’s game and build momentum “in a world of spin-off benefits”. However, Davis cautioned against relying totally on inward investment. “You have to make it happen,” he said.

So is Hull making it happen? It’s easy to say ‘no’ when news of Comet going into administration brought the toll of local jobs placed under threat to almost 1,000 in just two weeks. However, the mood at HDLive was far from downbeat.

Event organiser Jon Moss, founder of Hull Digital, said the digital sector was a source of opportunity and optimism for the region. His vision was for Hull to become “a hub for digital innovation, enterprise and technology” and HDLive showed what could be achieved.

Moss pointed to plans by developer Wykeland, a HDLive sponsor, for a Centre for Digital Innovation (C4Di) near Hull’s Fruit Market, which would act as a focus and catalyst for digital entrepreneurship. He also highlighted the Digital Estuary website which profiles scores of digital and technology businesses around the Humber and said telecommunications provider KC was rolling out the fastest broadband network in the country, which would act as a magnet for investment, encourage start-ups and enable existing businesses to grow.

Kevin Walsh, Chief Executive of KC, another HDLive sponsor, highlighted the digital sector, which is growing at 4% per cent annually despite the weak UK economy, as a major opportunity for the region.

He said KC’s rollout of its Lightstream super-fast fibre network was providing local businesses with the UK’s best broadband and it had established a £600,000 loans fund, KC Invest, to support digital start-ups. Both were stimulating enterprise and providing a platform for business growth.

Walsh read from a recent press report in which Manchester boasted about having 50 miles of super-fast fibre broadband and said this paled in comparison with Hull: “We’ve laid 300 miles and we’re still going”. He said HDLive was about inspiring ideas that became businesses and told delegates: “We’re betting KC’s future on your big ideas”.

Of course, many of those big ideas will start as small businesses, but a theme of the conference was how the power of digital technology had transformed the rules of business. “Today, the smallest amount of capital can help to create a global brand,” said Walsh.

HDLive certainly provided plenty of food for thought and prompts for action, from a series of inspiring speakers. They included the world’s leading mobile digital analyst, Horace Dediu; Roan Lavery, founder of Free Agent, one of the world’s most popular online accounting apps; and Simon Mottram, who has employed the power of digital platforms and communications to build a successful luxury cycling wear brand. On another grim day for Hull’s economy, it was so heartening and motivating.

As Evan Davis explained so expertly, the economy is changing rapidly, in part because of the seismic impact of technology. Britain is in need of new economic models, he said. It’s clear that the same applies to Hull. As traditional industries and employers, such as Seven Seas, disappear, new sources of employment have to be found.

The silver lining is that Hull is becoming ever more connected – the key requirement for economic prosperity identified by Davis – and has opportunities that are about the future rather than the past.

It is becoming better connected to its neighbouring communities across the Humber, assisted by the creation of the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership, improved cross-estuary local authority and business collaboration, and the slashing of the Humber Bridge tolls.

Hull also has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to replace declining industries of the past with a vital industry of the future, renewable energy, in all in its forms – offshore wind, tidal power, biomass and biofuels. Everything possible is being done locally to seal the Siemens deal, which will be the catalyst for a wave of green energy investments in the Humber.

Now the Government must provide the necessary long-term policy certainty and financial arrangements to encourage global businesses to commit to long-term investments totalling billions of pounds. Hull and the Humber are crying out for ministers to enable a new growth industry for UK Plc to emerge, flourish and create long-term jobs for thousands of local people.

Finally, as HD Live demonstrated, Hull has a vibrant and ambitious community of digital and technology businesses eager to seize opportunities for collaboration and growth, building on rapidly-developing infrastructure and connected networks. They’re certainly responding to Evan Davis’ challenge to make it happen.

Many thanks to Mark Kensett for the brilliant photo of Evan.

Horace Dediu is a leading analyst and advisor on mobile platform strategy and the author of Asymco.com.

Buy your ticket now by clicking here!

He was declared “King of Apple Analysts” by Fortune Magazine, and is frequently quoted by, CNN, The Financial Times, The Economist, and Forbes.

Who Will Find His Talk Useful?

