agenda

< From SEO to CEO, East London’s Tech City is creating a hothouse of digital expertise that the Government is bolstering with extended support. Ruth Ling reports / >

T

he Olympics site is well on its way to completion, with a vibrant new community taking shape. But Stratford

doesn’t have a monopoly on all the action in East London. Shoreditch – once just the end of the number 35 bus route and latterly a hip hang-out for artists – is the new hotbed of regeneration and investment. Just north of the Square Mile, and straddling Old Street as it heads east out to Hackney, Shoreditch is rapidly becoming the digital capital of Europe. In May, the area received a boost when

the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) announced a £1m pilot grant-funding competition, Launchpad, to support creative and digital businesses in East London. Companies can apply for up to £100k for projects, with the TSB

helping 10 successful bidders to fi nd match funding. Opening the competition at the Digital Shoreditch festival, David Bott, the TSB’s director of innovation programmes, said: “We are looking for projects that may be too risky for companies to go for alone, or that may take them into new areas.”

EARLY ADOPTERS Prime Minister David Cameron says he

wants East London to become a world- leading technology city to rival Silicon Valley. Last November, he launched the Tech City UK Initiative to expand the existing cluster of technology fi rms from Shoreditch to Stratford by the end of the Olympics in 2012. Ten major international companies have committed to investing in the long-term development of this hub.

Cisco Systems will establish Innovation

Centres in Shoreditch and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, focusing on technical excellence, and Google an Innovation Hub to develop next- generation applications and services. Similarly, facebook is to create a base in Tech City for its Developer Garage programme, while Intel Corporation will set up a research lab focusing on performance computing and new energy- effi ciency technologies. In addition, management consultancy

McKinsey has provided advice and a cluster report on Tech City and offered help to start-up companies, and Qualcomm will give intellectual property advice. Specialist banking services will come from Barclays and Silicon Valley Bank, which has established a UK-based bank to provide fi nancing for technology and life science

< html/ a £1m pilot grant-funding competition /> springboard: | page 12

<The tech