cloud.IQ raises £250,000 through government innovation competition

Tech City start-up, cloudIQ, has received £250,000 from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) after winning an SME innovation competition.

The one-year-old firm, which provides cloud based marketing applications, secured the money through the TSB’s Smart Programme for its idea of creating a web-based tool that allows non-technical people to build, publish and monetise web apps that can integrate email, voice, web, social and mobile technologies into innovative services.

The funding will be used for research and development of the tool, known as AppEditor.

James Critchley, CEO and co-founder of cloud.IQ said: “In just 12 months, we have launched a suite of apps for SMEs which have already delivered significant results in helping businesses convert more customers.

“The investment from the Technology Strategy Board provides us with a platform to bring to market a new solution which we believe will have an ever wider reach and impact on the businesses community.”

The government innovation agency launched the award with the aim of finding an innovative idea that that offers significant potential to help stimulate economic growth in the UK.

James Heydari, TSB programme manager, said: “Smart awards support SMEs with high growth ambition and potential. Successful applicants need to show that they have a really innovative idea, addressing a real market need and have the ability to deliver their idea to drive economic growth.”

In 2012, the start-up, which also has offices in Sydney, received £2m in funding from Bridges Ventures.

Over the past 12 months, cloud.IQ has launched a suite of conversion focused apps including callMe, cartRecovery and SmartSMS. The start-up says that its integrated applications help companies of all sizes acquire more customers and build brand loyalty.

Britain's digital economy twice as big as government thought

Britain’s digital economy is significantly larger than official estimates, according to National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR).

The report, commissioned by Google, tracked digital footprints left by companies online to determine if they were a digital or non-digital company.

It found at least 270,000 companies form the digital economy – well above the previous government estimate of 188,000.

The report claims the areas with the highest concentration of digital companies can be found outside London, in places like Aberdeen, Middlesbrough and Manchester.

But a report out last week found that 17 of the top 20 startup areas in the country are found in London, with the area around Silicon Roundabout far outstripping everywhere else with 15,000 new companies set up in the area in the last year.

The NIESR report also found that the revenue reported by digital companies is growing 25 per cent faster than that reported by non-digital companies. The research also found that digital employers hire three more people on average than non-digital companies.

The researchers argue that Britain is using an out-dated business classification system which means hundreds of thousands of digital companies are being incorrectly identified by government and financial services and missing out on vital support as a result.

The researchers said that Growth Intelligence, a London-based sales software company, allowed them to spot digital companies working in 'traditional' sectors, such as software companies in architecture, publishing and engineering.

Tom Gatten, chief executive of Growth Intelligence, said: “This research demonstrates the need for a new way of understanding the economy, both for government and for businesses. Rather than relying on outdated codes or static lists, our new technology and internet data reveals new opportunities and insights for growth.”

Government awards £1m fund to help UK datacentres cut carbon footprint

The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the ministerial department that aims to reduce UK’s greenhouse gas emissions and promote energy efficiency, has awarded almost £1m funding to assist UK datacentres minimise their carbon footprint.

The funding was won by a consortium led by Cambridge-based datacentre energy monitoring company Alquist and involving Verizon and Schneider Electric.

The funding comes after it emerged that datacentre energy requirements grew by 63% in 2012, suggesting that rising energy costs and stricter regulations are not helping to limit datacentre power use and cut carbon emissions.

Alquist will help the two consortium members achieve significant CO2 reductions by integrating its Celsius temperature monitoring system in two refurbishment projects in London.

The funding award from DECC, follows the consortium’s success in the “Invest in Innovative Refurbishment” DECC competition organised by the Technology Strategy Board in April 2012.

Alquist’s datacentre temperature monitoring tool Celsius uses advanced laser technology and fibre optics to create high-definition temperature maps of datacentre server racks and power transmission equipment.

The real-time information will enable datacentre managers to optimise airflow and air-conditioning settings more actively. This will help improve the datacentre facility’s energy usage, offering a mid-size datacentre about 10-30% reduction in electricity bills and carbon emission reduction of up to 2,000 tonnes per annum, according to Alquist.

 “Datacentre managers have very limited visibility of temperature fluctuation across their data halls. Celsius offers real-time visibility to enable IT professionals cool equipment far more efficiently and make significant energy savings," said Alquist founder Andrew Jones.

“We are delighted that DECC is investing in an area with huge potential for CO2 reduction.”
Alquist’s temperature monitoring tool targets a high-growth market where the UK, with over £3bn invested in 2011, is the world’s third largest green datacentre player. The global market for green datacentres will grow from $17.1bn (£10bn) in 2012 to $45.4bn (£28bn) by 2016, according to a study.

