Super-connected cities

The UK Government’s CFO (George Osborne, full job title Chancellor of the Exchequer) today announced some interesting proposals around designating ten UK cities as internet broadband mega-cities, which will guarantee 80-100 megabits per second wired connections as well as citywide high speed mobile connectivity. The UK already has £830M set aside in this parliament for broadband improvements, the extra £100M almost rounds the UK up to a neat £1Bn investment in improving internet communications.

Personally, I’d just be grateful to be out of the single digits – my home broadband has actually gotten slower, not faster, in the five or so years I’ve had it – and today it crawls along barely above one megabit like some snail on Mogadon.

I’m not sure if it exists, but I’d love to see a chart showing various countries GDP stats and along with their average national broadband speed – if there isn’t a correlation, I imagine there soon will be.

Update (from Rod)
Gary I couldn’t resist posting my speed test result from my shed in the colonies.

Unfortunately in New Zealand our international connections let us down so Fibre to the Home doesn’t feel any faster than good ADSL+.

(UK people wanting to experience fibre and mountain biking after work we do have jobs available in NZ  http://xero.com/careers)

Hello Scotland

Confession time.

I spent the first ten or so years of my accounting software career in Scotland and relocated to England in 2001. But today I bear a newfound sense of shame at having abandoned the country of my birth. It crystallised uncomfortably last Friday when I stepped off the train to visit a Xero Partner in Edinburgh and calculated that at least ten years had passed since I last set foot in Scotland’s capital city – and at least a two years since I visited Scotland on business.

Ouch.

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Catch my continental drift

In London last week I attended an excellent lecture given by Professor Richard Dawkins, the renowned evolutionary biologist. It seems that regardless of what I’m reading or listening to, I can’t help but eventually transpose its meaning to technology. Even if it makes no sense. And sitting in the grandeur of London’s Royal Albert Hall hearing about Darwinist theories of evolution was much more than I’d usually need to set me off.

So, buckle up…!

About ten years ago I spent a day in a hotel room at London’s Heathrow Airport secretly evaluating a market leading european accounting software product to scope out the viability of bringing it to the UK. That proposed deal died a death principally because the user interface and software design workflows were so alien to my British accounting software brain that I was convinced that it would never be accepted in the UK without a lot of costly UI rework which would have fundamentally broken the application. The odd thing was that the UI of that product was deemed to be the best in class in its home country and had been copied by all its native competitors over time. I didn’t get it.

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Shifts

UPDATE : A couple of days after this post, HP lurched into yet another crisis and fired its CEO, Leo Apotheker, replacing him with former eBay CEO, Meg Whitman. 

I was in Utah last weekend attending a friend’s wedding when by chance I found myself outside the offices of Novell. The onetime biggest network operating system company in the world still trades today but it’s moved on to other areas after conceding the server war to Microsoft. Seeing that old Novell logo on the side of an office building in 2011 felt way out of context in today’s tablet, web and smartphone world and it got me thinking about technology shifts.

Today’s shifts are bigger than ever because technology has crept into so many aspects of our personal and working lives compared with back in Novell’s old glory days in the 80’s and 90’s.

Back in 1990 it took Microsoft six months to shift the first two million licenses of Windows 3 – and that was deemed to be a huge success. In its first six months a hundred million licenses of Windows 7 were sold.

Last month Google reported that it is now activating more than half a million Android devices a day and even this week upon unveiling its first developer preview of Windows 8, Microsoft reported that over half a million copies were downloaded by eager developers in the first 24 hours. These numbers tell a story that while the microprocessor revolution might have began life in an obscure, funky branch of the office automation world – today its influence is felt literally everywhere.

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Disruptive

I was lucky enough to be invited to spend half a day at TechCrunch Disrupt 2011, wandering around the Startup Alley, listening to the Battlefield and selling Xero (all of these startups should be using Xero right?).

TechCrunch Disrupt is a three-day conference and startup competition targeting very early ventures as well as a gathering of industry leaders and innovators, providing deep insights into what’s happening in the industry right now and what’s coming up in the future. The main event at TechCrunch Disrupt is the Disrupt Battlefield, which is essentially a launch competition for early-stage startups – they have to be live for fewer than 3 months, and less than 2 years old. Most of the companies at the Battlefield were actually going live at Disrupt. It’s huge for them – Disrupt competitors get a massive amount of PR just by being on stage. If you’re building a startup and want to launch in the US then TechCrunch Disrupt is the place to do it.

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