Global downturn: In graphics | Business | BBC NEWS | Some of the key facts and figures behind the turmoil in the global financial markets; in easy to consume graphical formats. …..
Home repossessions rise to 40,000 | Business | BBC NEWS | Harrowing news that number of home repossessed in the UK by lenders rose by 54% to 40,000, thankfully this is less than predicted by the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), however they still expect that repossessions this. …..
Shark attacks predict economic bubbles, says boffinThe Register A top Florida fish boffin says that the global recession is causing a massive decrease in the number of shark attacks; “I’ve yet to find a surfer who says he or she won’t go back into the water. …..
Just wanted to jot down a few thoughts on hearing that Northern Rock are to release £14 Billion into the UK economy via lending for mortgages.
Frankly it seems pretty obvious that this isn’t just the UK Governments method for pumping liquidity into the UK housing market, but also demonstrates a frustration with the money used to help ‘prop up’ the Financial Sector. Much of the Government bail-outs were supposed to help restart the financial institutions in question to start lending again, this plainly hasn’t happened. I think everyone, especially the UK Government, is disappointed that the money has been used to shore up the massive debts run up, as well as the short-falls exasperated by the world-wide economic downturn.
Northern Rock was the first of the big financial companies to bite the bullet and need to seek massive Government investment to stay solvent, or be nationalised, whichever you prefer.
What’s phenomenal about this apparent ‘turn of face’ given that up until today they had closed their books to new mortgage lending (in fact they had been aggressively repossessing homes across the UK), is how much the Bank had ‘closed the gap’ between it’s original debt and what it now owes; a massive two-thirds, the original level of debt when it sought Government intervention was £27 Billion and it now stands at £9 Billion.
The Shadow Treasury Minister, Greg Hands, is concerned about the dichotomy between existing Northern Rock customers, facing repossession, with all the new mortgage customers; a very valid point given that the Bank has said that it will be restructured, with new mortgages and existing mortgages managed separately, furthering any gap between the two groups.
Evidently this is not all that there is to this story and the three other questions I think we should be asking right now are:
Given that the number of homes in the UK repossessed by lenders rose last year by 54% to 40,000, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), how much was this number contributed to by Northern Rock?
Given that the new management team at Northern Rock successfully decreased the Banks debt by £18 Billion, how much of this was done via straight forward repossessions and how much by other methods, and if replicable in an appropriate manner, can any of these alternative approaches to repossession be turned into ‘best practices’ which can be shared with the rest of the UK banking community to reduce their levels of debt too?
Given that organisations like the CBI are saying if credit isn’t available soon the recession is going to get a whole lot worse what is the Government going to do to get the other Banks and Financial Institutions lending again as soon as possible?
Steam cashes in on better gaming experience – The Inquirer – The future of distribution is in giving people what they want; immediate access to high quality content. …..
USA CO2 emissions from fossil fuel (2002 data only) : Project Vulcan : US Scientists from Purdue University have created an interactive Google Earth map showing carbon dioxide emissions across the United States, the high-resolution map shows carbon dioxide emissions in metric. …..
“Whose data is it anyway?” Facebook in row over who owns *your* data | Technology | BBC NEWS | With Facebook still yet to find a genuine revenue generating business model, there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable not knowing what Facebook might do to achieve profitability.…..
Glad to see the Monument to the Great Fire of London has been re-opened after spending the last eighteen months being refurbished. And to celebrate here’s a few of the photographs I’ve taken on, from, by, and of, the Monument.
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I’m keen on the Monument seeing as I’m a bit of a nostalgist and it’s just by Sun’s London offices (55 King William St.) and Customer Briefing Centre (CBC, at Regis House, 45 King William St.), with the Fine Line pub artfully arranged betwixt the two (there are plenty of other pubs nearby, it’s just almost a certainty you’ll see someone you know here after work, prior to the inevitable journey home).
A couple of years ago I went through a phase of going up the Monument almost every lunch time I was at our London offices; for a bit of exercise (it’s 311 steps up) and because I enjoyed the view, and that’s when I started to take the photos.
