ScotlandIS

“Nurturing the green shoots” - how do we fund the start-ups of the future?

Business angels and serial entrepreneurs, guest bloggers Ian Ritchie and Paul Atkinson urge the government to do more to support the growth companies of the future.

In the run up to the Budget there was, as usual, a ‘whole lotta lobbying’ going on.

The British Venture Capital Association (BVCA) believes there is a crisis is investment and wanted the government to channel substantial funds via the larger Venture Capital firms.

On the other hand, the CBI considers it is time to recreate the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (ICFC), founded after the second world war by the major clearing banks and which later turned into the world’s largest Venture Capital firm, 3i. In the last decade 3i has moved out of this market altogether, leaving a significant gap.

These are both valid ideas, and it looks as though the proposed Strategic Investment Fund may go some way to address them but we are more worried about where the small start-up companies will actually come from – the innovative new businesses that will grow ambitious enough to seek the Venture Capital support that is proposed. Who is lobbying for them?

Start-ups, these days, are invariably supported by Business Angels; wealthy individuals who put money and effort into early stage businesses. Trouble is, the Angel market is largely supported by the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), which gives substantial tax breaks to these high-risk investors. Right now, such individuals don’t have many Capital Gains to re-invest, or the resultant tax to shelter, and as trade sales and flotations have dried up, their money  is locked into their existing investments.

Scotland is relatively well served in terms of angel networks and the Scottish Co-Investment Fund and Venture Fund models support this to the tune of 25% + of all angel money being deployed. 

But one of the main issues just now is that what spare angel money there is, is being diverted to investment opportunities that would normally be served by debt provision (that is later stage investment opportunities).  As it happens, Scotland is currently outperforming the rest of the UK in terms of Angel investment - but this is probably not enough in the current environment, where debt is not easily available (no matter what the government states).

However, with the notable exception of a handful of firms like Pentech and ParEquity, Scotland is under-served by early stage VCs (ie those firms that invest £1-5m in early stage businesses and operate in a very hands on way). There are still good sources of VC funding once you get to the £10m level, whereas early stage funding, both the first £200,000, and second round finance up to £5m,  is becoming extremely difficult to raise.

There is a crying need for some more government-supported early stage risk money. It would be so much better to support 50 companies with £200,000 each, than one at £10m. This could be further helped if the banks were to provide a matching debt model aligned with Scottish Enterprise’s offerings.

From a Scottish perspective, any initiatives that support the establishment of early stage VCs would be a good thing e.g. by providing committed capital into their funds (for example using European Investment Fund monies, as is happening in the North East and parts of Central Europe).

A key area that would make a huge difference would be providing additional incentives/support for investor readiness and diligence processes as this is a key tipping point to early stage companies gaining investment support. In our experience many companies that approach us are not really investor ready. Just because the numbers add up, this doesn't mean their market strategy or business model is ready to receive financial support from the capital market. Such schemes could easily be managed by the existing SMART/SPUR teams in Government.

Of course, there are very few of us to lobby for the start-up companies because, by definition, they don’t yet exist, but unless we do something to ensure the formation of a healthy new population of businesses, the Venture Capitalists will later have nothing to invest in, and then where will the "green shoots" be ?

Ian Ritchie, Paul Atkinson

Is the Scottish ICT industry sowing the seeds of its own demise ?

Guest Post by Gerry Docherty, Chair, Conscia Enterprise Systems

You may not have noticed, but we’re currently sowing the seeds of the death of the Scottish ICT industry. Every year, we hasten its rate of decline. Every year, the systemic failures of the Scottish ICT community bring closer its increasingly-inevitable demise.

Hold on – isn’t the ICT industry one of Scotland’s few success stories? Comparatively, it’s faring particularly well in the teeth of the recession. Many of our indigenous companies are recruiting, and reporting growth.  There’s a steady flow of sparky start-ups. All of which is encouraging, but it only masks the insidious threat – that we have allowed the image of our industry to become so poor and so distorted that it threatens the long-term viability of the industry itself, and the economic health of Scotland as a whole.

