The rise in East of England exports outside the EU was well over twice the national average, with particular highlights being a 33 per cent rise in exports to Nigeria, 20 per cent to Hong Kong, 12 per cent to India, 11 per cent to Australia and nine per cent to China.

The US remains our most important single overseas sales destination with  exports growing by over a quarter year on year. This fantastic result is underpinned by growing links between some of the region’s top innovators and their American counterparts and the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and US looks set to reinforce these  existing strong  bonds.

The agreement has been described as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to free up trade between the world’s two largest trading blocs that together account for one third of global trade. A successful deal would offer as much as £10 billion to the British economy, £100 billion to EU gross domestic product (GDP) and £80 billion to US GDP.

So those are the numbers, and the story is pretty clear.  But although the big export wins are undoubtedly in markets further afield, I wouldn't write off our near neighbours just yet. With an economy bigger than the US and Russia combined and 22 European countries in the top 50 for ease of doing business, the EU is still the place to start for many of the new exporters we want to encourage.

The region sold £3.3bn-worth of goods to Germany last year and I learned the other day that the Czech republic is among a number of profitable European export markets for A Touch of Ginger, one of our local export - and manufacturing - success stories.  The headlines about European economies might make gloomy reading but there are still plenty of East of England companies doing good business in the EU.

I met Jane Moran from A Touch of Ginger at a business conference organised by the ICAEW at Duxford on 13 June, when we shared a speaking slot.  Also on the agenda for that event was a great talk about a research project on Formula One Racing from Professor Mark Jenkins of Cranfield School of Management.

Professor Jenkins offered some very valuable lessons on innovation, process integration and organisational culture, and in terms of carrying out the research - well, it must have been a tough assignment but someone had to do it!

So, to sum up, there's a lot to be pleased about in the latest trade figures but we need to keep our foot on the gas. Starting with the NERVE conference next week our events programme at UKTI will include sessions on how to enhance your web based business through Search Engine Optimisation, events on Australia, South Africa and India, a trade mission to Russia and workshops to help non-exporting companies decide whether they are ready to start selling overseas.

Our trade minister Lord Green, will visit the region and we're planning an even  bigger and better Export Week  for November. To keep up to date with all that is happening , sign up for our newsletter at info@uktieast.org.uk  –  and  watch this space!

It happened to refer to Tech City. Produced by GfK, one of the world’s leading research companies, the report’s credibility could scarcely be challenged.

Almost 80 per cent of Tech City companies said a lack of skilled workers was restricting their growth; a third believed a lack of access to capital was hindering their business. A similar number said that as a consequence their company was missing significant business opportunities to expand. Over 40 per cent said they were finding it hard to hold onto the staff they did recruit. “Our research shows Tech City is at a tipping point,” said GfK.

Steve Leith, who heads up Grant Thornton's early stage technology team in Tech City, said: “Whilst there is an increasing flow of angel capital, we see a growing gap for businesses requiring investment of £500,000 to £2 million. This is in stark contrast to the development of the funding community in the US where the cycle of tech entrepreneurs reinvesting in startups is fully developed and the VC community has a greater appetite for risk.

“UK Government supported initiatives such as the MMC London Fund and GrowthAccelerator may prove part of the solution, but more will be needed to fulfil Tech City's potential, and avoid a loss of talent and investment opportunities to the Silicon Valley dollar.”

Tech City’s business leaders have mixed feelings about the effectiveness of the UK Government’s support so far and believe there has been more PR than action from Government. This ‘hype’ is seen as negative - pushing up rents and salaries and attracting global firms that have poached the best talent.

No-one is being smug here because this is a problem for UK plc. As we reported this week, Cambridge is losing hundreds of research and technology jobs to India within one plc alone – AVEVA – because the company says its expansion plans are being stunted by infrastructure problems that are just not being addressed, let alone tackled.

Serial entrepreneurs Mike Lynch and David Cleevely have each recently called for Tech City and Cambridge to work together to optimise their respective but synergistic strengths. That would be a start.

More than at any time in its history as a trading nation the UK needs to forge one powerhouse supercluster that presents a dynamic and united face to the world. One that would be taken seriously by the megapowers of the business world – not a fragmented collection of clusters doing their own thing and diluting the force of the collective.

Until the debate is taken out of a geographic context and becomes an issue central to national economic strategy then all of the UK’s technology clusters could eventually become candidates for the sick ward.

Despite the excellence of the Cambridge cluster’s best companies, there are still far too few of them. It’s the global reputation of Cambridge University for perennially producing world-class science and technology – as well as producing generations of brilliant students and future employees – that is keeping Cambridge in the game globally. In the long term that could prove a dangerous over-reliance.

