Here’s a great mashup - Live map of London Underground trains. Created with Transport for London’s recently released data feed, it shows why the government must free its data as quickly as possible – TfL have presumably had this information for years and sat on it; one programmer put this together in a few hours.
Effortless computing
technology for growing businesses
Filed under Economy …
Tories don’t understand startups – give us your offices instead
Dave Cameron, in a refreshing bit of public politics, says how he’s going to help startups
any new business that starts up, the first ten people they employ, they don’t have to pay National Insurance [payroll tax]
You can tell Dave hasn’t done any startups… the only ones that reach ten people in the first year (see the small print) are well-funded and not going to notice 13% off their payroll bill.
Why not scrap the quangos and bureaucrats and give their offices to startups? That really would help.
Here’s the video – quote at 1:50 and enjoyably direct throughout:
Spooks do IT better than the Government
Is there any IT project they can manage properly? The SCOPE secret communications project, run by the Cabinet Office, has wasted tens of millions. Meanwhile the spooks have been running a little side-project of their own
“We are doing really quite well on this more modest CLiC programme, which is not being run out of the Cabinet Office, it is being run out of SIS and GCHQ” said the head of MI6
“It is regrettable that this same practical and incremental approach was not adopted in the planning of the SCOPE programme” says the parliamentary oversight committee
‘Practical and incremental approach’ – build it in quick manageable pieces, proving and adapting as you go. That’s how today’s leading software companies do it. Our Government is stuck in the last century with the likes of Microsoft and IBM.
Spooks scramble to replace failed secret messaging system – The Register.
UK manufacturing – decline is only relative
The Register has a bald chart of UK manufacturing showing steady growth (bar recessions) since WWII. Here’s a look at the detail behind it.
First, the overall manufacturing sector – all figures are an index, where 2005 = 100, and using the 2005 value of money (ie taking inflation into account).
Now look at the detailed sectors
which just shows that Textiles and Leather never recovered after 1979. Strip those out -
and we see Metals, Machinery & Other losing ground since 79 – that’s our heavy industry gone – but the others holding their ground or, especially for Chemicals, Plastics and Electricals, increasing. At least until Gordon’s Bust.
Why tax loss-making businesses?
Loss-making companies don’t pay corporation tax but they do pay payroll taxes (national insurance). Why tax loss-making businesses at all? Helping them recover to profitability should be the government’s first priority – who else is going to drag the country back to financial health?
All these taxes end up in the same pot, so it’s illogical and short-sighted, but such is our government.
Laser printers were harmed in the wrecking of our economy
We’ve heard the tales, but now from the reliable Bloomberg
The strain shows, say current and former Brown aides: Among other things, it has inflamed a temper that has always been the subject of gallows humor among those who work with him, they say.
The prime minister, 58, has hurled pens and even a stapler at aides, according to one; he says he once saw the leader of Britain’s 61 million people shove a laser printer off a desk in a rage. Another aide was warned to watch out for “flying Nokias” when he joined Brown’s team.
Conosco’s IT support service has dealt with tricky clients, but this man is world class.
Pretty vacant
What’s missing from this picture?
Bank of England management structure
Which explains it all really.
Davos: what about small businesses?
Robert Scoble in Davos rightly says that startups are the way out of the recession – they’ll be hiring long before large companies.
I’ve posted and badgered politicians for months on this, even emailed Ken Clarke (does he use email?). There’s a quick and easy solution ready to be used: give small companies payment terms of 6 or 12 months on all their taxes. Yes, in the UK you get a long period on corporation tax, but not on the others unless you plead poverty to the Revenue.
The mechanism exists, it will have immediate effect, and won’t cost much. And no-one needs to persuade the bankers to start lending again.
Is anyone in our governments listening to small businesses?
Brown wants us to join his debt addiction
Gordon Brown is trying to save our businesses again – but only if they’re debt junkies like him. His plan is still vague, but it seems to involve the government insuring or guaranteeing corporate debt. Which assumes a company has or needs significant debt…
But the service sector is dominant in the UK. Service companies don’t use much working capital and generally have little or no debt – but are suffering horribly in this recession. (Labour of course are still thinking in Capitalist terms.)
Give small – or all – companies another six months to pay their taxes (VAT, payroll, rates, etc) and you’d give them a huge working capital injection to help them through the bad times. It’s simple to implement, has immediate effect, and shouldn’t cost much in the long run.
As a bonus, it would make startups far easier to finance, boosting the UK’s entrepreneurial sector – which could help us out of the Brown mess.
Google Apps – the future not yet
When everyone yanked their spending after Lehman’s went down, we had another look at Google Apps – $50 a user a year is a huge cost saving on MS Office and you get file sharing, storage and backup/versioning thrown in. Works from any browser so you can ditch Windows too – another big saving.
The problem is… Google Apps/Docs doesn’t work very well. In fact it’s a curate’s egg – the multi-user collaboration in the spreadsheet is brilliantly effective and useful (and unique) but the spreadsheet grinds to a halt on anything larger than a summary profit & loss.
Worse, there’s no folder sharing – so you can’t set up a company’s shared file structure. The file versioning is great, especially in the spreadsheet, but you can’t use Office 07 formats and the Excel exporter eats certain functions.
Most of this is probably being worked on in the Willy Wonka factory, but getting large spreadsheets up to speed might require a browser plug-in – which sounds rather like the desktop software Google is trying to avoid…
Too bad, because it’s the future for many users – freedom from the desktop and power to thin clients.