To be competitive internationally, our key industries (like energy, food&drink, financial services) invest substantially in technology to reduce costs, improve productivity, and trade globally. Almost all of that investment in hardware, communications and packages goes directly to Far East and US-owned corporations. Add in government spending and consumer spending on ICT, and you can see that the Scottish economy already runs an unhealthy balance of payments deficit – certainly more than a billion pounds per annum - simply in order to be a technologically-advanced nation. It’s a high price to pay just to be a part of the global game.

So if Scotland’s economy is to be healthy in future, it needs a vibrant, competitive ICT supply side which can minimise that balance of payments deficit, by providing for more of Scotland’s ICT needs from a local base, and by earning export dollars through selling our technology overseas. That supply side needs high-end capability in innovation, technology, and business management if it is to be truly competitive with the ICT industries in India, China and the USA.

But high-end capability needs talent, and the simple truth is that we are not attracting a sufficiently high quality of individual to the industry, and we haven’t been doing so for some years now. If you have any doubt, let’s look at the facts surrounding the major flow of talent into our industry – our university graduates.

Scotland’s major universities are justifiably lauded as centres of excellence for ICT research and teaching. Their figures clearly demonstrate that they are magnets for the brightest overseas students. And yet, between 2001 and 2006, the numbers of native Scots studying ICT-related courses in Scotland declined by 50%, at a time that the undergraduate population was on the increase to meet government targets. The decline is continuing, anecdotally by as much as 10% per annum.

At the same time, the female representation in ICT-related courses in now comfortably less than 10% in every major university, so we have a gender imbalance looming – never healthy for any industry.

And it’s not as if ICT courses are tough to get in to – entrance qualifications for many ICT-related courses around the country have been relaxed in the hope of attracting more students, without success so far. As any university lecturer will tell you, the consequence of relaxing entry qualifications is that those courses immediately become less attractive to high-achieving native students.

Of course, there will continue to be star Scottish students in every course, but the summary has to be that the Scottish ICT industry’s upcoming talent base is reducing in quantity, reducing in quality, and gender-imbalanced. These aren’t interesting statistics – these are frightening statistics.

If we can’t attract high-achieving talent, we can’t compete internationally. And if we can’t compete internationally, the future for the Scottish ICT industry can only be one of gradual decline. And if the Scottish ICT declines, the wider Scottish economy suffers even more.

But is our image really to blame for this state of affairs?

You bet.

20 years ago, ICT was the place to be if you wanted to change the world. The overwhelming image was of an industry full of excitement, invention and discovery – certainly attractive to high achievers. But, primarily as a result of the hype and disappointment of the dotcom boom-bust, the backlash kicked in with a vengeance. Over the past 10 years, our cultural image as an industry has flipped – the world at large now sees us as geeks, or guys who can’t get girlfriends, or socially-inept pasty-faced youths with their faces in laptops, or the creators and consumers of disturbing shoot-em-up games. It’s all been fuelled by lazy stereotyping in the media, but mud sticks, and it’s going to be hard to shift. Granted, our image may be not as bad as your average banker right now, but it’s deeply unflattering. We might laugh along with the stereotype, and indulge ourselves in some self-deprecation sometimes, but the consequences have been serious.

At school level, the new industry stereotype means that girls simply don’t take up ICT – it’s not at all unusual to find Higher classes of boys only. At University choices time, Mr and Mrs Newton Mearns are not at all keen for little Johnny with his 5As to study for a profession with such a poor image.

Now, insiders like you and I know that the industry isn’t stuffed full of geeks, and that it is still a hotbed of excitement, invention and discovery. For all the reasons outlined above, we owe it to ourselves, and to the economy as a whole, to fight back against the prevailing stereotype, so that we can again attract the highest-achieving talent into the industry.

