There’s a bigger point, though, about the dead hand of government in supporting or stifling organic innovation. And also the age-old question of culturally led “regeneration”.

Unless government subsidises rents and/or does not allow asset owners to make profit from their buildings, places will go from being cheap, grotty and edgy to expensive, palatial and mainstream.

Government can be both the problem and solution. By anointing the area with a moniker, foisting a taskforce and scattering a few (and only a few) £ you accelerate this process and lose the genus of what you wanted to promote.

On the other hand, govt can work to safeguard buildings (how the fuck that awful hotel will be built at the foundry I’ll never know)by setting up supportive planning rules, take the freehold on “creative” buildings and areas, and set some (and I mean few) ground rules about what the market can do. Hackney Council is trying to do some of this at Hackney Wick, which, to my mind, is much more exciting than Shoreditch or Dalston.

I may be misreading you but it seems as if you want government to keep its hands off so that it doesn’t stifle the area, at the same time as being hands on in saving the opportunity for creative businesses to set up.

PS – Agree that Spitalfields Market is a prime example in how not to do it

PPS – Love the tote bag, will have to get one. Can you also knock up a ‘Dalston has jumped the shark’ one

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/museum/collections/zoology/

Another example that comes to mind is augmented-reality goggles. Everyone would love to have them, the idea is awesome, but the implementation always disappoints.

Case in point: The Goggle Glasses.

JSON http://www.json.org/
Atom http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt
HTTP http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt
TCP/IP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite

Kind regards,
tamberg

PS. Thanks Cuno!

glad that you put my book in you list of IoT references! There is a companion Web site for the book (www.gsiot.info), maybe this would be a better link.

As for other startups, I suggest two additions:

- Our spin-off Yaler (www.yaler.net), an “Infrastructure as a Service” cloud startup which solves the “firewall and NAT” problem of embedded devices that are used as Web services.

- A non-related company: http://www.koubachi.com that solves the “how can I prevent my plants from becoming parched” problem.

Thanks and best regards

Cuno Pfister

Oberon microsystems AG