- Anyone interested in mobile technology and its future
- Anyone involved in mobile procurement and strategy
- Business leaders tasked with planning for the future
- Thinkers, consultants and teachers
- Anyone who owns a mobile phone!

Horace has written some brilliant blog posts over the past few years, a recent selection are included below:

How many iPhone 5′s will sell in the opening weekend?

Positioning the Lumia Smartphone

From bad to worse and from good to great

You can follow Horace on Twitter here.

Technology continues to influence increasing areas of business, education and our personal lives. How effectively we integrate and harness that technology will affect how successful our organisation is.

Therefore, whether you’re a student, an enthusiast, a business owner, or even a complete technophobe, we’re confident there will be plenty to challenge and equip you with as we face this new and exciting era of technology.

Buy your ticket now by clicking here!

Best wishes,

The HDLive Team

Friends who are avid cyclists seem to acknowledge the social and environmental value of the scheme, but clearly have no desire to form their own relationship with the ubiquitous “Boris bikes”. They bemoan the clunkiness of the rental cycles, the lack of a long-legged cruising gear and the hefty weight and dynamic shortfall. But I feel that this is to miss the point. You see, I don’t keep a bicycle in London as I live far from the city, and I don’t want the responsibility of securing and maintaining one… my journeys are short, mostly I’m keeping within the confines of the “hire zone”, so it works like a charm for me, and is a heap of fun!

If I had my own superlight exotic or utilitarian stripped back single-speed bicycle then I think I’d probably join in with the sniping, and have some jolly good fun picking apart the many failings of the “Boris”. I might allow myself a little sniff of derision as I lugubriously carved my path between breathless and furiously pedaling commuters, their garish “Barclays” livery at odds with my own handcrafted steed. And as I rode I’d too be sharing a comradely knowing nod with the Shoreditch hipster on the fixie. But that’s not me today, I’m the one with the red face, the broad smile and the determination to reach my destination before the magic 30 minutes of free use is exhausted.

Which brings me neatly to my latest fascination, the Asus/Google Nexus 7. This 7” slab has been my constant companion for over a week now, and I’m having a lot of fun with it…

I would be a fool to label the Nexus an “iPad slayer”, or to even grope around for such a hyperbolic claim. The Asus-manufactured Nexus is clearly a less broadly specified machine than the benchmark Apple tablet and I’d be setting the diminutive Google device up for a failure. Since acquiring the little fellow from Carphone Warehouse on the UK launch day I have sought out reviews and have read many articles where the failure of the Nexus 7 is determined according to its failure to surpass the more expensive iPad, principally in those areas where Apple excels; such as super-intuitive user interface, highly-polished and theatrical applications and showboating party-pieces like Garageband. No question about it, the iPad is the daddy and wears its DNA on its sleeve, and I’m not sure that the Nexus is even trying to eat the iPad’s lunch.

The Nexus makes a lot of sense to me, because although I can see that the lack of a rear-facing camera, the decidedly meat-and-potatoes collection of apps offered by the Google Play store and the 16GB storage limit invokes a profound “huh?” from existing iPad owners, there are a lot of folks who either don’t need, don’t want or can’t afford that “full feature” experience. And at under two hundred quid I think that this is where the Nexus delivers in spades.

Pick the device up, it feels solid and reassuring in the hand but it isn’t heavy. The buttons are nicely finished on the side, the rear is coated with a rubberized finish not unlike something employed by Audi in their recent vehicles, where a tactile feel is required and grip is an advantage. This doesn’t feel cheap, but it is inexpensive.

Thumb the top button on the right hand side, just above the physical volume rocker, and the display pops awake with a pleasant lock-screen. Slide your finger down and unlock to the homepage, or slide your finger up and unlock Google Now, accessing local information and stuff that’s important to YOU. It’s simple, it’s intuitive, and with the introduction of Jelly Bean it feels like Google’s Android OS has reached a level of fit and finish that at least matches that of the hardware, and the Nexus has a few neat tricks up its sleeve too!