Work undertaken in the past year by the ICT Forum for Scotland, supported by organisations such as ScotlandIS, has identified this culture change as an essential contribution to improving Scotland’s economic prospects. It’s one of a number of ambitious targets adopted by the Forum, but hopefully it will attract government and media support.

In the meantime, we can all make our contribution at a personal level. Don’t blush when you tell people that you work in ICT. Don’t laugh when they hit you with the geek jokes.

Instead, remind them that their world is built on what you produce. Tell them that your industry has created modern society. Our systems get oil out of the ground, run power stations, keep planes in the sky, support communications and broadcast, underpin retail, provide logistics for transport and distribution, and make business and government more efficient. Our technologies support the disabled, and are powerful weapons for social inclusion. Our industry is the heart of renewable energies, and green car technology. In the future, what we produce will be essential to the revised regulation of the international banking system, and in the fight to combat global warming.

Persuade your children, nephews and nieces that if they want to change the world, then they need to be the creators of technology, not just consumers.

The fight back starts here.

Gerry Docherty is Chair of Conscia Enterprise Systems, and nmp. He also chairs Scottish Enterprise's ICT Markets Industry Advisory Group and is a member of the ICT Forum for Scotland.  He served as inaugural Chair of ScotlandIS and was a board member until 2007.

Time for joined up thinking

Now that President Obama has appointed a CIO, is it time to re-assess the need for a Scotland wide strategy regarding information technology and tap into the £2.8bn  uplift in the economy this could bring ? 

Like the US, the UK and Scotland were early adopters of information technology, assimilating new developments as they came onto the market. Over the last thirty years, use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has grown like topsy, but with little planning - with the result that we have ended up with a bit of a cats cradle. 

So whilst we have an aspiration to be a digitally connected, knowledge based economy, storming up the Arc of Prosperity charts alongside those other genuinely digitally connected, knowledge based economies like Finland, Denmark, and Norway, the reality is that there is no Scotland-wide focus on ICT - and a lack of shared understanding as to its role as a catalyst of productivity improvements, innovation and service delivery.

Emerging economies such as Romania and Egypt have developed formal country-wide ICT strategies, informing national policy from digital interactions with citizens to education, health and business. This provides clarity as to how ICT interacts across a modern economy, enabling school children to access boundless educational resources online, individuals to interact with the workplace, government, friends and family, the health service to ensure seamless delivery of patient services, business to trade efficiently domestically and internationally, and underpinning research and innovation

But this integrated approach is currently missing from Scottish policy development, and as a nation we are therefore losing out on a number of important benefits. All the evidence emphasises that investments in ICT are a major catalyst of productivity improvements, and underpin innovation, and that digital communications and high performance computing enable breakthroughs in world class research. The evidence also highlights that we under exploit our ICT investments, underperforming against economies like the US by about 8 percentage points.  Closing that gap would be worth several billion pounds to the Scottish economy. Just the sort of life line we need at the moment !    

If the Scottish economy is to come out of the current recession in reasonable shape then Scotland needs to be much more productive, and embrace the opportunities ubiquitous ICT provides – with a more coherent approach to increased technology adoption throughout business, the public sector and the wider community

Current examples where change is needed include
Schools : Whilst the western world talks about projects like one lap top per child (OLPC) in Africa, here in Scotland, many schools are lucky to have one laptop per classroom; scarce  funds are being channelled into buying jotters and photocopying school books, and some councils have entered into contracts with their IT suppliers which make connecting up the school population prohibitively expensive – yet the Government is resourcing the development of the ground breaking Glow project, the world's first national intranet for education.  So, on the one hand we’re leading the world in the move to online educational resources, but on the other schools are struggling to provide the resources young people need to access these.  A more holistic approach would see the spend on jotters transferred to electronic notebooks (with a much longer shelf life) and Glow acting as a Scotland wide web-based resource for learning, underpinning delivery of the new curriculum for excellence.

e-government
There are many examples of highly effective use of ICT within the public sector – such as the introduction of online filing of tax returns - but much more could be done to help generate the efficiency savings needed to free up budgets for front-line service delivery. Much greater emphasis on leveraging ICT investments is needed. Shared services can help reduce duplication, and innovative use of technology to support eg the delivery of leading edge health care services could overcoming the challenges created by distance.

