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.

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?

In fact the preceding lines are just as prescient:

Picture this, my telephone number

One and one is what I’m telling you

Get a pocket computer

Try to do what you used to do, yeah

This was 1978. The year Epson introduced the TX-80, the first successful dot matrix printer. The year the 5.25-inch floppy disk became an industry standard. Apple (I do believe I have heard of them) introduced Apple DOS 3.1, their first operating system.

It preceded the Intel 8088 CPU (released on June 1, 1979), the first commercial version of SQL (thank you Oracle), the Motorola 6800 8-bit processor (which powered the Mac and my beloved Atari 1040ST) and VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). It was just over a year after the release of the Commodore PET (which I had to program in raw machine code to run heat capacity equations as fast as I needed), the Apple II and  Tandy’s TRS-80 (1.9 kB of programmable memory). DOS and the PC are 3 years in the future.

1977 Commodore announces that the PET (Personal Electronic Transactor)

Yet as I sit here, talking tech with the enthusiasts in Hull Digital, I am struck that in my pocket sits a computer with my telephone number (but regrettably not Debbie Harry’s).  Picture this; it holds a local gallery of my personal photographs, a camera to take more and access to Flickr etc. to browse further millions. All the power and flexibility to do what I used to do and so much more besides… including listening to Parallel Lines whenever I feel the urge.

I seamlessly switch between my pocket computer, my slate computer and my laptop. My content, my knowledge, my entertainment, my friends are accessible from all of them. The tools each contains are unimaginably capable; the capabilities are limited only by our imaginations. And there’s more to come.

Thank you Blondie for your glimpse of the future, so many years ago. Where to from here?

Get a pocket computer, try to do what you used to do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZxVEH1eSOA

http://www.computerhope.com/history/196080.htm

This could be a massive year for the availability of video content online. We have the London 2012 Olympic games, Euro 2012 and the Diamond Jubilee here in the UK, all expected to rely heavily on the Internet for global distribution of highlights and detailed coverage alike. We are starting to enjoy recently launched online services from Netflix, LoveFilm and Sky that deliver video on demand to a hungry audience that has been weaned on the BBC iPlayer and is now heavily armed with iPads, Internet-connected televisions and a wealth of other devices from telephones to gaming consoles that are capable of tapping into this rich new seam of media content.

Yes, 2012 has the potential to be a vintage year for us, the viewing public and the consumers of entertainment content. Never before will we have had access to so much content, so easily and at such speed with so much convenience (especially if you’re in a position to take advantage of connectivity services such as BT Infinity or KC Lightstream). But is it all really so different? Watching Top Gear on my iPad using the BBC iPlayer app is fab, but it’s not really a world removed from the old days of settling down to watch the latest Top Gear on my DVR, or my VCR for that matter!

No, for me the experience that has coloured my year so far, and that has set my personal benchmark for entertainment enjoyment, combines the cinematic scope of the Peter Jackson Lord Of The Rings trilogy with an epic soundtrack and a level of immersion that even the most gargantuan 3D TV couldn’t rival (well, not without also offering me the thrill of travel-sickness and low-light eye-strain). I am of course referring to a video game, Skyrim specifically. Gaming is where it’s at, and with the 2011 release of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 representing the biggest entertainment release ever (a mind-boggling 75 copies a second) we are increasingly looking beyond Hollywood or the TV networks for our free-time kicks.

When we do watch a movie these days, as a family, on the big-screen TV in the lounge then inevitably at least one of us has IMDB primed and ready for those “what was she in?”, and, “where do I know his face from?” questions that have been a part of the viewing experience since the year dot, and with our experiences learned in the worlds of Skyrim, Portal or even Super Mario we now crave interactivity in all of its forms.

And this is why, as we participate more, as we share a collective experience more and as we submit more of our personal information into the giant black hole that is The Internet in order to do so, this is why we need to know that the gatekeepers and custodians are acting honourably. This is why, friends and fellow geeks, we need to remain engaged, alert and informed. SOPA, PIPA and Megaupload might seem like a world away from you and me, but as we transfer our “copies” of Top Gear from one device to another, as we find that innocent-looking little loophole that gets the video on the phone (just like me, with my Monday night Clarkson-fix in my VCR days) we may be inadvertent pirates, and leave ourselves exposed and vulnerable! Scary, eh?

This is the latent value of a tech-community like Hull Digital, this is the User Group (for those of us old enough to remember those) that can be our support infrastructure and our geek buddy. Use it, participate and engage! We will get out what we feed in, and in this age where the bureaucrats are now nipping at our heels our very digital liberty itself may be at stake!

So, it’s arrived. KC Lightstream is here and being totally honest, it looks amazing. How about up to 100Mbps?!

Kevin Walsh, the Chief Executive from KC announced:

Our fibre deployment is the start of something special that local people can feel proud of. At its heart it’s an investment in the future of Hull and East Yorkshire, and, I believe, a catalyst for change that will help to transform the region’s fortunes and improve local lives.

