Why Silicon Roundabout can’t compete with Ireland tax incentive

Original post by JH

Twitter, Silicon Valley’s micro-blogging website, is to open an international headquarters in Dublin. They have joined other high profile US tech companies including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and eBay.

Last year, The Sunday Telegraph reported that Twitter executives met property agents in London and visited locations in the West End and ‘Silicon Roundabout’.

The IDA (Ireland’s Foreign Investment Development Agency) is trying to make Dublin the social media and online capital of Europe. Google set up it’s international HQ in Dublin in 2004 with 200 members of staff. It is now one of Dublin’s biggest employers with 2,200 people working for it, including developers and sales support staff.

Foreign companies are attracted to Ireland by its 12.5% rate of corporation tax, one of the lowest in Europe. From April 2011, the UK’s corporation tax rate is more than double at 26%.

Even more attractive is ‘transfer pricing’, a tax law which allows large multinationals to legally divert profits out of subsidiary companies and into take havens such as Bermuda, which has no corporate tax rate.

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First direct crowdsourcing effort gains traction

Original post via finextra

 UK bank first direct is asking for customer input on the design of its new debit cards, following a strong response to a new crowdsourcing portal where members of the public can shape products and services before they are officially released

The first direct lab site was launched in August to give visitors the chance to see what the bank is planning and critique it through a comment facility and forum.

The initial plans up for discussion included a Web site re-design, a consultation on the use of QR codes and an early version of a mortgage comparison smartphone app.

Now the bank is asking customers to view a number of design options for its next debit card, showing images of a card featuring a matt black front with sparkle ink backing and logo, and a silver version in sparkle ink.

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FixMyTransport uses crowdsourcing to solve travel problems

Original post by Charles Arthur via The Guardian

A new website with the slogan “Euston, we have a problem” aims to use the power of the crowds using British public transport to notify operators of problems with rail, bus, tube and even ferry services.

FixMyTransport, which launched on Tuesday, aims to “give you the tools to report your public transport problems to the correct operator or authority”, and to post them online so that other people can see where problems are.

And, following representations from transport companies, there will also be another option: to praise them for the quality of the experience.

The project, which is the result of 18 months’ work by a lone developer, Louise Crow, uses the same idea as its older sibling FixMyStreet.com, which lets people contact their local council to report problems with roads such as potholes or fly-tipping and last year had more than 60,000 problems reported.

FixMyTransport has been open for limited user testing for some weeks and has already gathered a number of examples from users reporting their problems: one complained that the Woolwich Ferry’s Greenland pier was in poor repair; the council renovated and fixed it soon afterwards.

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UK start-ups kick off the hunt for new talent

Original post by Nick Clark via  The Independent

As the UK’s technology sector struggles to attract computer science graduates, start-ups have clubbed together to offer more than 500 jobs in an attempt to lure talent away from joining the City.

The move comes in the build-up to the second “Silicon Milkroundabout”, the jobs fair for the London tech start-up community, next month. The event was set up by Ian Hogarth, the chief executive and co-founder of music start-up Songkick.

Among the more than 120 companies backing the recruitment drive are Mind Candy, which owns the hugely popular Moshi Monsters brand, music-identifying group Shazam and ticket-exchange company Viagogo.

Mr Hogarth said: “We, along with many of our friends from other start-ups, struggle with the shortage of computer science graduates and experienced software developers.”

He added that many potential candidates were “not aware of tech start-ups as an alternative to the more traditional routes of working for a bank, a consultancy, Google, Facebook or Microsoft”. The event organisers hope to raise awareness of the opportunities among graduates, and attract more start-ups to take part.

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For better or worse? – The UK plans big changes for startup investment

Original post by Mike Butcher via TC

This is a joint guest post from security camera tech entrepreneur / startup finance blogger Nick Pelling and London tech business angel Andrew Lockley. They report on The UK government’s ongoing consultation on to the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), which could well reshape the UK startup investment landscape during 2012.

The UK government has spent most of 2011 whacking the same pro-enterprise rhetorical stake into the ground. It wants to turn the UK into ‘Venture Central’, “the best place in Europe to start, finance and grow a business”; and it claims that it will do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this.

10/10 for ambition, but… what’s the plan? Aside from Tech City grandstanding (a bit shallow, but decent enough PR) and the whole Enterprise Zone fiasco-to-be (more offices? Why?), what the government wants to happen now is for business angels and VCs to start funding lots of high growth startups – fast.

Yet even though the March 2011 Budget increased the income tax relief available to angels via the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) to 30%, that decent-hearted snowball failed to trigger the government’s hoped-for avalanche of UK tech investments (seen any on TechCrunch? Nope, neither have we). As a result, it started to wonder whether the problem might be with EIS itself. So in July, HM Treasury opened up a three month consultation period on radical updates to the EIS, to end on 28^th September 2011.

However, the only ‘stakeholders’ likely to read (let alone submit detailed commentary on) its hefty document’s government-speak are the usual suspects: larger angel networks and trade bodies (e.g. the BBAA and the BVCA). This is not entirely unlike consulting solely with lions on your “Preferred Access to Wildebeest” scheme.

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My gift to UKTI

Original post by Milo Yiannopoulos via Real Business 

Well! What a lot of fuss there was on Twitter this week after I revealed the results of my Freedom of Information request about the cost of UKTI’s Tech City UK website. (To spare my blood pressure, I didn’t put in a request for the total cost of the Tech City project, though readers are of course free to do so.)

The response was extraordinary, with agencies, web designers, startup founders and journalists alike flabbergasted to discover that the total cost of a site clearly not fit for purpose was in excess of £50,000.

Is this the most expensive WordPress theme in history? Is the site running on gold-plated servers? Those were some of the questions circulating yesterday, as eagle-eyed readers identified the agency responsible as Creativeworks, an agency with little experience designing websites.

According to UKTI, £37,000 of taxpayers’ money has been spent on “website development and hosting” for the WordPress-powered site, which has been forensically examined over the past few days. £6,756 has been spent on security and penetration testing (this, at least, is a fairly understandable expense for a Government website, though I am told, given its straightforward architecture, that the price is probably excessive).

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Should London Be More Like Silicon Valley?

Original post by NICK CLAYTON via blogs.wsj

For years there have been official initiatives to try and replicate Silicon Valley. None have really worked. Part of the problem is there was never a plan to make this corner of California the center of world technology, so there is no recipe to recreate it.

More importantly, perhaps, there is a mythology about “the Valley” which bears little semblance to what visitors actually find when they get there. Far from being filled with coffee shops where entrepreneurs with laptops bounce ideas for start-ups off each other, for the most part what you find are office blocks and freeways. Entrepreneurs are probably more likely to hook up through LinkedIn than as the result of a chance encounter in Starbucks.

In fact, for a knowledge economy business there seems no logical reason to be based anywhere in particular. There is no difference between an internet connection in Palo Alto and one in, say, Ibiza.

The reason why technology start-ups head for Silicon Valley is because venture capitalists are lazy, according to Martin Warner. “They want to be physically close to the companies they are funding,” he says.

Mr. Warner is the founder of Tech Entrepreneurs Week which takes place in London from December 5 to 9. He is also a businessman with a foot on both sides of the Atlantic as CEO and co-founder of Talkbiznow.com which is designed to enable small businesses to network and run their processes online.

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