That would work eventually, but it is slow and expensive and it is debatable how valuable it is as a goal.

Imagine if you want to make an aeroplane from scratch. You could study birds and make extremely detailed reverse engineered mathematical models of the structures of individual feathers and try to model all the stresses and airflows as the wing beats.

Eventually you could make a good model of a wing and by also looking at the electrics, feedbacks, nerves and muscles, you could eventually make some sort of control system that would essentially replicate a bird wing.

Then you could scale it all up, look for other materials, experiment a bit and eventually you might make a big bird replica. Alternatively, you could look briefly at a bird and note the basic aerodynamics of a wing, note the use of lightweight and strong materials, then let it go. You don’t need any more from nature than that.

The rest can be done by looking at ways of propelling the surface to create sufficient airflow and lift using the aerofoil, and ways to achieve the strength needed. The bird provides some basic insight, but it simply isn’t necessary to copy all a bird’s proprietary technology to fly.

Back to Markram. If the real goal is to reverse engineer the actual human brain and make a detailed replica or model of it, then fair enough. I wish him and his team, and their distributed helpers and affiliates every success with that.

If the project goes well, and we can find insights to help with the hundreds of brain disorders and improve medicine, great. A few billion euros will have been well spent, especially given the waste of more billions of euros elsewhere on futile and counter-productive projects. Lots of people criticise his goal, and some of their arguments are nonsensical. It is a good project and for what it’s worth, I support it.

My only real objection is that a simulation of the brain will not think well and at best will be an extremely inefficient thinking machine. So if a goal is to achieve thought or intelligence the project as described is barking up the wrong tree. If that isn’t a goal, so what? It still has the other uses.

A simulation can do many things. It can be used to follow through the consequences of an input if the system is sufficiently well modelled. A sufficiently detailed and accurate brain simulation could predict the impacts of a drug or behaviours resulting from certain mental processes.

It could follow through the impacts and chain of events resulting from an electrical impulse  this finding out what the eventual result of that will be. It can therefore very inefficiently predict the result of thinking, but by using extremely high speed computation, it could in principle work out the end result of some thoughts.

But it needs enormous detail and algorithmic precision to do that. I doubt it is achievable simply because of the volume of calculation needed.  Thinking properly requires consciousness and therefore emulation. A conscious circuit has to be built, not just modelled.

Consciousness is not the same as thinking. A simulation of the brain would not be conscious, even if it can work out the result of thoughts. It is the difference between printed music and played music. One is data, one is an experience. A simulation of all the processes going on inside a head will not generate any consciousness, only data. It could think, but not feel or experience.

Having made that important distinction, I still think that Markram’s approach will prove useful. It will generate many useful insights into the workings of the brain, and many of the processes nature uses to solve certain engineering problems. These insights and techniques can be used as input into other projects.

Biomimetics is already proven as a useful tool in solving big problems. Looking at how the brain works will give us hints how to make a truly conscious, properly thinking machine. But just as with birds and airbuses, we can take ideas and inspiration from nature and then do it far better.

No bird can carry the weight or fly as high or as fast as an aeroplane. No proper plane uses feathers or flaps its wings.

http://www.futurizon.com/

@timeguide

Close to 80 per cent of the population is now online and whether they spend their time shopping, gaming, social networking or simply surfing, it has become a social and business phenomenon – some might say obsession. According to a recent survey, 1 in 4 people spend more time online than they do sleeping.

The implications for advertising and PR are obvious. Some retailers complain that the online marketplace is taking over the high street one, and when you look at last Christmas’s sales – traditionally the high point of the year for the retail trade – you can see why.

UK internet users made 84 million visits to retail websites on Christmas Eve and 107 million visits on Christmas Day – up 86 per cent and 71 per cent, respectively, compared to the same days the previous year, according to Experian Information Service.

Boxing Day topped the lot with consumers making 113 million visits to retailers’ websites – up 17 per cent on the previous year; presumably not all were made simply to check how much their presents had cost!

The lesson for businesses in all sectors is that digital marketing and PR should now be indispensable weapons in their promotional armoury.

But where to begin? The chief cornerstone of online marketing always used to be a website, the virtual shop window or reception desk of a business. It is the prospective customers’ first port of call and has taken the place of the sales brochure or corporate literature traditionally used to set out a company’s wares or establish its credibility.

This is not to suggest, incidentally, that online promotion is a wholesale replacement for traditional (or proven) promotional activity. On the contrary, companies now exercise 360 degree campaigns which use a whole range of promotional tools from direct mail to SEO. A complementary mix is the key to developing, and maintaining, a strong brand presence, as opposed to simply focusing on product.

