The pursuit of Appiness
IS Scotland stuck in the digital doldrums?
Yes, according to a manifesto from IT trade group ScotlandIS which last month suggested that the nation risked being left “in the dark ages” by failures in strategic thinking, provision of skills and the creation of an attractive investment environment.
Entitled Enabling A Digital Scotland, the report quantified the potential economic gains in added GDP (£12 billion) and new businesses (1000) of embracing digital technology over the next five years, and painted a “very worrying” picture “in a world where other small, traditionally inventive nations like Israel and Norway are leading the pace”.
“Many other comparable countries and indeed other parts of the UK are leapfrogging us,” ScotlandIS chairman David Cairns warns. “In turn, these tech-savvy countries are enjoying greater economic benefits, including productivity gains, improved competitiveness and a greater ability to export.”
In a land of proliferating “strategy documents”, one little-noticed report was last week countered by another, the Scottish Government’s own Scotland’s Digital Future, praising what Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop called our “world-class strengths... in digital media industries, higher and further education facilities and its telecare [health] services”.
But the Scottish Government’s report rather made ScotlandIS’s point with its feeble top-line ambition of “making next-generation broadband available to all by 2020”, a meaninglessly long timeframe in the current era.
In a world where the evolution and adoption of new technologies is getting exponentially faster, basic failure to expedite the superfast connectivity of lochs and glens is one of the economic missed tricks of the post-devolution period. Instead, the Scottish Government’s response to a plethora of well-evidenced reports (SCDI, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Reform Scotland), has been, predictably, to set up more committees to “drive forward and implement” various abstract aims.
Thankfully, the civil service nation of digital pedestrians is not the one inhabited by Carolyn Burnett and Jonathan Heap of NN4M (No Need For Mirrors), a Larbert-based firm that makes the smartphone web shopping App for Debenhams and River Island. Nor does it constrain Graeme West, a 20-something “geek lawyer”, whose Glasgow company Spot Specific has developed a software programme to help creative and commercial enterprises develop their own Apps. Likewise, Dunoon-based Argyll, whose managing director Tom Morton has translated life-saving security systems for vulnerable people and lone workers into digital form compatible with mobile device technology. Or Edinburgh’s Ciqual, which provides software and services for mobile network operators keen to retain customers affected by connectivity snarl-ups.
All of these companies, among the 20 which attended last month’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, form a new wave of Scots technology firms, that are allowing a new landscape of customers and businesses to connect via the devices in their palms, pockets and briefcases.
In mobile telecoms software, suddenly made consumer-friendly via the world of “Apps”, Scots firms are achieving breakthroughs where commercial and economic promise is as easy to grasp conceptually as your BlackBerry Curve or iPad 2 is to grasp in the palm of your hand.
The traffic around the Scottish stand at the Barcelona MWC was a good indication of how the development of smart-phone technology has thrown open the doors of a global market to creative Scots companies. Five years of experience has taught host Scottish Development International how business is done at this overwhelming event. It was attended by 50,000 delegates per day and dominated by the no-expense-spared stands of titanic brands and “platforms”, colonised by big-hitting nations such as France and China. This year, the buzz was all about delivering video to mobile devices. The saltire-branded stand showing a looped video of an animated USB cable rearing up over the surface of Loch Ness is host to a rotating cluster of Scots companies, and murmured conversations with visiting emissaries from global technology empires such as Orange or Facebook, attracted by the quality of ideas.
Mobile technology moves so fast that antennae for the next transformative technology are exceptionally sensitive, and prior reputation or expensive branding means nothing – Microsoft’s marriage to Nokia for example, trumpeted in Barcelona, was widely interpreted as the desperate act of two has-beens, overtaken by more nimble players,
The mobile revolution has short-circuited traditional patterns of market access, with a levelling effect that is potentially very exciting for Scotland, with its strong science, digital media and creative arts base and well-developed internal and external networks. Packaged and presented in the right way, a great application based on proprietary software developed in Dunoon is on an equal status with one from San Diego.