Navigating around the device is straight-forward and pretty intuitive, although for absolute “no-brainer” levels of simplicity iOS still has Android licked… but is getting there. Navigating around the world is also pretty straight-forward, as although the Nexus lacks cellular data connectivity, requiring WiFi for Internet access, it does boast a GPS radio and the excellent Google turn-by-turn navigation is right there out of the box… now you can’t do that with an iPod touch!

In terms of software and apps, well you’re very well catered for if you want to cover the basics. Chrome is a browsing environment that translates well from the desktop to the tablet, and with Gmail taking care of email duties, the addition of Skype, Spotify, Dropbox and Kindle from the Google Play store and Angry Birds for those downtime moments then my device was pretty much ready for action. And it’s here where I had my “Boris Bike” moment… because although the Nexus isn’t a racing machine, it’s not an exotic hand-crafted frame or a carbon fibre woven shopping basket and it lacks the spokey-dokeys of my old 1970’s Raleigh Chopper, it is a device that will get me there without fuss or expense, without needing to worry or plan too well.

The Nexus 7 has a low entry price, great general competency, provides a neat interface into my favourite cloud-applications and offers a battery life that will see me through the day, (and well into the night, without breaking a sweat or requiring that I nervously scan walls for spare outlets in every room. Yep, I’m looking at YOU iPhone 4S!). Moreover, it doesn’t feel like an orthopaedic shoe, or look like a Soviet-era grey leather blouson. It’s a proper little thing and whether it’s a long-term love, or becomes the device I toss guests and their visiting children, I’m enjoying it very much.

My reaction to this type of ‘journalism’ is fairly scathing. My measured response is that the example in the video is neither a fair test since the unsuspecting suspect was given no guidance at all on what to expect, nor is it exactly a statistical sample. There was not even a baseline of sitting other equally ‘ordinary’ user in front of Windows XP, 7, OS X, Android, iOS etc.

The accusation, of course, is that Windows 8 isn’t intuitive and that it’s different to the previous version. As they say on the other side of the pond “Well, Duh!”.

Of course it’s different – that’s the point, it now includes touch elements and a new interface.

Of course it isn’t intuitive – no man machine interface is.

The first few times I used OS X I had no clue what was going on; it’s completely non-intuitive until you know how it’s supposed to work. Pinch to zoom? Mouse driven interface – how I laughed at people the first time they used one.

These interactions are generally great when you are shown, but have no relation to how things work in the physical world. Even real world devices are learned rather than intuitive – we turn things clockwise (screw drivers, can openers, door handles) because we have been shown and learned, not because it’s obvious.

I love Windows 7, but the first time I used it I had to learn what the subtle changes were compared to Vista, XP, NT, 95, 3.1 and DOS. When I laid my hands on Windows 8 I was initially confused; it’s like every other OS: the paradigms and models of interaction need to be exposed first. But once you understand them the physicality of the interaction is lovely. When I showed Windows 8 to my teenage daughter she had it cracked in about 3 minutes – much faster than I did. Whatever that tells us…

I do have reservations about Windows 8 on the desktop. Obviously the touch elements are largely irrelevant. It’s not clear what role the Metro interface plays as desktop use patterns are different to mobile device ones. Desktop devices are left powered up most of the day, usually with several applications always open. In this case one rarely passes through Metro and the absence of the Windows Start menu is a shock. However if I ignore my Start Button preconditioning (and I remember how heavily that was criticised when it was introduced) and simply treat Metro as a really big and powerful Start Menu then it’s not so bad. I wouldn’t leave it open any more than I would leave the current Start Menu open, but as an application launcher it’s pretty good. I prefer the Windows Key>type approach for combined search and launch, but I’m a power user. I expect the nice big tiles, with colour coding, size, placement and imagers cues, to be easier for ordinary users to look through than the Start Button menu. It’s not that Windows 8 is bad, it seems to be at least as good as Windows 7, but the improvement is not compelling so far.