Datacentres are forecast to consume 6% of UK electricity by 2020 and UK suppliers lead globally in developing green datacentre solutions. Government funding will help refine the Celsius range of tools and provide hard evidence of actual savings at two London demonstrator sites owned and operated by Verizon and Schneider Electric.  

"Operating cooling systems efficiently whilst avoiding hotspots is one of the key challenges faced by datacentre operators,” said Natalie Hooper, Verizon’s technical facilities lead in Europe. Using datacentre energy metrics will help it gather necessary temperature information and take aggressive steps to reduce its energy consumption worldwide, she said.

Meanwhile, Schneider Electric’s director of business development, Andy Roberts said: “Our customers want to optimise energy usage and use available power for powering IT equipment rather than for cooling. Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare management suite, together with Celsius’ monitoring capability, can help them achieve this.”

The DECC funding is the latest government initiative in Europe aimed at cutting IT’s carbon footprint. Earlier this year, green IT project CoolEmAll – funded by the European Commission – released the first prototypes of advanced tools designed to help improve the efficiency and sustainability of datacentres.
The tools will be ready for general release in 2014 after feedback from early adopters.

GDS tracks 'digital by default' progress of top 25 government services

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has launched a new website to track the progress of the 25 transactions targeted as the first to be put online under the new digital strategy.

The 25 services – ranging from visa applications to benefit claims to booking prison visits – were identified as “exemplars” that would be the first to be redeveloped under the “digital by default” plan to put more public services online.

Since the strategy was launched at the end of 2012, 13 of the transactions have reached the discovery phase, six are in alpha, five in beta, and part of one – student finance – is already live.

The aim is to digitally transform the 25 services – among those most widely – in a 400-day time period that started earlier in 2013. The progress updates were provided today at a GDS event, called Sprint Alpha, to mark the conclusion of the first 100 days of the plan.

“We’ve really focused on growing out the transformation programme of 25 exemplar projects. A lot of that has been done quietly and in departments, out of the gaze of the public eye,” said Mike Bracken, executive director of GDS in a video published on the Cabinet Office website.

“The spending round took more time than anyone could have guessed, but we’re though that and looking forward to our transformation of public services.”

A statement from the Cabinet Office added: “This is the start of a transformation that will mean people can interact with government in the same way they do with their bank or with retailers.”

Over the next three months, the digital strategy will focus on moving more than 300 agencies’ and arms-length government bodies’ websites across to the central Gov.UK web platform; as well as publishing a new governance model for the delivery of technology across Whitehall to support the digital strategy, which is expected this month.

The Cabinet Office claims that the digital strategy will save over £1.2bn, by moving online a number of costly phone, postal and face-to-face transactions.

Government saves £500m by going digital

The government has saved £500m by controlling spending on IT and digitising a number of its services.

The claim was made in the latest report from the Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG), formed by the coalition to cut the UK deficit and run by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander.

The update said overall spending by the government had been reduced by £10bn – 82% higher than the previous year – with IT coming into play in a number of areas, sticking with the ERG’s initial pledge to “increase digitisation and the use of alternative delivery models” to save money.

IT spend controls and moving government services and transactions onto digital platforms accounted for £500m of the figure, but almost £2bn was also saved in procuring common goods and services, and renegotiating large government contracts – which would have involved IT spend.

The report also highlighted a £126m saving through using framework agreements for telecoms services and a further £42m from merging the DirectGov and BusinessLink websites into gov.uk – which it claims now receives one million hits each day.

Computer Weekly asked the Cabinet Office if the telecoms spend was specifically saved thanks to the PSN framework, but it had not answered our question by the time of publication.

The ERG said it aspired to cutting back even more costs in the coming years, aiming for annual savings of £20bn by 2015.

“We are working with government departments and focusing on getting more for less,” read the report. “We have achieved significant savings without affecting front-line services. We will continue to find ways to improve services, work smarter and unlock large savings.”

Privacy advocates call on government to rein in NSA

A U.S. government board focused on privacy and civil rights should push Congress to rein in the National Security Agency’s mass collection of telephone records and Internet communications, privacy advocates said Tuesday.
The U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, established by Congress in 2004 to be a watchdog of government antiterrorism efforts, should also demand that the NSA and other government agencies be more transparent about the data they collect, said privacy advocates speaking at a board meeting in Washington, D.C.