According to Alisdair Gunn of Interactive Scotland, the arm of Scottish Enterprise that supports the digital media sector, Scotland’s presence at the MWC has achieved critical mass of sorts, with half as many companies as previously seeking exposure, and the increased traffic in meetings on and around the stand telling its own story. Interactive Scotland supports Scottish firms with market intelligence and advice on product and service development. As he tells it, the explosion in the mobile devices market is a fortuitous happening for Scotland, as it has, in an exceptionally short time, provided an entire new route to a vast global market – undreamt of until recently – for Scots “content providers” in new and old specialised fields such as mapping or payment technology, or ecommerce platform, games artwork and music. A world of new opportunities is open at the touch of the consumer’s thumb.
Interactive Scotland links the various sub-sectors that exist in Scotland’s digital media world. Along with the international networks of SDI, supported by high profile players from the Globalscot network, Interactive Scotland is a useful sounding board, networking hub and reference source. Alongside other grass roots, and publicly supported networking groups such as TechMeetUp, MobileMonday (“MoMo”) Edinburgh, Interactive Tayside and Starter for 6. It helps SMEs needing assistance to identify competitors and markets, access sectoral fund specific to the digital media sector, and to target development partners and end customers, large or small.
Barely noticed outside the trade press, new technologies are allowing a new “ecosystem” of firms to emerge at various points in the value chain, from deeply geeky business-to-business firms such as network testing firm Calnex Solutions of Linlithgow to firms like NN4M who live by their ability to delight the eyeballs of high street clothes shoppers. Like e-commerce itself, which is being adapted to fit these increasingly ubiquitous and crowded hand-held platforms, the potential value-add to Scotland if success breeds success, is beginning to be appreciated.
“What is now happening is that the changes in the web standards around computing or tablet computing and smart-phone platforms now allow companies that traditionally haven’t worked with the digital media, to come in to the marketplace,” says Gunn. “We are now seeing companies that are, say tourism companies that want to adopt their technologies to these new platforms, because they can see how they could be used.
“In a purely creative sector like the music sector you are now seeing musicians linking them with the digital media companies, creating innovation and allowing them to monetise their core offering. The same goes for the tourism sector – companies are coming together to look at new services and applications, and we can help them evolve to next stage of their growth.”
Interactive Scotland was set up in recognition that Scotland’s digital media sector has lots of subsectors and that a small country could gain advantage from linking together the worlds of the media, publishing, the mobile, advertising, the web, online companies and also opening digital doors for companies in more traditional sectors. Given that the ICT sector already contributes about 5% of Scotland’s GVA according to ScotlandIS, there is massive potential for Scotland to win out in a world where, according to Cisco summit in the US last weekend, four children are born every second, 40 mobile phones sold every second.
Gunn says: “Even the financial services and energy sectors, can utilise digital media and related creative industries to evolve their markets. Scotland is well connected regionally, and is ahead of the game in implementing support to the new media”
The buzz around the growth of the App companies is a useful corrective against prevailing gloom, supporting David Cairns of ScotlandIS’s point that: “At a time when economic hopes are pinned on private-sector expansion and export-led recovery to counterbalance the reduction in public sector spending and employment, Scotland’s ICT industry holds the key to growth, productivity and export income.”
Progress for the sector will help convince Scotland’s strategy-makers, by emphasising that the digital economy is current reality, and is not something which may appear in the future, and which we can spend time devising strategies in anticipation. Not that the consumers of Scotland’s burgeoning App wizards care about the priorities of the Scottish economy rather than in buying “solutions” that are professionally indispensable, lifestyle-enhancing or simply fun.
After our recessionary frost, there is cause for spring cheer in the way that such a diverse and agile clutch of Scottish start-ups can appeal to a new world of global customers. A few years ago neither the companies nor their customers knew what an App was, and didn’t yet know that they couldn’t live without them.