Today we heard the emergency budget from the new coalition government. Here are the points most pertinent to me as an IT entrepreneur running a high-growth technology company.
Covered areas: Corporation tax, Depreciation & annual investment allowance (AIA), Loans for SMEs, Entrepreneur’s relief and VAT.
A look at the areas of the 2010 budget that are potentially good news for high-tech SMEs, including lending, capital gains tax freeze, investment incentives, education, broadband levy and government contract allocation.
Twitter has been valued at $1bn, but is that really sane? Time to get out my trusty calculator and offer a rather different assessment…
On 10th February I took part in a panel session at the 2009 Intellect Annual Regent Conference “Keeping ahead of changing markets”. The event took place at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in London, was attended by top executives from the high-tech industry and was chaired by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, who I left speechless at one point!
I was recently asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the differences between traditional IT infrastructure outsourcing and “Cloud Computing”. When you get down to it, there are only really three differences between the two, but that does not stop Cloud being a significant threat to the old-guard of IT consultancies.
Twitter recently announced that they would be removing replies to people you do not follow from the timeline. In my view, and that of just about everyone I know and follow, that is highly undesirable and eliminates a large part of what was unique about Twitter. Now it has taken a giant leap back in time to IRC-days.
Last month I had a brief spot on CNBC due to our inclusion in the 2008 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50. It is a two minute spot where I talk about what has driven our rapid growth, and some of the challenges that has brought us. Watch the video here.
There is such a thing as a free lunch, and it is called open sauce software! Er, open source even. Did I forget breakfast again? Anyway! I am constantly surprised that, despite its massive and growing use in many areas, open source software solutions, and the benefits therein, are either unknown or shunned even by [...]
I’m frequently out and about and on trains (usually between Guildford and London), and always try to make good use of the time. The ability to work anywhere is important to me, and I think I might have finally cracked it! Up until recently I had been using a massive Dell Inspiron 9100, which is [...]
Yet again I find myself tweaking our financial business model (essentially just a rather bloated and overly-complex spread sheet) and it reminded me again that dedicated server providers like us are slightly unusual in a business sense. At a really crude level, we buy in hardware, mostly Dell and Sun servers, setup their OS and [...]