While two former government officials defended the NSA’s collection of U.S. phone records and overseas Internet communications, other speakers told the board the agency has exceeded its legal authority, particularly when collecting U.S. records. Recent revelations about NSA data collection and surveillance show a lack of congressional and court oversight, said Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Congress needs to limit what information the NSA and law enforcement agencies collect because internal privacy safeguards won’t work, Jaffer said. “You don’t know what the privacy safeguards are going to look like three years from now, five years from now” when there may be another terrorist attack, he said.

Board member Patricia Wald, an appeals court judge, asked if the NSA should be able to collect large amounts of data about U.S. residents, then have data minimization rules that limit what the agency can do with the data.
“Minimization is one of the great euphemisms of our time,” said James Robertson, a former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge who’s criticized current surveillance practices. “No one knows what it means.”
The surveillance court now appears to be issuing opinions on policy in addition to approving surveillance requests, Robertson said. The policy rulings are not in the court’s authority, he and other privacy advocates told the board.
Asked if the NSA could protect privacy through technological safeguards on the use of the data collected, some participants suggested a technology solution wasn’t enough. Technology can only implement policy, said Steven Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University.
As the NSA collects more and more data, it will find new ways to use it, said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “A threshold is crossed once the data is collected,” he said. “There’s no guarantee the safeguard will remain over time.”
But the NSA and other agencies are already collecting massive amounts of data, said Daniel Weitzner, director of the Decentralized Information Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It would be useful for privacy advocates to work both on changing U.S. policies and on implementing technological limits on what the NSA can do with the data it collects, said Weitzner, a former deputy CTO in President Barack Obama’s administration.

“All the useful data has been collected,” he said.
The surveillance court and the NSA should be more transparent about the data collected, and the court should publish some of its orders, some panelists said. Part of the reason for concern about the surveillance is that the “searches are done in secret,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties watchdog group.
But it makes sense that the NSA doesn’t broadcast the targets of its surveillance, said Kenneth Wainstein, a former White House homeland security adviser. The surveillance court process, which doesn’t include a lawyer arguing against the surveillance, mirrors criminal wiretap requests, he said.
“We trust judges” to scrutinize surveillance requests, he said.
Still, Wainstein said there may be some merit in creating a new role for a public advocate during the surveillance court’s process because it may restore some public confidence in the process, Wainstein said.
Wainstein and Steven Bradbury, formerly with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, defended the surveillance efforts, saying they are necessary to protect the U.S. from terrorism. Despite the recent uproar about the programs prompted by leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the U.S. shouldn’t significantly limit the surveillance because of some “speculative concerns down the road,” Wainstein said.
Bradbury questioned the suggestion to include a public advocate in the surveillance court process. The current process is “workable,” he said.

Board member James Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, called on privacy advocates to propose concrete ideas for fixing the surveillance process and on defenders to engage in the debate.
“It can’t be that everything is perfect,” he said to Wainstein and Bradbury. “It can’t be that no changes can be made.”
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Businesses, UK government team against cyber attacks

Lockheed Martin, BT, and BAE Systems are among a group of defense and security companies that have pledged to support the U.K. government in bolstering the security of the country against sophisticated cyber attacks.

By pooling their experience of operating under constant threat of attack, the so-called Defense Cyber Protection Partnership (DCPP) says the alliance will identify and implement actions that have a real impact on the cyber defenses of the members of the partnership and the U.K. defense sector as a whole.

The DCPP model is intended to lead the way in industry collaboration and action on cyber security and to act as a template which can then be followed by commercial sectors to improve resilience across U.K. industry.

"I'm absolutely delighted by the level of commitment shown by the participating companies in helping us to build our national resilience against cyber attack, and I look forward to more of our key contractors coming on board," said Minister for Defense Equipment, Support and Technology Philip Dunne.

"This is a clear demonstration that government and industry can work together—sharing information, experience and expertise—to make sure we do everything we can to protect these critical networks, ensuring that the business of Defence is robustly protected."

A total of nine companies will work alongside the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the Ministry Of Defence (MOD) to offer their expertise. These include BAE Systems, BT, Cassidian, CGI, Hewlett Packard, Lockheed Martin, Rolls-Royce, Selex ES, and Thales UK.

Throughout the rest of 2013, the partnership will focus on three specific areas: increasing awareness of cyber risks across the supply chain; defining risk-driven approaches to applying cyber security standards; and sharing threat intelligence.

Organisations within the DCPP will also share threat intelligence and wider expertise on tackling cyber threats with other industry sectors and government through the recently announced national Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership.