E-commerce - The UK is in an exceptional position regarding online business with online sales (B2B and B2C) increasing by 30% last year alone despite the downturn, and a UK market worth some £160bn per annum.  But where is all this business going?  Well, mostly south of the border - so we need to get Scottish businesses online to grab a share of this lucrative marketplace.

Productivity
In tough times business more than ever needs to keep “lean and mean”. ICT has a significant part to play in helping reduce costs and improve productivity across the business, from simple steps such as

• conference calls replacing distant meetings, reducing travel costs and time away from the desk,
• online sales demos, and Web2.0 techniques improving the customer experience and increasing customer loyalty, and repeat sales,

to major  process improvements, supported by ICT, such as those deployed by the airline industry moving to ticketless check in systems, and supply chain management in the retail industries can make a real difference.

But we need first to build a Scotland wide strategy that enables us to get the best out of our collective investments in ICT – to create a co-ordinated approach that engages everyone.

So how do we take this forward ? All ideas gratefully received .....

e-shops on the up!

Good to see the bbc carrying the following story : "The credit crunch might be bad news for high street stores who see fewer people step through their doors but it is proving to be good news for web retailers.

Many hope their green credentials and more secure payment systems will encourage more customers to take their mouse shopping rather than their car.

Chris Russell, Director of eDigital Research said: "Consumers are spending more online, and this surge in traffic means that e-retailers have a massive opportunity to capitalise on the increased attention they are experiencing.

We actually have a lower carbon footprint per pound of sales than walking to a supermarket yourself
Jason Gissing, founder of Ocado

"If they don't, then they will be missing out on a chance to build customer loyalty and repeat business, something no organisation wants to do in economic times such as these."

Retailers are already beginning to plan stock and quantity levels for next Christmas, suggests research by eDigital. In 2008, 60% of people turned to the web when sourcing " The full story is here.

Is Scotland missing out ??

Throughout 2008 the IMRG-Capgemini index tracked online sales, reporting phenomenal month on month increases.  Even as the economy hurtled into recession through the autumn, the rate of growth continued.  Whilst online shopping at Christmas was not immune from the economic downturn,   Amazon, play.com  and other online companies reported bumper sales, and in general trade was larger, later and longer than in 2007 according to the latest research by IMRG, eDigital Research and Secure Trading. 

"The underlying message that runs through these results is continuing consumer confidence in the online channel.... We expect to see this continue with the online retail channel at the forefront of aggressive sales activity during 2009." comments Chris Russell, Director at eDigitalResearch.

This week the British Retail Consortium figures for the year to December 2008 showed that non food, non store sales rose by 30%, year on year.  So while the high street struggled, online sales grew, and this doesn't include all the business to business (B2B) online sales.  ONS calculates that online sales in the UK are now worth £160bn per annum - almost twice the GDP of Scotland.

Unique Position
The UK is currently in a unique position as the online capital of Europe, with a higher spend per capita than in the US, more online sales than anywhere else in Europe, and increasingly savvy consumers.  Improved security, excellent fulfilment, better broadband access and all manner of comparison sites are making us all more comfortable purchasing online. Businesses now regularly source supplies online, from stationery to overalls, coffee to travel tickets.

Over the last ten years companies like Asos, Bravissimo and Boden have become household names across the UK, with the overwhelming majority of their sales coming from the web. In Scotland the travel and tourism sectors have been early adopters with companies like Barrhead Travel,  Globespan and Canvas Holidays increasingly reliant on their  web business.  New specialist suppliers such as Toolstop and Rooms you Love, are breaking into the market and building business at a tremendous rate.  So its not that Scotland isn't tapping in to this new channel,  but ...

