When I read Milo Yiannopoulos’s article ‘Sun Tech Mission 2009: it’s (still) grim up North’, in yesterdays Telegraph, I was at first shocked, then outraged and finally somewhat dismayed.

How could the Telegraph publish, such a damning report, and how could a serious journalist get it so wrong? Is this really how people in the south feel about live in the North?

That was last night. This morning I woke, relieved that I resisted last night’s urge to post and instant rebuttal (that would have put me in the same league as Milo, and I credit myself with more self respect than that).

Perhaps, what got to me most about the article, wasn’t that it was poorly written, with little evidence of substance or research, but that the author seemed to revel in his own ignorance, and that he wrote with an arrogance that implied this was not only his opinion but that of the whole London Community.

I truly believe it would be just as foolish for VC’s in London, not to also look and regional talent, as it would anyone working in the regions, not to be prepared to regularly travel London.

For those people brought up in our national capitals, its not uncommon (or terribly unreasonable) to think that you’re are the centre of the universe. Much of the money, talent and conferences do gravitate towards that centre, but Washington is the capital of the US, yet Silicon Valley may be the heart of its Tech industries, were also currently seeing great start ups coming from cities like San Francisco.

Its important to realise that what made Silicon Valley a success, was a combination of factors: Start-ups that made money in Silicon Valley, reinvested that money, talent and knowledge back into tech in the Silicon Valley area, allowing  a growing number of companies to prosper. They also had the space and resources to grow (The North doesn’t have some of the power issues of the South, and we are seeing increasing numbers of call and data centres as a result) and that start-ups worked with first rate educational institutions (something that we in the North are now getting very good at, Digital city in Middlesbrough being a great example – Google started with 4 people in a university basement).

Admittedly I am not a VC or an Entrepreneur, so maybe i should really leave this debate to those more qualified that i to debate, but like many in our region i am passionate about the North East. I live and work, in the North East and for the past 5 years I have been involved with  organizations like Codeworks, Middlesbrough Uni’s Digital City, Newcastle Uni’s Culture Lab, groups like Supermonday’s, Thursday Fizz, The IT Director’s Forum, TuttleNorth East,Digital Marketing Debates and events like Thinking Digital, Game Horizon, the AV Festival, Barcamp,Science week,Tynetwestival and Cloud Camp, and to that end i consider myself very lucky.

Its important not to forget, that many people live in this area out of choice. Yes, there is often a cost to that choice, in that we have to travel a little more often, and that sometimes means days away from home, but its its about choosing a livework balance that works. If success is involve living in a pokey flat in the mile end road, and spending hours a day commuting, then I’m not sure I would be willing to make that sacrifice.

My work involves working with leading contemporary artists from around the world on sometimes very complex and very technical projects and i have yet to find a project that i couldn’t find a solution to locally, (often at a fraction of the price of solution from outside the region). Another lesson I’ve learnt is you get back what you put in, and that while I have very limited budgets, that talking to the local tech communities and getting involved with universities and local start ups is a great way to stay in touch with what is going on. In the last six months alone I have seen some fantastic start ups and projects. I would hate to think, that we could loose them to London because of the sort of scare mongering and poor advice given by Milo Yiannopoulos.

I have been somewhat heartened to see comment after comment, come in as the day went on, supporting the North, including declarations from Manoj Ranaweera (organiser of Sun Tech Mission 2009), Herb Kim (organiser of Thinking digital), Nick Bell of Quick.tv and comments from VC’s and entrepreneurs both from London and the North.

I can but conclude that either Milo Yiannopoulo and the Telegraph made a huge lapse in Judgement in printing such a potentially damaging article (not only to the North, but all the Regions and London itself), or that I (and many of the people i hold in high regard) are missing some hidden genius. I like the regions am an optimist and would like to end on a positive note by reiterating Manoj Ranaweera’s sentiments and saying that this is a great opportunity to come together and show what the North (and other regions has to offer) and I would encourage those London based companies and VC to get on the train and see this for themselves…you never know you may not only be surprised but also inspired!

Because of the bank holiday, this months ‘Super Monday’ was somewhat strangely on a Tuesday, and to confuse us still further, it was in a different part of the university. …but regarless of the day  it lived up to its regular high standards.

We were lucky enough to be invited to the ‘Culture lab’. Headed up by Atau Tanaka, this a unique research facility with academics and practitioners working alongside artists, creatives and scientists developing innovative research and digital tools. I’m not altogether unfamiliar, with this part of the university having been amongst the first people to use its resources (I was involved in the recording of Candice Brietz “working Class hero” project for BALTIC in 2006), and I’ve made several visits since.
The normal teas and coffee’s part of the evening took place in ‘space2’on the ground floor, where we had an opportunity to meet some of the culture labs residents and see some of the projects they are working on, from gadget enabled ‘ambient kitchens’, design to aid people with a wide range of medical conditions, to internet enabled jewellery, and multi touch control surfaces. There were also an opportunities to take a closer look at some of the latest technologies like the fantastic 3d printer.
Much of the research itself looks at the interactions between users and technologies, and in someways the people I spoke to weren’t that bothered by the actual technology itself. Many of the projects in fact used surprisingly simple technologies, but used it in incredibly clever ways. I looked at two projects in particular that were very interesting to my work at BALTIC.

