Category: Technology

The BBC’s decision to relocate Breakfast to Greater Manchester has generated plenty of heated comments over the last couple of days. According to opponents of the move, the iconic TV programme will be cut off from the London news hub while celebrities will baulk at the idea of trekking up to Salford. Anonymous sources are lining up to say it will be the death of the show.

Am I the only one who thinks this is all a storm in a teacup? After all, London-based companies open up Manchester branches all year round and nobody thinks anything of it.

Expansion in the 21st Century

In fact, expanding into new cities has never been easier because, in the 21st Century, it is no longer necessary for people to meet face to face in order to do business. The days of travelling hundreds or thousands of miles simply to exchange pleasantries and signatures on a contract are thankfully behind us.

Nowadays, businessmen who need to contact clients can take their pick from a plethora of options – email, LinkedIn, video conferencing and much more. In the world of high-speed internet connections, the concept of pressing the flesh begins to look positively dated.

Broadband for Breakfast

Perhaps someone in the upper echelons of the BBC needs to make this point to disgruntled Breakfast staffers. It is perfectly reasonable to think that the programme will continue to prosper after relocating to Greater Manchester.

News reports could be transferred from Broadcasting House to MediaCityUK via a sturdy VPN connection. An SDSL package with good upload rates would allow business leaders in the City to be interviewed live on air in Salford. Perhaps a few lightweight celebrities might not want to make the trip up north, but if that means more of a focus on regional news and how Manchester companies are weathering the recession, that might not be an altogether bad thing.

The truth is that Greater Manchester is a great place to do business and by no means as isolated as some at the BBC would have you believe. Indeed, thanks to the onward march of technology, you could argue that Portland Place and Salford Quays have never been closer.

According to several recent reports, Manchester is to become a testing ground for the next stage of the UK’s broadband network development.

The government, along with telecoms companies like BT, have been talking for what seems like years about how best to advance broadband in this country, all the while falling ever further behind places such as Japan and South Korea where superfast internet speeds are the norm, not just a distant dream.

They even produced a report looking at the various ways in which the broadband expansion might be funded, including the introduction of a levy (read: tax) on phone lines to pay for high speed network upgrades.

Now, it seems there might finally be some light at the end of the tunnel, as our own fair city plays host to a relatively small scale project, which, if successful, could shape the future of internet use and broadband connectivity in the UK.

The latest round of work will see high speed fibre optic broadband lines fitted along the Oxford Road ‘Corridor’ area, alongside SDSL and ADSL connections between businesses, homes and university buildings. The aim is that users in the vicinity will be able to take advantage of connection speeds of up to 100Mbps, as well as getting their telecoms services from multiple providers, rather than just one.

While I commend the fact that the high speed broadband ball is finally rolling, and feel pride that once again Manchester is at the centre of innovation when it comes to technology, I can’t help but feel that there could be more progress being made. It seems we’ve waited years for… what… one road lined with fast internet?

Hopefully the pilot will be a success and we’ll start to see the rollout of more high speed broadband around the UK – before we fall even further behind our global competitors.

One local MD talks about his experiences of building up a successful company: how SEO (search engine optimisation) and VPNs (virtual private networks) have helped and how SMM (social media marketing) might be the way forward.

Manchester is a fantastic place with a great business history; unsurprisingly for the city that was at the epicentre of the industrial revolution, it seems to nurture endeavour and entrepreneurism like few other places can.

My company has been operating in Manchester for just over eleven years now, during which time we’ve witnessed not only the continuing expansion and improvement of the city centre, but also its communication infrastructure.

When we first started out in the business of re-upholstering prestige cars to our clients’ specifications, we took a lot of our orders by fax, or over the phone. There’s a surprising amount of word of mouth generated around what we do, particularly with all the millionaire footballers floating around Manchester, so we were able to maintain a good churn with the clientbase we had.

Then, with the boom of broadband, came the opportunity to market what we do to a larger audience than ever before. We put together a simple website with an enquiry form and pretty soon we were pulling in sales from much further afield (many of them came from the leafier suburbs of Merseyside and Cheshire, home to yet more footballers and high-fliers). We’ve now opened another dedicated sales office in Liverpool and business is better than ever.

Two things have helped us immeasurably in the venture over the last couple of years. Firstly, search engine optimisation, or SEO. We got a little agency in Manchester to put together our website for us and while I’m still not entirely clued-up on the exact science behind what they did, I know that by using keywords related to our business and building everything with search engine users in mind they were able to generate a lot of traffic (and ergo sales) for what was a relatively simple site.

The second thing we couldn’t really have done without, at least since opening the Liverpool office, is our VPN, or virtual private network. We share a lot of information between our two sales centres and needed a secure and fast way to give staff at both ends access to it all. I believe our managed VPN is much safer and more efficient than sending files over email. It is as though all of my staff are in the same room when using it, even though half of them have the misfortune of being stuck at the wrong end of the M62 (I’m joking!).

What will our next step be? Well, for now, we’ve got to make sure we keep trading well at a time when people are spending less on luxuries. Luckily the market for bespoke, wipe-clean patterns hasn’t bottomed out too much – I guess we’ll prosper as long as the car makers keep producing boring, grey interiors.

I am, however, interested in exploring a more creative field of web marketing over the next year. Buzzwords I keep hearing include viral and social and while at first all that made me think of was the common cold, I’ve been speaking to a few agencies who think they can produce some innovative social media tools and videos.

One idea I’m particularly keen on is a Create Your Own Upholstery-type application for Facebook or phones, which might appeal to our affluent female userbase (without wanting to cast aspersions on the creativity, or lack thereof, of our footballing friends), but I think this needs more development to set it apart from the crowd.

Time will tell how we fare as the economy continues to recover, but I’m still convinced that Manchester is as good a place as any for businesses to thrive.