AI is more than a trend in investment activity. Uniquely, AI is a sub-sector of technology which is set for a development surge as technologies associated with AI advance and the reliance on AI products for businesses across all sectors to stay competitive grows.
Fintech companies - businesses that harness technological advances to challenge the existing financial system and the way things have traditionally been done - appear to be riding the post-Brexit storm with genuine confidence.
To the fore of this mini revolution are companies developing apps for stock market trading, websites that will help create entirely new currencies, and revolutionary new payment technology. All these ideas will change the way finance works.
Demand for virtual reality experts and machine learning engineers with knowledge across data mining, statistical modelling, data analysis and natural language processing is on the rise. Closely tracking the now rapidly increasing enterprise adoption of these technologies.
Many of the world’s largest Internet and mobile software companies, like Google and Facebook, rely heavily on advertising to finance their online empires.
According to the Tech Nation 2016 report, the Reading and Bracknell tech cluster is now the country’s largest cluster of digital businesses outside London. The area around these two towns is the home of digital businesses which contribute about £10bn in annual turnover to the British tech economy.
So, a couple of months after the momentous public and private sector commitments involving billionaire movers and shakers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Bezosh and other high-profile entrepreneurs to pledge to spark a “new economic revolution” based around clean energy through launching a new investment drive for renewables…..it’s instructive to look back and reflect on the issues - and exactly what was agreed.
It is paramount for startups to hire talented people who want to work hard to build something from the ground up. However, the costs of sourcing and hiring a Developer or Software Engineer in the UK, especially in London, can be high, so many founders end up outsourcing the work to remote contractors based offshore.
Startups can look to India, Spain, China or many remote locations to get a job done but that doesn’t replace an in-house team of permanent hires with a shared vision for the longer term.
The digital economy in the UK is thriving. The UK-wide nature of the industry was supported by the Tech Nation research report from Tech City UK - the agency originally created by the government to promote the east London tech cluster but which now promotes tech business growth UK-wide.
Using data from fast-rising digital businesses like Duedil and Adzuna, the Tech Nation 2015 report predicts that digital job growth will outperform all other occupation categories by 2020 - with digital employment itself set to grow by 5.4% by 2020.
The UK faces a worsening gender gap in its flourishing IT industry, according to a new study.
The Women in IT scorecard looked at gender trends from secondary education through to the work place. It indicates women account for just 16% of the UK IT workforce. And the problem starts early - despite consistently out-performing boys in computing A-level results, girls account for just 6.5% of those taking the exam.
The study was compiled by BCS, the chartered institute for IT, and E-skills UK.
Other highlights from the report include:
Just to show that we do prize ‘down time’ at Richard Wheeler Associates, that time spent considering things other than the recruitment of software engineerings, grappling with the competition for the top talent, client’s growth strategies, compiling shortlists of System Architects, J2EE specialists, preparing the ground for an IT recruitment new client meeting, assessing the merits of one embedded C++ candidate vs another, getting to grips with the latest CleanTech hiring campaign, ………we offer what we hope will be the first of many glimpses - of this ‘down time’: