Startup Britain
startupbritain.org
startupbritain.org
At least, that was my four seconds on the site. Any survivors who managed to parse some content? Were there articles behind those links? Did those articles have any text in non-bolded, non-48px, non-shadowed text on a non-red background?
On one hand, it is a useful collection of links for entrepreneurs in the UK, and the offers, while not exactly brilliant, are worth looking at.
On the other it's not revolutionary.
According to the media there is going to be £1,500 of funding/incentives for startups as part of this project, but I haven't quite figured out if that is launched yet, or whether it means those offers and the other bits on the page (which is not very impressive if so).
I was talking to someone who is involved in this at some level and he said they are developing a mentoring scheme, events/tutorials and some awards/grants etc. But we will see.
Without the latter it's mostly a collection of "government backed" links and bluster.
From the news reports I've seen this is just the offers (e.g. the BBC say "New enterprises will be offered help worth about £1,500 in areas such as IT training and internet advertising."), so it's really not too impressive.
Click on 'Growing' link. It is the offers on the right hand side, eg, £30 Adwords voucher.
I am slightly suspicious of the fact that the people listed on the "About Us" page appear to have things to sell in this field. For example a link to a "startup kit" with a book by Emma Jones is linked from the first page.
It's fine if this is killer material and good stuff, and I hope it is, but it gives me pause for thought.
It doesn't matter if the band can play as long as they have a cool name.
I'm hoping the designer was intentionally referencing the surreal "Top Tips" from UK comedy magazine Viz to undermine this effort.
Still at least our lords and masters have taken the time to collate what 20 minutes with Google would have uncovered, as at the moment this just looks like big companies giving away freebies to get business.
Still any focus on enterprise has to be a good thing!
That said, there definitely does need to be something. The US definitely has a better start-up culture. And culture is definitely the right word here. I'd say pg did have a point when he advised moving to the US. Not that I think any Brits should, but that a dedicated area/culture would be really useful in the UK, and something we lack now.
This always makes me pause to wonder if there's a compelling reason I should "temporarily" disable NoScript (which often then cascades to more sites I need to "temporarily" unblock), or just walk away. I often do the latter.
* Lots of text rendered in low-quality jpegs full of artifacts (yet it still downloads a bunch of fonts)
* Stolen artwork (the MSN messenger and iCal icons are in there with no modification except they're grayscaled. And is that the old download.com logo I can see?)
* No expires headers
[1] - http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/topstorynews/2011/03/startup...
http://www.barricane.com/2011/03/05/uk-internet-startup-week...
Where you can search for an accountant as an 'Individual' or 'Buisness' [sic]
The whole thing is largely just a bunch of links. I'd love to know how much it cost
Totally disagree. The stakes for failing in the US are very high. The thing that currently gives the US the edge is that that's where so many startup minded people are.