techmesh: Hull report

This was the first time techmesh had held an event in Hull and what an exceptional turnout it was!

techmesh: Hull was organised with support from Jon Moss at Hull Digital and Hull University Business School.

The evening proceeded with refreshments, food and plenty of networking as the other delegates arrived. Guests where then encouraged to take a seat in the presentation room where I (Gary Rowbotham, techmesh Programme Manger) introduced techmesh and the many benefits of becoming a member. The agenda then moved to Nick Riley, Director of the Logistics Technology Group, who gave a synopsis surrounding Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implementation in logistics and freight handling. An interesting insight from the presentation was that a RFID transmitter can be equivalent in size to a grain of rice!

Mike Harlington, a techmesh sponsor, introduced telecoms company MediaSat3, who are striving to provide an alternative telecoms provider in the Hull area. Mike discussed how MediaSat3 are negotiating the use of new telecom satellites which would allow remote speeds of 100mb download and 10mb upload. Once MediaSat3 services are fully implemented they will be capable of moving an impressive 1 million terabytes of data every second.

The presentations were rounded off with an introduction from Jon Moss at Hull Digital, who discussed how he hopes to expand the digital community in Hull. Jon encouraged the audience to attend the highly anticipated event ‘Hull Digital Question Time’ on the 26th May at the Donald Roy Theatre in Hull. The event is an opportunity for delegates to join the conversation and hear about current topics that matter in digital, technology and the web.

After the presentation session, guests were invited to look at the Hull University Business School technology showcase. The showcase was exceptional and in some cases breathtaking; the enormous 3D TV that greeted visitors as they entered the room was amazing!

The techmesh team would like to thank everyone that helped to make techmesh: Hull a success, including: Jon Moss at Hull Digital, Hull University Business School for the venue and Nick Riley for introducing the audience to future technologies in RFID.

Join us at the next techmesh event on 25th May - focussed towards Cloud Computing and using Software-as-a-Service. The event will feature keynote speakers from Microsoft and Liquid Accounts. For further information visit http://techmesh.org/events/view/55

Academic Commercialisation: The Third Way?

In an earlier post, Fail Fast Fail Early, focused on healthcare companies optimising their pipeline development, I asked whether there was a better way of commercialising medicines. Well GSK and Cambridge University have come with an interesting alternative development model using “academic incubators” to optimise the early clinical development of new medicines.

Cambridge will dedicate a team of academic experts to develop drugs with therapeutic potential, as well as bearing some financial risk for which they'd be compensated if the programme is a success. GSK will provide operational support, access to its in-house clinical research and imaging facilities, and background preclinical data on the drug. The agreement is fully aligned with one of the key recommendations of the Cooksey Review of UK Health Research Funding that consideration should be given to alternative drug development models, such as Public Private Partnerships, to optimise effective collaboration between industry and academic sectors in the development of effective new medicines.

Whether this is "ground-breaking approach" or just a sensible way of outsourcing development of low priority orphan drugs is open to debate. It does however establish a joined up pipeline from academic research towards commercialisation that may university inspired projects lack - despite their efforts to bolt on commercialisation activities. Also the fact that the projects are GSK sponsored gives a commercial focus to the activity from the outset that will undoubtedly benefit the eventual business outcomes. As we have seen with the Enterprise Fellowship projects backed by Yorkshire Forward, having some commercialisation DNA and focus at an early stage is invaluable.

The Best Of Both Worlds

So Facebook has an open API that allows you to add-in your application and tap into the millions of users on the platform. What's so innovative about that? Microsoft opened up their Office applications in the mid-nineties to allow add-in components to be seamlessly integrated into the GUI to complement and extend their platform in niche areas. This was good for the vertical market developers who didn't have to try to duplicate this base functionality and good for Microsoft who could get even better entrenched into these markets.

Similar business models have come to the deep and murky world of relational databases with the ability to create new object types in Oracle via 'data cartridges' that appeared on the scene in the early noughties. So my crystal ball didn't have much difficulty in predicting this development as the Web matures - but as they say hindsight is 20:20 vision. The good thing about this iteration is unlike those that went before the loosely coupled nature of the Web means that these component-based solutions are unlikely to interact in negative ways, but equally you may be able to see the joins, but the Web has taught us its benefits outway these disadvantages.

I look forward to seeing more innovative mashups and better support for component-based Web development rather than everyone reinventing the wheel and having to develop the basic backbones of a Web application. However, the hoards of web development companies that are out there may not quite see it that way! The benefit is that horizontal platforms providing generic capabilities can be extended to do more vertical market things, so the consumer gets the best of both worlds.

New Year Predictions

OK here goes:

Connect Yorkshire helps even more companies get investment ready and pitch for investment through its flagship investment forums, investment challenges and business plan competitions.

The rest of the Northern Way embrace the Connect model and it is rolled out in the North East and North West.

An online community of best practise, participation and support develops that brings together entrepreneurs with the resources to they need to help them succeed that extends beyond our traditional geographic boundary and the Web 2.0 community.

Yorkshire Forward announces a region-wide investment fund as a follow on for Partnership Investment Finance and the South Yorkshire Investment Fund that incorporates a much needed seedcorn element.

Component-based, service-oriented applications finally take centre stage with Web Mashups and loosely-coupled applications 'Web 2.0' increasingly replacing the monoliths of the past.

Connect launches its 'Springboard' initiative to help early stage propositions get their business plans into shape.

I finally access and use a Web site in a meaningful way through my mobile phone.

One can but dream...Happy New Year!