The Opportunity
And the ‘but’ is we only have a very small share of overall UK figures.  Minimally  5% - but probably nearer to 10% - of all UK online sales should be secured by Scottish businesses, but look at the top 50 eshops and there's not one Scottish company amongst them.  Sure, the top 50 does include companies like Tesco and Amazon UK - but the rest is made up of household UK names, not multinationals.  Scotland is missing out !

So in this hugely difficult trading environment here is something we can do collectively to help Scottish companies to build new business. We should look to grab a bigger share of this lucrative online market. A whole host of small businesses across Scotland from food and drink to tourist businesses could take advantage of this.

Scotland benefits from highly professional web development and digital marketing companies with the skills to help companies get properly online and a growing fulfilment sector with the expertise to make sure that goods arrive on time in good condition.  New packaging materials enable the freshest and most perishable of goods, such as fish and meat, to be delivered safely. 

Left unchecked, Scottish businesses will not only continue to miss out on opportunities to sell their goods more widely, but will come under increasing pressure from on-line competitors who are able to fulfil local needs without having a geographic presence in Scotland.

The Benefits
Beyond the fact that this is a significantly important and growing channel to market, online stores or eshops have a very fast return on investment if done properly. They are relatively inexpensive to establish, don't require major investment in property, and enable you to access not just your local market but the whole of the UK and beyond (although truly international sales may need country specific customisation).

ebusiness of this type will transform your business and you will need to invest in upskilling staff over time, as you grow your sales.  Fast reliable fulfilment is a pre-requisite so you need good reliable fulfilment/delivery partners.  You also need an experienced web development supplier, with good digital marketing skills, and you’ll need to create a responsive mind set amongst your team so that your website is always up to date, you are tracking competitors etc .  But this becomes second nature,  as you get more experienced at trading in this way.

By the time Scotland comes out of the recession, online trading will be even more common.  Let's take this time to help Scottish business protect market share by getting seriously online and positioned to be ahead of the wave when the economy improves.

 

Heathrow - A new approach or same old, same old ?

So the business community is supporting calls for a third runway at Heathrow ? Not from where I’m sitting in the software and ICT industry they aren’t.  If one thing is clear, when the economy comes out of this recession it will be significantly different, and if we are really looking to build a sustainable economy for the future we need new ways of doing business.

So more of the same is not what we need – a third runway at Heathrow sounds like profligacy in today’s environment, based on more business travel not less, fuelling the chimera of cheap flights.

Do we really need more business travel ? Possibly, but more than anything we need smart travel – travel when its really needed, and an increasing questioning of travel for travel’s sake. The alternatives are increasingly compelling – conference calling, video conferencing, sharing of documents, presentations and plans via collaborative tools are coming of age and are a serious alternative, and provide a vastly more sustainable model, saving time, costs and the environment.

Its interesting to note that many larger technology companies are now aiming to strip out significant elements of their travel budgets by asking the question – do I really need to be there ? and increasingly the answer is no.

Don’t get me wrong of course there are times when you do need to be there in person, to eyeball the customer or colleague, read the body language, and cement relationships but always ? every time you talk, with people you know well ? surely not.

For technology companies you could argue that they should indeed be walking the walk – after all their business is all about communications and many already use video conferencing solutions. But some of these are very expensive and only in the reach of large companies. However there is now a wide range of options from stringing together applications at the budget end such as Skype, Google docs and laptop video cameras, to more sophisticated solutions such as Webex and Sharepoint through to the full blown top of the market teleconferencing solutions, with lots of hosted conference calling facilities in between.  You can automatically record the call, have the call moderated if you want, and share documents, depending on the service level you want.   Increasingly these are in the reach of everyone, and the more we all use them the more the cost of  these tools should reduce.

