Google has leased a seven-story commercial property in ‘Silicon City’, in East London to help new and upcoming technology organisations get off the ground. Google will not only provide office space to the new companies, but they will also offer assistance, which no amount of money can be compared to. Many companies would jump at the opportunity to learn from the market leaders.
Google said that the commercial property in London, which is due to open in 2012 after a complete renovation would include, “A range of activities, such as speaker series, hackathons, training workshops and product demonstrations.” Google went onto say that they will, “Open up the space to other organisations that support technology entrepreneurs, working together to provide a launchpad for new London-based start-ups and developers.”
According to Tech City, the organisation in charge of promoting the scheme, there are currently around 300 organisations working in ‘Silicon Roundabout’. But this figure is set the rocket with the announcement of Google providing help and advice to companies.
Eric Van Der Kleij, Chief Executive Tech City said that, “Partnering established technology companies with fresh talent could be beneficial to both parties. What [big organizations like Google] do by having a firm footing in the community is to provide a channel for innovation, to partner with them and potentially even sell to them.”
“It accelerates the process of the entrepreneur doing a tech startup, selling for a lot of money, creating a lot of millionaires within their organisation and creating recyclable wealth – then going out to do more innovation.” Eric went onto say.
The Prime Minister, David Cameron is also behind the scheme. He believes ‘Silicon City’ could help boost the UK’s economy. During a conference in November 2010, David Cameron expressed that the scheme could learn from Silicon Valley in the USA, “Go with the grain of what is already there. Don’t interfere so much that you smother. But do help out wherever you can. Help to create the right framework, so it’s easier for new companies to start up, for venture capital firms to invest, for innovations to flourish, for businesses to grow.”
Google is more than just a search engine now, users can send and receive emails on Gmail, organise themselves on Google Calendar, create and edit documents on Google Docs and also upload and share videos on YouTube, just to name a few. What’s more you don’t even need to be at your computer to do these things as Google have developed Android, which Google states is, “The world’s first fully open platform that any mobile developer can use and any hardware manufacturer can install on a device.”
Google will own the lease for the commercial property until 2022, which will allow plenty of companies to take advantage of the facilities and benefit from Google’s expertise. But I doubt that Google will be sharing all of their secrets to their success from over the last 13 years.
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