Frightening graphs from economic historians Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke over at Vox, where they compare the current economic crisis with that of 1929. It’s scary stuff, although their conclusion is that “the good news, of course, is that the policy response is very different (to that in 1929). The question now is whether that policy response will work.” …
Building Britains Future – But Will It Be On Science?
As British Politics seems to be mainly concerned with lies & deceit these days it was refreshing to to see Science Minister Lord Drayson popping up on Twitter yesterday to address the concerns of the scientific community. Most of the science community were as shocked to be tweeting with a government minister as they would be to wake up next …
Tech VCs Hope For A Quick Recovery
The chart below shows the recent decline in valuations of late stage venture backed companies as reported by the Wall Street Journal. It’s a decline that hurts everybody, with cash starved companies taking whatever they can get, which is often a far cry from what was promised and according to the WSJ, existing investors are increasingly resorting to propping up …
The Best Minds in the UK At Loggerheads Over Technology
British scientists are hopping mad about comments from Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, who recently argued against increased science funding, presumably on the grounds that all the money had already been spent on health and safety agencies, totally ineffective government agencies and bailing out Scottish Banks. I would expect the Governor of the Bank of England to understand a little bit of …
Time Catches Up With Technology VCs
It appears that reality is catching up with the Venture Capital industry – albeit slowly. While similar numbers of deals are being done to ten years ago, the IPO window is firmly closed (to use a VC cliché). мебели варнаAverage Time to IPO 1998 3 years 2008 9 years Number of Companies Funded: 1998 1,896 ($14.0B invested) 2008 1,930 ($14.1B …
Building a .-tech economy from the ashes of the current one
Thomas Friedman in this weekends New York Times echoes my recent thoughts on how to get us out of the credit crunch recession: As we invest taxpayer money, let’s do it with an eye to starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers. Our motto …
Hand Over The Cash Or We’ll Smash The Place Up
The UK Venture Capital industry has become the latest to thrust its hand out for a £1 billion bail out claiming that it is “potentially a lost generation of companies.” Why? Well, as we predicted, the reason is that VCs cannot get exits and cannot raise fresh capital for their current portfolio companies, something that may have been buried in …
Mind The Gap – in 2012
One of the major obstacles to restarting the economy is the burden of regulation that has been piled onto businesses (but obviously not onto the banks) meaning that compliance becomes a major headache for every small business. The EU seems set to change all of that with a new suggestion from the European Parliament concerned with “establishing a framework for …
Well Known But Not Widely Understood
As we have a three day weekend courtesy of the snow (schools, tube, buses all closed and here in the City I have almost a foot of snow on my terrace) it’s an opportunity to catch up with a few things that might stave off of the early onset of cabin fever. One of my favourite articles over the last …
Let A Million Flowers Bloom
Given the global gloom emanating from all sources, it was at least nice to see that our little bit of the world, nanotechnologies, got a mention in Davos and Andrew Maynard who is also on the nanotechnologies council with me has the background details here. However, I’m still a bit worried that most discussions about nanotechnology tend to focus on …