And what’s in it for you ? Well firstly look at the time you save. A meeting in London takes all day from Scotland and if you’re on the red eye considerably more than a working day – an hour’s conference call takes – well an hour.  And money – an open ticket to London, even a budget flight ticket and all the extras or an hour’s phone call ?  Even if you are hosting the service there’s no contest.  And finally carbon offset ? minimal.

So let’s use the downturn to start using the tools of the future, and look at building new models for the way we do business. Let’s think hard before we inflict another runway on the people of west London and Berkshire, before we open the door to more environmental damage and seriously question the thinking that says “I need to be there”.

Top Ten Trends to watch for 2009

What do you reckon  the key trends will be in 2009 ? Here's my take :

Improving Productivity and Flexibility

The quest for cost reduction, improved productivity and business flexibility will drive demand for

• More distributed working
  2009 will see increasing growth in the use of collaborative working tools (particularly amongst sme’s) eg vastly improved video conferencing at all levels, VoIP, and the move to more web based solutions.  This also lets businesses tick the “green” box.
• Open Source
  Notionally enabling both lower tco and flexibility, interest in open source is likely to continue to grow.
  
• Partnerships and alliances – as people accept they shouldn’t do it all.   May also provide access to partners’ sales channel at reduced cost.
  

Working closer with customers to meet their needs

• Growth of online sales
  Underneath all the doom and gloom of the High Street this is the real success of 2008, and even with a reduction in growth rates online still looks like the place to be in 2009.  These websites need specialist web/digital marketing skills, and niche solutions such as peak demand management and competitor tracking tools.
• Helping clients get closer to their customers. 
  Blogs, wikis and social networking  are increasingly being used in mainstream business, and offer a variety of ways of “improving the customer experience”, whether that’s the internal or external customer.
• Data Management/Mining
  A number of drivers :
  Need for improved management information/analytics.
  Need for easier access to corporate knowledge.
  Growth of “smarter” personalisation – as you get closer to the customer they’ll demand more savvy communications.
• Software as a Service
  Much hyped will 2009 be the year for SaaS ?As everyone seeks to contain costs and only pay for what they use, SaaS may  become much more acceptable, particularly where vendors make it an easy purchase.
  

Mobility

• Notebooks
  2008 has seen the explosive growth of the iPhone and look alikes and suddenly everyone “gets it” about the advantage of everything on one ultra portable, location aware device.  These devices are still too small to do a lot of detailed work and this is likely to further fuel the growth of notebooks – light, sufficiently powerful for “on the move” use  - see Acer and Asus, HP and Dell all doing business in this market.
  
  
• Mobile Apps
  There is huge potential for more mobile applications – see growth of iphone apps, mobile gaming. Location based services – for the same reasons – the “show me “ opportunity of the smart phone, a new generation of games

 

Regulation/Compliance

• An inevitable reaction to the credit crunch will be new regulation for the Financial Services sector. After Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II,  some intelligent thinking is needed to really make a difference.

Preparing for $170 oil prices

The news tonight is that oil has hit $140 dollars a barrel. People in the know in the transport world are forecasting that we are getting very close to the point when we'll all think very hard before getting the car out to go to work; that public transport will face increasing demand, and there'll be a significant increase in working from home or from a more local office. 
My immediate thought is how do we prepare our small business to meet this challenge in terms of the travel issues, both from an environmental angle and because higher fuel costs are the equivalent of a reduction in earnings for staff who drive to work.  Can we use ICT to help the process ?

So how do we reduce our need to travel ? At ScotlandIS, getting to the office means jumping into the car for all of us, but we're already using a number of technology solutions to allow us to work from home (mostly)  a couple of days a week.