On a slate the experience is different again. In fact it’s pretty good and when they have more Metro apps I can see me mostly using Metro and only dropping into the standard desktop occasionally for power user stuff. The transition from Metro to Windows is a little jarring, but not as bad as being dumped into a command line. Treat it as a hierarchy:

• Metro – quick, simple, visually appealing, focused on single applications. For ‘process workers’
• Windows Desktop – Powerful, flexible, visually interesting, focused on multitasking. For power users and ‘knowledge workers’
• Command Line/Powershell – Extremely powerful, arcane, visually repulsive, focused on  ‘under the hood’ processes. For ‘propeller heads’

Windows 8 provides an extensible OS – as you need more power you step down through the levels and expose the next level of capability and complexity. But no one forces you down that path if you want to stay simple and focused.

It’s great for home users in this regard. It’s good for power users. Nevertheless I can’t see companies adopting it any time soon.

My whole relationship started pretty badly with KC within a week of moving to Leven. I’d just moved from an incredibly reliable 2Mbps cable connection from Telewest (now Virgin Media) and was now on a 1Mbsp ADSL connection which was already proving unreliable. I then received a flyer through the post stating how KC was providing the fastest internet connection in the country. I promptly replied telling them this was in fact untrue, but I never heard anything back.

Since living in the KC area, I’ve watched other areas of the country improve their connection speeds whilst I’m seemed to be stuck around the 2Mbps connection mark. In the 10 years since I first signed up to my first ISP I’ve gone from 0.5Mbps to 2Mbps. Compared to the rate at which other changes occur within the computer industry this has been very painful. I’m certain many of you share these gripes, but recently things have changed. We’ve all been given some hope. Granted for some of you it’s probably not coming fast enough, but KC have an ageing network they have to upgrade and things like this don’t happen overnight, but the important thing is that the investment is happening.

As part of getting Lightstream I excitedly tweeted quite a bit about it. However I’m still getting asked quite a few questions, so this post hopefully explains things a bit more.

First contact

You probably all saw the first initial press release on Lightstream and checked availability in your area pretty quickly.  I certainly registered my interest.  After that press release my first contact from KC was via a letter stating that engineers would be working in my area and that they may well need access to the connection box on the side of my house.  Over the next few weeks I saw the odd few vans in the area but nothing more.

The excitement builds

After about another month or so I got another letter from KC stating that Lightstream was now available in my area and I should contact them to book an appointment. I did this as soon as humanly possible. I asked the lady on the phone about the best option for me, and I decided to go for the largest bundle. I figured I could always downgrade if it wasn’t proving value for money. For those of you asking about the price of the full bundle, which includes your phone calls etc, it is £48 per month. (It’s actually £38 per month for the first 3 months). This is the price for fibre to the home. For those who have fibre to the kerb there is a slightly reduced price as that can quite reach the 100Mbps, but only get 80Mbps.  It is my understanding that KC are pushing to have fibre to the home as much as possible, as this is better from a maintenance point of view.

The closest appointment I could get was about two weeks after my phone call. I was informed that engineers would be needing access the connection box outside of my house, but I wouldn’t need to be around for that.

One slight thing of note here, even though I registered interest and KC rang me to ask for a mobile number, they never actually called me about getting a Lightstream appointment. In fact I’m not certain how the registered interest data is being used.

So many vans and cables!

About a week and half before my installation the streets in my vicinity seemed to be filled with Vans (some KC and some were clearly contractors for KC). Every time we saw a van it was generally around a manhole and they were pushing cables in, lots of them!

The box of the side of my house was finally accessed around the same time.

The installation

The installation itself was pretty quick, as would be expected as the ground work had already been done.  The engineer drilled a whole into the house, pushed the fibre through, and then connected the optical network unit.  Quick point here, you’ll need two power sockets near by, one for the optical network unit and one for the wireless router.  These are installed as standard by KC, so you don’t need to worry about having the right equipment yourself. For those of you interested, the router installed was a Netgear N300 Gigabit router.

Giving it a whirl

Before leaving, the engineer did a speed test with his PC that was directly wired into the router and he was recording a connection of around 140Mbps.

The only speed tests I’ve run so far have been through a wireless device and I’ve been getting around 70Mbps. Never thought I’d see the day where the wireless aspect of the connection would be the bottleneck!

To give it a proper test, that evening I downloaded a 4.5GB VPC from Microsoft’s servers. It was very quick. Once of the 700MB sections came down in 7 minutes. Whilst doing this download I also decided to stream a 4oD programme. No buffering occurred at all. So there is definitely plenty of bandwidth to play with.

