I kicked off a new series, Supplier side, for TheInformationDaily.com last week with two pieces: one on what Ukip’s rise means for businesses (not good), the other on the insights you can gain from cities and data:
Cities are found at the extremes of all kinds of official datasets. National Statistics produces workplace-based gross value added figures, roughly equivalent to gross domestic product for an area’s workplaces, for 193 areas of the UK. The UK-wide figure for 2012 was £21,674. London’s was £37,232, and if you break it down further, inner London west (including the City and Westminster) totted up £127,127, nearly six times the national average.
Everyone knows London is rich, but the same pattern is visible on smaller scales. The second highest gross value added in the UK is the City of Edinburgh’s £35,614, 74 per cent higher than the Scottish average of £20,423. Leeds generates £24,770 a head, compared with £19,149 across all of West Yorkshire. Cities are the places where regions and counties go to work, as well as countries.
Catching up with other recent articles, for The Register I explored how horse-racing is, gradually, finding some uses for IT, although more on the racecourse (such as tracing the gee-gees during races with a land-based version of GPS) than in the stables.
And for Beacon on the 70th anniversary of D-Day (and just after the 50th anniversary of BBC2 – there is a stronger link than you think) I argued that Britain needs to put the Second World War behind it. It was very touching later on Friday seeing the veterans meet once more; but this time will be the last formal occasion, given the dissolution of the Normandy Veterans’ Association.