Wednesday, June 17, 2009

At Investment Forum, York

Today I spent the day at the York Racecourse, where normally horses run around in a big oval, and people win or loose money when betting on them. Is a very big thing here in the UK, and 3 years ago I actually had been at one, as a part of a Leeds Met uni charity event. But today was no horse race, instead it was a race for money. For the money of investors, who had the choice of investing into companies who presented their case in front of a panel. This event was organised by Connect Yorkshire.

Was indeed very interesting: there was a mix of startup companies and established ones, covering a range from the IT sector to traditional shipbuilding. I was mentoring one of those companies, which gave me a nice insight into this process. The presentations of the companies were very interesting, and I hope that some of them will attract investment.

In the afternoon there was a TechTalk organised as a continuation of that event. The Oracle VP of Business Applications gave a keynote about the development of business software. The discussions with the panel and the participants then turned to "cloud computing", which is a hot topic in the IT world since about 2 years. I personally do not quite share the optimism in this technology development which was expressed by almost every speaker: for me the trend towards outsourcing software and data storage creates new dependencies on hubs and communication and is in some ways a step back to the mainframe technology from the 1960s and 70s. But I do agree that in situations where collaboration between users is required, cloud computing can be a very sensible way of enabling this collaboration.

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