A combination of broadband, wireless networks, email, skype, and google docs let us work pretty seamlessly from home. Of course, at first we were all a bit unsure whether this would work.  If you couldn't see your colleagues, were they really working? Were you working ? Or just sloping about in your pyjamas, over a leisurely breakfast, surfing the net for holidays ... actually of course you very quickly find that whilst people might take a bit of time out to hang out, the reality is that people do put the time in, and the work definitely get done. 

To date we have used some relatively Heath Robinson systems such as call forwarding for incoming calls to the office, and we do have to be careful we've rationalised versions of documents that have been worked on away from the office.  So  to move seriously to more virtual working and reduce the amount of travelling we do to meetings, events etc we need to take further steps.

More sophisticated telephone systems will let us  transfer calls to wherever we are without the caller being aware of call rerouting.  We are already looking at a number of web based solutions to meet our database and office documentation needs.  We're increasingly using conference calls to replace meetings, but this tends to be for "internal" meetings, such as team discussions, or project work, and for Board meetings.  I have to admit the function I'm not comfortable about "virtualising" is the accounts - but with some thought it could be relatively easily done.

One of the biggest next steps we could take would be to seriously embrace video-conferencing for meetings.  And to encourage people who normally expect to meet in person to try the video conferencing option. 

We run a host of events over the year - and whilst sometimes there is no substitute for meeting people in the flesh, some of these events could be replaced with webinars, and other options such as virtual worlds.

Many of these solutions have already been adopted by large companies, but for small businesses these moves can be quite challenging, in terms not only of the technology but in business culture.  However a number of factors are making this easier.  The technology is much easier to use,  suitable competitively priced software solutions are increasingly available, and new ones come along every day. You do need to look at the security issues,and in particular at how you protect sensitive data, but again there are robust solutions available.

On the business culture front, there is increasing evidence that staff seriously value the increased flexibility these changes allow, and some early indicators of productivity improvements. 

For many small businesses all of the above is possible - it won't work for everyone, but it could make a considerable difference to the quality of our working lives - not to mention being kinder on the wallet ! 

Ecommerce - where next ?

Interesting discussion at yesterday's ScotlandIS networking lunch around the opportunities offered by the new generation of ecommerce, and also the challenges. Apparently last year UK businesses transacted £130 billion in online sales. Some companies have transformed their business models with month on month growth rates of 10% and more. However much of this business is centred in London both in terms of the companies transacting the business and the web developers creating the sites.

Lots of Scottish web businesses build workman-like attractive web sites but most of them are not supporting high volumes of on-line business - so how do we lift our game ?

To power ecommerce successfully requires an exceptional mix of top-end web development skills and digital marketing expertise.  Skills that are in short supply in Scotland.  The question is can we corner a slice of this growing market  for Scotland ? and how do we develop the necessary skill sets ?

Speeding up broadband, and league tables

So London's broadband users can go online at average speeds of 4.5 Mbps, nearly twice those in Wales and one and half times as fast as most users in Scotland.  In a survey for BBC News, Thinkbroadband.com have just analysed speed tests from the last two months in 6,000 locations and found the average speed to be 3.2 megabits per second (Mbps). In Wales the average figure was 2.6Mbps.  Scotland fares slightly better at 2.9 Mbps.  Unsurprisingly towns and cities tend to benefit from faster speeds than rural areas

International broadband league tables
A major report on broadband published last week by  OECD  puts the UK 12th overall with an average of 24 households per 100 connected to broadband. Denmark leads these rankings at 35 households per 100, with Iceland, Norway and Finland (the other Arc of Prosperity countries favoured by the Scottish Government) averaging 30 households per 100. 

Add this to the digital divide between rural and urban areas around broadband speeds as highlighted by Ofcom's report below  with Scotland averaging 2.9Mbs and if we're really going to make Scotland plc digitally competitive we've quite a way to go. 

Speed wise we're still a long way behind the leaders, South Korea where 100Mbs speeds are planned for 2010.  On the plus side the UK has one of the most competitively priced broadband markets in the world lying 5th in the league tables .