Serendipitously my children were learning about the Great Fire a few months after I’d become interested in the Monument, in fact I think the commemorative certificate I received when I first went up there is still on the wall at their primary school, along with the information booklet and a few pictures.
Obviously the history of the Monument is more than interesting; it was commissioned in 1669, three years after the Great Fire of London of 1666 that it commemorated. And for a great deal of the time it has been in existence it was inscribed with a variety of text blaming the Catholic community for starting the fire (getting caught up in the ascension of William III to the throne), a lie so plainly untrue that Alexander Pope famously wrote “Where London’s column pointing at the skies, Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lies.” (Moral Essays. Epistle iii.).
William the III marks the last successful invasion and occupation of England and Wales, and is often overlooked by many, as, of course, he and his Dutch forces were ‘invited’ to invade by Parliament, but invasion and occupation it was. The bloodshed was predominately kept to Scotland and Ireland, where supporters for James the II were most prevalent; in Scotland because of his links to and descent from the Scottish throne and in Ireland because of his support of Catholicism. Anecdotally I’ve been told by elder members of the Horkan family that a number of our ancestors fought at ‘Battle of the Boyne‘ on the side of James the II, this decisive battle marked the failure of James to regain the throne of England and a crucial turning point in the struggle between Protestant and Catholic communities in Ireland.
The English Parliament, had made it illegal for anyone to be Head of State who was Catholic, in part, as being so would mean that the Head of the Church of England would be subject to the See of Rome, something that could not be tolerated, but predominately because of the mainly Protestant make up of Parliament itself. Coupled with the complex relationship to, and composition of, allies and enemies, some united by and divided by religious alignment, across Western Europe, it led to the situation that saw the invasion take place (in fact many historians see it as being little more than an extension to the fighting across Europe attempting to keep Louise the XIV in check). The law still exists that dictates the religion of the Head of State of England, even though a number of the Royal family have chosen to convert to Catholicism, losing them their place in the ‘order of precedence’ for the throne for all time (unsurprisingly this is often done just before they need to receive their last rights, just in case I suppose).
Thanks to the wonders of tagging here’s a selection of pictures from the monument taken by everyone who hosts their photographs on flickr who’ve used ‘the-monument‘ as a tag (some of these will be mine, flickr doesn’t have complex search and sort around tags yet, that would allow me to exclude my photos from this selection).
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Here’s a whole host of links to Monument themed content; go knock yourselves out:
U2’s new album leaked online – The Inquirer – Popular beat combo, U2’s new album, No Line On The Horizon, has been leaked on the web after someone stuck it on their online music store two weeks early, so I’m sure you’ll be able to get a link to it at the. …..
Checkout YouNoodle, a new service which measures the “buzz” surrounding a company via blogs and media reports along with a variety of factors including website traffic. So far it’s providing coverage of nearly 30,000 start-ups, ranging from biotechnology to gaming software.
I’ve just signed up and I’m checking out some of my favourite start-ups already; it’s very interesting reading.
Press reviews: Henry’s Othello | Entertainment | BBC NEWS | One of the UK’s favourite comedians and Black Countrymen, Lenny Henry, dazzles critics and audiences with his portrayal of Othello in Shakespeare’s play of the same name. …..
Race for ‘God particle’ heats up | Science & Environment | BBC NEWS | Competition is healthy for both Europe and the US, says Professor Lyn Evans, project leader of the European Large Hadron Collider (LHC), though missing out on the Higgs would be “sour. …..
During the recent ‘Entrepreneur Country’ event hosted by Ariadne Capital I took part in a Cloud Computing panel interview session on behalf of Sun Microsystems, I was able to capture some notes after the session and have replicated them here.