The first dealt with the problem of interpretation material. One of the problems that galleries generally face is, visitors often have different levels of art knowledge, and artists don’t generally like having too much information on display next to the artwork – as this can be very distracting. So it was interesting to see how both rfid and scan able labels could be used with mobile phones, image readers and kiosks to provide information points.
The second interesting project involved a homemade ‘surface’ like touch screen. It would seem that a major problem with multi touch technologies is keeping track of multiple users, the solution involved using multiple cameras to track not only the touches, but also users between touches. Some of the possible applications were quite interesting, allowing visitors to collaborate in new , innovative and creative ways.
The second part of the evening took place upstairs in one of the lecture theatres, with a more formal talk from Patrick Oliver and Dr Jayne Wallace on some of the bigger projects taking place in culture lab.
The final speaker of the evening was Andrew Waite, Andrew introduced us to the concept of ‘honeypotting’. As an IT manager, network security is really interesting to me, so I for one found Andrews talk fascinating. Andrew uses Nepenthes, a low interaction honeypot which emulates several known vulnerabilities to security, allowing him to monitor and detect attacks on his systems. The ultimate goal is to capture live malware samples, in the safety of the honeypot, which he can then be examined to get an insight into what they are doing and how they work.

Newcastle University’s Beehive building played host to the first UK Cloudcamp outside on London on Tuesday 24th March. Officially an unconference, entry was free and anyone that wanted to speak had an opportunity to take a slot, it also followed the great tradition of Barcamps with free beer and pizza and plenty of time for networking. A little more structured than a typical unconference, starting with a series of lightening talks and moving on to a panel discussion.

After a brief introduction Justin Souter kicked off the lighting talks with ‘an introduction to cloud computing’, Steve Tron of Knowledge IT talked about ‘public and fedorated clouds’, Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre talked about ‘whether there is a need for private clouds’, Chris Purrington from CohesiveFT covered ‘taking control in the cloud’, Arvid Fossen of Aserver went on to talk about ‘ready to use clouds’,
Ross Cooney, founder of EmailCloud did a spot titled ‘bootstrap and transition, cloud computing to get your business started’, Alex Heneveld, CTO of CloudSoft covered ‘cloud routemaster’, while Steve Caughey, CEO of Arjuna took ‘how to obtain Quality Of Service from a cloud?’ leaving Duncan Malcolm of EveryCity talking ‘cloud1 versus cloud2′ and Stewart Townsend from SUN rounded off the lightening talks.

The lightening talks were followed by a lively panel discussion chaired by Ross Cooney, where the 80 or so delegates got to pick the brains of the panel. The discussion covering everything from standards and data portability, to how do you tell your IT team that their jobs no longer exist and questions like how do businesses cope with a utility billing approach to cost and what happens if your provider goes bust.

All in all, it was very successful evening and I know I had a great time and learned a lot. While I found all of it interesting Ross’s talk was one of the most compelling. Ross’s company, Rozmic is relatively small, a handful of employees providing services for email and messaging, in a traditional model they would have a large building housing enough servers to cope with maximum usage (117 servers), a team of engineers, a huge internet pipe and power facilities. This would have had to be purchased and set up, and the maintenace and upkeep would be quite a task. With cloud computing he’s paying per server, per hour and automatically turning it off and on as required, so during the night when demand is low he’s only paying for 1 or 2 machines, during the day as demand goes up, he maintains performance by turning on more servers. He’s only paying for what he uses and paying as he goes, so cash flow is managable and as the servers are virtual maintenace is minimal, giving his engineers time to streamline the code and make it even more efficient. What this means is, he can afford to use the technology he wants to use and can grow his business, without large risky upfront investments.

Having thought about it since i’m still not sure that I fully understand the implications of moving your IT into the cloud. Here are a few of the things that occured to me:

If you are deploying all your data to the cloud, and spinning up server instances all over the place, how does this affect the networking model? i.e. are you still using active directory to control your users, computers, sites and services? And where does anti virus and maleware fit in? Then, there is the whole area of licencing, if your creating hundreds of new servers on the fly how are they being licensed does it still use the per seat or per server approach, even if your not using microsoft servers and services surely there’ll be licenses for anti virus, back up etc.

When we talk about “the cloud” are we talking about a single cloud or many fluffy little clouds, ie would i use amazon to store my files and cloudmail to provide my email and someone else to supply my sql and someone else for my cms and if this is the case how do i back all of this up, do i have lots and lots of little back up all over this cloud.

And the final thing to leave you with is do we have enough people with the skills to do all this? As an IT manager of some years, i have a very good understanding of core It, backup, disaster recovery, and a little knowledge of Api’s and web development,but i’m not entirely sure that most IT staff would have all of the skills required to do all of the tricky bits to make this seemless to their end users, and i don’t think many sme’s could afford to get an engineer in every time it needs a tweek.

Resources: Introduction to cloud computing by Souter Consulting, Justin’s blog post (with transcripts of the questions and answers), Ross’s blog post, David coxon’s photos.