Other things I’ve tested including streaming a HD movie. Again the stream started instantly and I experienced no buffering. Looks like I can finally start to put away some of those old DVD’s that were taking up too much room in my house.

Happy Customer

I always said whoever got fibre to my home first would get my money. So KC did it and I’m a very happy customer. It’s doing exactly what I expect. It’s been stable, although granted I’ve only had it just over two weeks. It’s been fast and I can finally realistically stream content to my TV knowing I’m not going to be frustrated by buffering.

The biggest thing for me, as a business owner, who sometimes works from home, is that I’m getting around 17Mbps upstream. That’s probably a bigger deal than the 100Mbps. Uploading large files are no longer such a time consuming part of the day.

As for the 600GB monthly limit, I’m going to do my best to get close to it, but I suspect I’ll fall some way short.

Fingers crossed the KC Lightstream rollout happens for you all shortly.

It’s all static

One final point. It was asked at the last Hull Digital Developer group if the Fibre packages were static IP addresses or not.  I’ve since found out all the Fibre packages use a static IP address.

A huge thanks must go to Rob Palmer for the amazing work on the site – thanks Rob! Also, I’m very pleased to say that the John Connolly is helping out this year (and making sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes!).

KC Lightstream and the University of Hull have once again stepped up and had no hesitation in being the main partners for the event, so I’d like to personally thank Nick Thompson, Sean Royce and Bill Walker. There are a few more partners and sponsors which I’ll be announcing shortly as well as the speaker line up (and it is looking amazing!).

So, eight months to go, hundreds of tasks to tick off, people to speak to, food to organise (always an important one, as well as the coffee of course!), presentations to collect and much, much more. Thanks again for all the kind tweets and emails and I look forward to putting on another wonderful day for everyone attending.

If we want growth and more jobs we’re just going to have to do it ourselves.

The good news is that there has never been a better time to start a digital business (and if you’re reading this I assume you have some involvement in web site or software application development). Here’s why:

• A digital business isn’t limited by its location. Its just as easy to develop a web site or mobile app in Hull as it is in London or Silicon Valley and customers of digital applications and services are increasingly agnostic to where that product or service is supplied from. Trust me on this one: I regularly talk to our customers in Hong Kong, New York and the City and they just assume I’m in some plush office in London. The fact that I’m actually in a little village in the Yorkshire Wolds is my smug little secret.
• Digital businesses are increasingly cheap to set up. If I wanted to start a web-based business 10 years ago the first thing I’d need to do is buy or rent some hardware and software to run it on. If it was a big idea I’d need millions of pounds to do that and even a small idea would require tens of thousands. Today there are a whole load of ‘cloud platforms’ I can build on that not only dramatically reduce the amount of work I need to do but also cost just a few quid to get started with. Take a look at Heroku.com, Force.com, Google App Engine, EngineYard.com, Google AWS and even WordPress. Or if mobile apps is your thing all you need is a phone and a computer to develop on, Apple, Amazon and the like have solved the problems of distribution for you with little up-front investment required on your part.
• We’re in the middle a huge financial slump. Sounds counter-intuitive but the middle of a downturn is the best time to start a business. If its a good business it will survive and as conditions improve it will come out the other side with a solid financial and customer base to build on. If its not a good business it will fail pretty quickly and that is no bad thing; if its going to fail better to waste as little time and money on it as possible.

So lets suppose you have an idea for a digital business, what next? If you watch Dragons Den you might be fooled into thinking that you need to turn that idea into a three-year business plan with a six-figure valuation and then go tout it around to investors. My advice: don’t bother … at least not yet. Here’s how I would spend that time instead:

• Talk to people who are potential customers about your idea. Ask them whether they would buy your service or product if it existed. If not, ask them why not; if they would, ask them how much they’d pay for it. Listen to them: you’re not just trying to validate your idea, you’re trying to come up with a business that works and it just may be that they have a better idea about that than you.
• Spend as little time and effort as possible in creating something that those potential customers can buy from you. If it solves a problem they really have, they’ll pay for it no matter how rough around the edges it is or what problems it doesn’t solve. We sold our first license within 6 weeks of writing our first line of code; great for our confidence, our bank balance and for keeping us focussed on what actually mattered.
• Sell it to them. As techies we tend not to like the process of asking people for money. But even if you don’t like it, learn to live with it because it doesn’t matter how good or valuable your idea is – if you can’t sell it you don’t have business. Freemium and pay-if-you-like models are fashionable and dodge that awkward question of putting a price on your work but unless you have £10m of VC money to burn, grasp the nettle and demand cash in return for your hard work.
• Listen to and act on feedback. Chances are the idea you start with isn’t going to be the one you end up with and your customers will tell you what they like and what they don’t. If you ask they’ll tell you how they’d like to see the idea develop and if you deliver they’ll become increasingly loyal and increasingly happy to spend their money with you.

People have been bootstrapping business this way for years but recently there has been a lot written about starting up like this. It’s been dubbed ‘Lean Startup’ and there’s a great book on the subject: http://theleanstartup.com/book. I also have a few top tips of my own.

• Don’t do it alone. “Two heads are better than one” is a very old saying but it applies just as much to starting a digital business as anything else. Having a partner to bounce ideas off, share the workload with and to keep you sane when the going gets tough is essential. However the other old saying “Too many cooks …” also applies.
• Don’t be afraid of failure. Most start-ups fail and in the US this is seen as a positive thing: you learn a lot more from failure than you do from success. In the UK we’re a lot less tolerant of failure but that will have to change if this SME revolution is actually to take place. If your idea doesn’t succeed, look at what you’ve learned and try again.
• Understand what you want from the business. One of the things that annoys me most about Dragon’s Den and the like is that they promote the idea that the only measure of a successful business is whether it makes its founder millions of pounds. Actually, a business that creates a job or a few jobs and allows people to do something they enjoy or interests them is a success. Anything else is a bonus. If you want to create a small business that provides for you and your family, good on you; not being a millionaire is not being a failure.
• Be bold. The main thing that holds people back from starting a business is the perceived risk. They have a nice secure job in a solid company or the public sector and throwing that away seems like madness. What’s that you say? ‘Solid’ companies are going bust at the drop of a hat and the public sector is cutting jobs like there’s no tomorrow? There is no such thing as a secure job any more and at least if you start your own business you are master of your own destiny and have all relevant facts available to you.
• Be realistic. Boldness is all well and good, recklessness isn’t. Chances are that idea you had at 3am isn’t going to become the next Facebook or Google so convincing all your family to hand over their life savings for you to gamble on it probably isn’t the best thing you can do. But putting a few hours into fleshing it out and seeing if people will buy it is. If, once you’ve done that, the idea stands up then maybe investing a few more quid into growing and promoting it is a good step. And so on: the more the idea proves itself, the more its worth spending time and money on. But don’t get carried away … just because you managed to sell 1000 copies of your app or get 100 people signed up to your website doesn’t suddenly mean your business is worth £1million and is you should re-mortgaging your house to support it. This is why asking people to pay from the outset is a good idea: you can measure the cost of the risks you take against the value of the revenue you believe they will generate.

If you do all of this, and enjoy a bit of luck and a following wind, you may discover that you have a solid, sustainable business on your hands. If you do, you can choose what to do with it. If you want to just keep things small and manageable then do so. If you want to grow it further then now is a great time to go looking for investment; there’s actually a lot of money available for people who can say “in the face of the current crisis I’ve grown this business from nothing to a solid money-making entity”. In fact given that interest rates are non-existent, the stock market is all over the place, the Eurozone is in meltdown and big business is on one long profit-warnings junket, start-ups that have proven they can get over the first hurdle of actually getting off the ground and generating some income are seen by investors as a relatively safe (or at least no-more-risky) bet at the moment.

Oh, and one more thing: starting a business is a lot of fun. Its bloody hard work and there are times when you may wonder why you bother but being able to make your own decisions, answering to no-one but yourself is a great feeling and there’s a lot of satisfaction in being able to point to the business you’ve built and saying “I did that”.

Image used under Creative Commons – Pesh on flickr.