The “Does every cloud have a silver lining?” session was hosted by Ric Francis of Ariadne and taking part alongside me were Charles Black, CEO and founder of Nasstar (a highly successful provider of ‘Desktop as a Service’ capabilities), and Kolvin Stone, Corporate Partner at Fox Williams (we were due to be joined by Joe Drumgoole, CEO, CTO and founder of Put Place, who I’d liked to have met, but sadly he couldn’t make it).
This article is a bit of ‘double A side’ with “Sun Microsystems, Cloud Computing and the premier European VC event ‘Entrepreneur Country’” where I describe the event itself. For further background material you may also want to check out my Cloud Computing overview article “Cloud Relationship Model“.
Here are the questions that we were asked:
I’ve divided the responses into roughly three sections; what I said at the time, what I captured from the other panel members, and any thoughts I have now reflecting on the responses we originally gave.
WTH: Yes we have, we have heard a lot of rhetoric in a similar vein for a long time now, promises have been made about similar initiatives in the past without the ability to deliver in a holistic manner. However four major reasons are creating a cadence around ‘Cloud Computing’ which indicate it is coming of age. Those are:
CB: Felt that High Speed Broadband was key to the adoption of Cloud Services and that the lack of further investment in Broadband would inhibit take up.
KS: Re-iterated that maturing technology and convergence meant that the time was right for Cloud Computing.
Now: I see now that when I talk about Cloud Computing, I generally mean application level IaaS and PaaS, i.e. development and engineering platforms, whereas a lot of people are including SaaS into the cut. I’ve had a number of conversations where the person I’m speaking with sees little, if no, distinction between Google App Engine (a PaaS play) and HotMail (a SaaS play). High speed Broadband is important, but, for me, in the context of the critical national infrastructure of the UK and important for the economic viability of the UK. For Charles high speed broadband is critical for Nasstars service because their customers depend on the reliability, level of concurrency, and latency, of the network connectivity provided to access that service.
WTH: Two pressures, one internal and one external, I feel will primarily drive adoption, and that they are both analogous to previous ‘waves’ of innovation:
The progressive and savvy CIOs are beginning to understand these pressures, and some do already, they will be starting to do R&D; around adopting Cloud services and developing their Cloud Compute strategies. Early adopters will be looking to sign up cloud providers as partners to use by the business departments and, where possible, avoiding having to integrate services deployed across multiple dissimilar Cloud providers (with differing stacks and engagement models). Some will looking at providing internal cloud services to avoid many of these problems completely (and to be seen as providing future proofed and strategic capabilities to the business).
More reactionary CIOs will wait until they are forced to adopt the technology; sadly some of them even to the point at which it is too late and they are being driven out of business by the competition (as in the initial phases of the Internet revolution).
I don’t want to give the impression that the more cost conscious CIOs won’t be amongst the group leading the charge to adopt Cloud services, because they are genuinely going to be at the fore front of looking at how to get the best business value to IT spend ratios.
WTH: I think this is very much an “undiscovered country”; I don’t think we’ll know much until we’re there. Legislation appears to me to be reactionary, and often set after the event.
What we know about doing business on the Internet will still remain as good experience when it comes to adopting Cloud models. Additional areas that the new Cloud adopter may want to consider are: privacy and privileged user access (who has access to your data? and what can they do with it?), regulatory compliance, data location, data segregation (and ‘sharding’), Recovery, Investigative Support, Long term viability (is your Cloud provider about to be bought out by your competitor?), competing with your Cloud provider (does part of your business compete with part of your Cloud providers?), Technical Implementation (what security technology do they have ‘baked’ in?), and Service levels (is the service available when you need or are legally responsible to be?).
Around privacy I have some specific concerns, for instance, laws governing the wholesale manipulation of large scale amounts of personally referable data is only really being worked out now. While certain companies promise to “do no evil” who is privy to how the information they are able to gather is used? And some of the largest Social Network sites in the World have still yet to find revenue generating business models, there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable not knowing what they might do to achieve profitability and what implication this will have legally. Similarly laws around copyright, distribution and ‘ownership’ are being put under significant pressure by the way people and organisations now have access to information and share data across the Internet.