The Government has recognised that superfast broadband will play an important role in the UK’s future economic success; helping to attract new businesses, stimulate the digital sector – a key driver of growth and wealth creation in regional economies – and helping councils and other public sector bodies to deliver services to residents more efficiently.

Kevin is a great ambassador for the region and passionately believes in the potential for the Lightstream service. Having talked to Kevin over the past three years or so, the Lightstream launch has been a firm focus for the company and the planning process has been a long and hard journey, culminating in the official launch today.

The headline figures are pretty amazing – upstream speeds up to 10Mbps and downstream up to 100Mbps. More than enough to satisfy speed freaks across the region. KC have looked at both the consumer and business areas, with various packages available.

For business, the packages start as £25.00 per month and go up to £100 per month, with the speed ramping up and also the usage allowance.

One big question I had was around the difference between the Business service and the Consumer one… from what I gather this download speeds are the same but the services for businesses include bigger usage allowances and faster upload speeds which is fair enough. I’m sure there will be some overlap though…

There is a very thorough FAQ for the new business service here.

Certainly, something like the homeworker option looks terrific and a really good price too. For many of the Hull Digital community who are freelancers, developers and work from home, this kind of speed is going to be very welcome. Upload speeds of 5-10Mbps depending on package will be even more warmly received!

Moving onto the consumer offering, there are a number of different options. Bundles and stand alone packages, with the bundles being the best value. You need to pop in your postcode first of all to see if you will be able to get the Lightstream service in the coming weeks… If you are in the right area, the website shows the packages available. See below:

The 100Mbps package is available for some areas which have FTTH (Fibre To The Home). Some postcodes show the 80Mbps package as this won’t be available and will be FTTC (Fibre To The Curb).

I’ve seen a few comments about the fact that it’s not unlimited download, but anyone who is giving that as a negative, is in my opinion, looking to find something to complain about. A 500 GB monthly allowance is HUGE. I use the web daily. A lot. Now I’m not certain of my data usage, but it’s no way near that. 500GB is very fair.

The big question – who can get Lightstream and when?

The people of the Grovehill area of Beverley will be the first to receive KC’s lightning fast broadband service this year, with customer installations starting in two weeks’ time on Monday 6thFebruary. Other installations in Beverley will include the Grange Way, Lockwood Road, Butt Lane, Old Manor Lawns, Lincoln Way, Poplars Way and Norwood areas.

Further fibre installations in 2012 are planned for the following areas (subject to detailed engineering surveys):

Priory Park business park in Hessle
Barnsley Street, Belmont Street and Buckingham Street off Holderness Road
A number of East Yorkshire villages including Skidby
Flats and apartments in areas including Hull city centre
Kingswood in the north of Hull
Parts of Greatfield estate in east Hull, as well as other areas of east Hull
Victoria Dock
Parts of Sutton-on-Hull
Parts of west Hull around Pickering Park

Overall, I am seriously impressed with Lightstream. They needed to do this, no question, but from the looks of things, we are going to have an amazing service in Hull, and at a very reasonable price. I’ve seen very few negative reactions from people, with the vast majority being very positive. The only thing to have really ticked me off is that I cannot have it yet! Now where’s Kevin’s number…

Main press release can be found here.

FAQ page is here.

The first ever TEDxHull event will be held at the Hull Truck Theatre with the themeBeyond Limits.

Take a look at our amazing speakers who will inspire you, amaze you and take you to places you never imagined.

What is TEDx?
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxHull, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxHull event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

I imagine tickets will go pretty quick for this, so I’d head on over the TEDx Hull site now and grab one!

It’s a little similar to this…

Question: What’s the best camera in the world?

Answer: The one you have with you at the time.

Following on from that…

Question:What’s the best backup in the world?

Answer: The one you use day in and day out.

This is why Apple’s Time Machine works so well. Plug in a hard drive to your Mac and forget about it which is what I’ve been looking into for some websites, both personal and for clients.

VaultPress is something which has been on my radar for while, and I’ve now installed it on here. Verdict? Just what I wanted. The sign up was painless and yes it does cost a small amount per month, but worth it in my opinion. Once you have signed up you get a special key which you use in the plugin to activate the service. The plugin is downloaded in the normal way from the backend of WordPress.

That’s it. It immediately starts backing up the site, tells you what’s happening in real time in the form of a small unobtrusive toolbar, and you can log into your own dashboard to get even more information. It offers one-click database install, and even has a “Concierge Service”:

When you install the VaultPress plugin, it opens a channel for our security and backup specialists to directly protect your critical WordPress sites. Our WordPress experts will help you with initial setup, restoring your files, and any needs in between.

Now I realise that there are plugins which download the WP database and there are plenty of other solutions (free as well). What I wanted was truly hassle free plus have the support of the VaultPress team if something went south. The fact that VaultPress is owned and run by AUTOMATTIC who happen to run a few blogs over at WordPress.com is real peace of mind.

It’s only been running for a few days, but I am really impressed, and judging by the testimonials from people, I am not alone. (Full disclosure, I am not paid to write this post, just a happy customer!).