"This is an issue which demands a concerted and coordinated approach between Government and Industry and the DCPP is a critical component of this," said Vic Leverett, DCPP chair. "Collaboration between industries and with Government has been first class, reflecting the joint commitment to succeed with our 2013 objectives. The whole is proving to be significantly better than the sum of the parts."

The U.S. Department of Defense has warned of coordinated cyber attacks that could harm industry as well as governmental operations.

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Big data project aims to improve Dutch flood control, save the government millions

A big data project called Digital Delta aims to investigate how to transform flood control and the management of the entire Dutch water system and save up to 15 percent of the annual Dutch water management budget.

 

IBM will collaborate with Rijkswaterstaat, the part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment that is responsible for the design, construction, management and maintenance of the waterways and water systems in the Netherlands. The project also involves the University of Delft, local water authority Delfland and the Deltares Science Institute, the organizations said in a joint news release Tuesday.

 

They will investigate whether data gathered by more than 100 different projects in the Netherlands that deal with water management can be combined and be made accessible to accelerate water management innovation, said Djeevan Schiferli, an IBM Business Development Executive who is involved in the project.

 

If the research is successful, the system can be applied to other areas in the world, Schiferli said. The principle has already been discussed with governments in the U.S. in New York and New Orleans, as well as in Japan, South Korea and Australia, he said.

 

In the next 12 months, the Digital Delta group will investigate how to integrate and analyze water data from a wide range of existing sources, including precipitation measurements, water level and water quality monitors, levee sensors, radar data, model predictions, and current and historic maintenance data from sluices, pumping stations, and locks and dams, the group said.

 

Because 55 percent of the Dutch population lives in a location prone to flooding, every water-related event is critical and can impact businesses, agriculture and citizens’ daily lives, they said.

 

Due to this, the Dutch water management budget adds up to €7 billion (US$9.2 billion) each year, and costs are expected to increase €1 billion to €2 billion by 2020, unless something is done, according to the release. By combining data, Digital Delta thinks it can save up to 15 percent, Schiferli said.

 

Digital Delta wants to reduce costs by dealing with IT and the available data in a better way, he said. At the moment, parties use a third to half of their budgets to collect and disseminate the data, according to Schiferli. “And that is even before the data can be interpreted,” he added.

 

The initiative aims to provide water experts with a real-time intelligent dashboard to harness information so data can be shared immediately across organizations and agencies, according to the release. Involved organizations can use the dashboard to help prepare for imminent difficulties as well as enabling authorities to coordinate and manage response efforts. Over the longer term, the project aims to enhance the ongoing efficiency of overall water management, it added.

 

Digital Delta’s goal is to improve the management of the Dutch water system in many different ways. For instance, by modeling weather events, the Netherlands should be able to determine the best course of action including storing water, diverting it from low-lying areas, and avoiding saltwater intrusion into drinking water, sewage overflows and water contamination, they said.

 

One satellite company can, for instance, spot a 100 meter stretch of dike that is sagging, Schiferli said. If those responsible for tending to the dike know this, they can put sensors in just that stretch instead of in the whole dike that is, say, 10 kilometers long, he said. Monitoring a stretch of 100 meters is much cheaper than fitting the whole dike with sensors, he said.

 

While all of the relevant data to determine where to put sensors may now be available, it is not combined so not everyone has access to it and this leads to unnecessary expenditures, he said.

 

Another project in the initiative aims to link a sensor to a well in a traffic tunnel, Schiferli said. If the data of that sensor is linked with the maintenance system and weather data, an estimation can be made of how likely it is the well will overflow or clog when heavy rain is expected, he said. The system could then send a warning to relevant authorities to check the well, which may prevent a traffic jam in the tunnel, he said.

 

IBM’s Intelligent Water Software can be used for this. Rijkswaterstaat and local water authorities will manage water balance data and share the information centrally through the Digital Delta platform, the organizations said. This should make it possible for the Dutch water system to optimize the discharge of water and improve the containment of water during dry periods, and prevent damage to agriculture, the group said.

 

Also, a scalable early flood warning method will be developed by combining weather data and, water system simulation models and real-time measurement data from the water system, they said.

 

The Digital Delta project is aimed at water management. Similar systems could be developed to deal with droughts or for use in ship traffic, said Schiferli.

 

“The Australians, for instance, said they know a lot about forest fires—that knowledge could be useful to the Dutch when they have to deal with a fire in the dunes,” Schiferli said, adding that international cooperation is also a possibility.

 

The current research project costs €5.5 million and will go on for 12 months after which the governments decide if they want to go through with it, he said.