CB and KS: Both of the other panellists believed that the Cloud model would make compliance easier; centralization of data away from a localized pc hard drive model will help the business manage compliance (please note both responses where much longer and complete than this, but I didn’t capture them as well as I’d have liked).
WTH:There’s two parts to this; the evolution of Cloud Computing and the evolution of the Web itself.
Firstly around Cloud Computing there’s a great deal going on at the moment, including conversations around standardisation and integration of Cloud services. Early drivers include organisations like the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) who are looking at interoperability across Cloud providers. For the most part I think were going to see standardisation around the virtual stack and platform offered to the developers much sooner than any actual standardisation between interfaces and meta-interfaces. That’s the advantage of the virtualised and vendor neutral stack; it’s inclusive, well known by the developer community and a ‘level playing field’. Increasingly we’re going to see services and capabilities built straight over the Cloud, with fewer and fewer infrastructure build-outs, certainly amongst the start-up community.
Unfortunately Cloud Computing hasn’t quite hit the peak of it’s hype curve yet and is certainly “No Silver Bullet” to peoples problems; however it is a fresh approach at how they can procure Service, Platform and Infrastructure capability and, to an extent, allowing them to reduce overall CapEx and offset some of that CapEx for OpEx.
Secondly around the way in which the Web is changing; I think that there is going to be two major technology revisions and one major technology improvement. One of the these technology revisions is that of combinative approaches to deliver functionality; real “Mash up”s that deliver genuine functional benefit, effectively the complex web stack. You could see this as a continuation of the Read Write Web and Web 2.0 but the multi-service enabled applications being greater than the sum of their parts, and although we’ve seen a little of this in Google Maps, etc., I think that it still due to deliver unexpected functionality. The next major technology revision is that of the semantic web, or rather more tagging, tagged data and micro-formats, will lead to an ever increasingly linked and related web, one the pundits are calling web 3.0; whilst this is interesting and will of course generate a variety of useful, innovative and supporting technologies it will actually act as a leap pad to another significant technology plateau. The major technology improvement is that of ubiquitous ‘agent based computing’; once the Internet is much more easily transposable, due to the semantic web and the wholesale tagging of unstructured data across it these agents will be able to ‘scuttle off’ and work for you in the background. At the moment search engines and their ilk use spiders and web crawlers to gather data, but imagine that Google’s web crawlers worked for you, coupled with improvements in analytic processing, doing tasks related to your workload and preceding it. For instance imagine the time when your ‘agent’ will access your diary, interpret your meeting and work needs, go off and collate data, distilling it down as research and presenting it for you in the appropriate format prior to your schedule; this will be the next great lead forwards enabled by computing and networking technology.
These are the major items, of course there’s loads more to come; from the evolution of Social Networks, the new approaches to “Web Science”, the coming explosion of analytic processing across the Web and Enterprise, how Enterprises will evolve due to the new architectural models driven from the web, how computing and computer science will combine with other disciplines and scientific branches to create exponential benefit, and, if it comes to it, the ‘Singularity’, a technology epiphany implied by a long-term pattern of accelerating change.
Audience: What do you think of Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy?
WTH: Personally I think it’s an interesting, and yet difficult (for MS) play. There are two major issues that MS have to address; firstly public perception of MS as a Monopoly and someone they don’t feel comfortable sharing information with, never mind their corporate data on the ‘Cloud’, and secondly the apparent complexity of the Azure architecture. The early slides I saw showed a four layer architecture, but with each layer having four layers, so sixteen layers before you even look at how you deploy your services – ouch. I can see why they’ve done some of this, basically to make it easy to adopt existing .Net Client-Server applications in Azure and to provide a whole suit of capabilities, but this assumes that the majority of early Azure developers are going to be ones with existing applications and that Cloud developers don’t care about vendor neutral stacks, something I believe they do.
Audience: What is Sun’s Cloud Computing strategy?