The internet may be the world’s biggest marketplace, but the infinity of cyberspace is a big place to get lost in, so a website alone is just a beginning. There is the question of driving traffic to your website, and there are a variety of ways to achieve this, both on and off line. One way is even through traditional media – such as in the newspaper you’re reading – a strategy that even on-line media moguls like Google and EBay are not above using.

And then of course there is social media, with all its ramifications – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. The ‘social media, is it the new PR or advertising?’ argument is still raging but I think this misses the point to a great extent.

I would suggest that it mainly falls into the advertising category because of its measurability, but why try and force it into any of our preconceived definitions of the promotional mix? The real questions you should be asking are about goals and what will the definition of a successful campaign outcome be – are we looking to create a buzz, or to make sales? For instance, the success of PR used to be measured mainly in column inches achieved. To that can now be added likes, tweets, posted comments and much, much more.

There’s also promotion via search engines. A good example of this was a recent campaign run for Snickers who wanted to target office workers, but who knew that viral and social content could well be blocked by IT departments. They worked with Google to produce an ad every time a user misspelt a word in a search (which needless to say is quite common). The search result read: ‘Yu cant spel properlie wen hungrie – Grab yourself a Snikkers’. They targeted 500,000 people in three days, they got them in two! A humorous engagement, brilliantly executed!

If one cornerstone of online marketing is a website, the other is a blog – embedded or linked to the former – which can form the heart of a company’s social media activities. A blog can be your business, but with a lighter, more personal touch.

If there is one lesson that marketers and PR’s have been forced to learn from the digital revolution it is this: the key importance of informality, of befriending and chatting with customers, involving them and inviting their opinions, and showing a human face rather than a corporate front.

Of course the best sales people have always known and practiced this, but now the technology is making it increasingly evident and giving the competitive edge to customer-centric businesses.

There are technical strategies that will hone that edge – modern CSS built websites with management systems, the preprogramming of some of your social media and so on – but the key to a successful digital marketing campaign is in deciding from the outset what it is that you want to achieve, what tools you will need to enable you to do it, a timeframe and, dare I say it, ‘a budget’! However you decide to tackle it one thing’s for certain – non-engagement is no longer an option.

http://www.simpsonscreative.co.uk/

Twitter: @rick_simpsons @SimpsonsCreate

In the context of the internet, this requires new software techniques to enable unstructured internet-based data to be organised and analysed within a structured environment.

The trend is fuelled by numerous factors, including the staggering volume and velocity of internet-based data, the desire to track and predict customer behaviour, and the greater prominence of the cloud computing model to deliver IT services. Perhaps inevitably, questions arise about how and whether to protect personal data (including lifestyle preferences, website behaviour, posts, images and so on) of internet users.

For one thing, the preference of the private individual for small-memory handheld devices, combined with greater reliance on (and acceptance of) cloud-based storage solutions, means that much less information is stored and controlled locally by users. As this model of personal computing continues to develop, might it become increasingly difficult for one to keep track of personal data, or of how it is being used or indeed monetised by others?

Also, the way in which personal data is viewed seems to be shifting. It is true that many individuals who use the internet remain unaware of how their personal data and web presence is being utilised, or perhaps simply place an implicit level of trust in their service providers to handle their data appropriately. However, it also appears that many users of social media show little concern for the protection of their personal data, and indeed are entirely happy to share or even relinquish it. They understand the bargain proposed by social network providers, search engines and the like, and they agree to it.

Where does this leave the law? Like many areas where technology, intellectual property and the internet overlap, the position is not a particularly cohesive one. In part, this is an inescapable consequence of the pace of change. In this respect, the Data Protection Act has been supplemented in piecemeal fashion by numerous privacy and e-commerce laws, in order to address specific concerns, but nonetheless we are left with a rather fragmented picture.

Reforms in data protection law are on their way but they won’t come into effect in the UK until 2015 or 2016, in all likelihood. The proposals significantly increase the sanctions against non-compliant businesses. They also contain some major changes in how responsibility is allocated: for instance, explicit consent will be required for all data processing activities. Plus, there is a proposed “right to be forgotten”, under which an individual can require a business to erase all personal data it holds relating to that individual. How such a right would be effectively implemented and enforced remains to be seen.

The proposals therefore strengthen what is at the core of data protection law: that personal data is private, and ‘belongs’ to somebody, and as such must be respected and treated carefully. However, will the next generation of social media users see this as such a priority? More significantly, there seems to be a growing divergence between what the law mandates (namely, to protect and restrict personal data) and the models adopted by industry (namely, to create, profile and monetise personal data).

The growth in ‘big data’ analytics might well bring this into sharp focus, and one wonders whether the reforms will be fit for purpose by the time they are enacted.

• For further information, please contact Hamish Corner on 01223 465465 or email hamish.corner@penningtons.co.uk

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