WTH: Frankly I’m not party to the conversations around setting our Cloud Strategy, although I have been giving feedback from the field organisation and influencing where possible; my remit is the UK and Ireland and how Sun addresses that marketplace. However I think that our Cloud strategy will map to and exceed customer expectations. Customers in the UK are asking for three things when it comes to Cloud Computing and I expect Sun to have a way to engage at those three points of opportunity. They are:
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At Sun UK we recently supported and attended “Entrepreneur Country” a major European Start Up and VC event.
Acting as a rallying cry to the entrepreneurial, VC and Start-up communities, the event affirmed that now is the best time to start your own company and that entrepreneurs were key to the recovery of the economy from the recession. Almost 300 of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, including Caffè Nero founder Gerry Ford and Betfair co-founder and Chairman Edward Wray, shared stories of success at the event. Roman Stanek, a founder of NetBeans, and now founder and CEO of Good Data Corp and successful serial entrepreneur, said “tough times create tough companies”, whilst Gerry Ford, urged us to “be restless and relentless” in the pursuit of success. The seminars were held at the Institute of Directors (IoD) in central London and coincided with the official launch of Entrepreneur Country online.
Other highlights of the day included keynotes from Sir Paul Judge (from the Enterprise Education Trust on ‘Risk and Enterprise’), Glen Manchester (Founder and CEO of Thunderhead), Ed Wray (Co-Founder and Chairman of Betfair), Niall Harbison (Founder and Chef at iFoods.tv), and David Courtier-Dutton and Paul Brown (from SliceThePie).
The event was organised and hosted by Ariadne Capital, an entrepreneurial investment and advisory firm. Ariadne was set up by current CEO Julie Meyer; probably best known as being a founder of First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs (which many credit for igniting the Internet generation across Europe).
The agenda also included two panel sessions discussing Online Gaming (and virtual worlds) and Cloud Computing (and, to an extent, it’s impact on the entrepreneurial, VC and Start-up communities and how they might best capitalise on it). The later of which I had been asked to take part in of behalf of Sun. Cannily I kept mental notes and have been able to write the session up as a separate blog post “Cloud Computing panel interview with Sun Microsystems at ‘Entrepreneur Country’“.
To whet your appetite for the article above the questions we were asked included:
I really enjoyed the day and had a productive time networking and meeting people, all of whom shared with me their vision, enthusiasm and wonderful business ideas. I met people from MovieStorm, TechnologyDen, NewVoiceMedia, Broadcom UK, SaaSPlex, Spinvox, Teamer, and a quite a few others too. Some of these companies had been funded by Enterprise Ireland and it was very good to see them there as well as representatives from the UK’s Technology Strategy Board.
Accompanying the days themes of Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurism were handouts, books and other resources, and I picked up a copy of Jeremy Coller’s new book “The Lives, Loves and Deaths of Splendidly Unreasonable Inventors“.
On the night we went to an associated networking dinner where I fell deep into conversation with a number of people including Paul Flanagan, Executive for Digital Entertainment at Ariadne, Declan Cunningham, Director at Ariadne, and Tom Salmon, founder of AfterShow and Traffic Digital.
The event was supported by the Sun UK Internet Business team, led by Paul Tarantino, with additional support from Simon Culmer, Director of Sales from the UK executive management team, as well as myself. Here’s the official write up, a variety of photos taken and also a selection of video recordings.
Thanks to Rebecca Temple, Manager of Portfolio Marketing at Ariadne, here’s a variety of some of the other coverage of the day, much of it focused on the business messages we heard:
TPB Tracker Geo Statistics – as in ‘The Pirate Bay’ – A helpful, handy, real-time, mash-up of Google maps and ‘The Pirate Bay’ (TPB) web logs, showing number of users on the site by country. …..
Happy Birthday to Black Sabbath’s first album ‘Black Sabbath‘, released on this day 39 years ago; yes that’s right on Friday the 13th, the wags.
Favourite song? ‘The Wizard’ the harmonica at the start is ace. Yes, this post is very short, and, no, it doesn’t contain any technology content.
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