Silicon Valley has been the catch-all name for the US’s entire high tech industry since the first semiconductor businesses moved into the Santa Clara Valley, south east of San Francisco back in the 1960s.
Ever since they beat the UK to such a snappy name for all they had going on tech-wise, we’ve been scratching around for a Brit equivalent.
The Silicon Roundabout and Silicon Fen are names we’ve thrown about at our own tech hubs. Dopplr.com chief technology officer Matt Biddulph coined the Roundabout phrase in summer 2008, when he mapped 15 similar businesses huddled there. Old Street’s roundabout precinct is now a hotbed of 155 or so start-ups and tech businesses, and the area around Cambridge, the Fens, turns out billions of microprocessors which you can find in, well, almost any device.
What to do with that awkward M4 corridor though? And with Bristol, the tech city at its apex? Silicon RoundaboutFensThamesPort is not sufficiently catchy. Unlike the valley below San Francisco’s harbour, not even London has a single, fixed area where all things tech happen. Google’s London offices are in St Giles, Facebook is in Carnaby Street and moving next January to Covent Garden. So the term Silicon Roundabout doesn’t throw the net wide enough to encompass the entire UK tech industry.
How do we capture the sprawled success of the UK’s tech industry into one tidy, geographical name and do we even need to?
Indeed, the phrase Silicon Valley dropped by Ralph Vaerst, in 1971, was when social connectivity was not yet a glint in Mrs Zuckerberg’s eye. Now we’re all up in the cloud, we’ve got an app for that, and email is outmoded and tech development is no longer tied to a single geographical location.
Steve Furber, the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, agrees that there’s much more to the UK’s tech industry than a single roundabout.
“Old Street’s Silicon Roundabout name refers to software companies there, but if you are looking for a hub for computing and engineering, then Cambridge’s “Silicon Fen” is the nearest we have to Silicon Valley," he says.
"The UK electronics industry is in a stronger place than ever before. ARM in Cambridge has just produced its 20 billionth processor, which are at the heart of Apple products. Instead of big, high profile-brand names in computing, we have a thriving electronics design industry spread over several small businesses that quietly contribute to the major companies.”
That’s not to say it’s a string of cottage industries, with villagers in their thatched cottages knitting up a few chips to ship off to the big brands. The regional hubs are full of smaller, less famous companies quietly doing big business.
In Cambridge ARM was last year valued at $6 billion according to The Inquirer, and can count Microsoft as one of its many licensees. Also in Cambridge, Cambridge Consultants have developed the next version of wifi, white space technology. The industry is boosted by the presence of the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing which has been attracting investor capital for over 25 years.
Bristol, another historical and current tech hub, is home to the ST Microelectronics Centre which has been leading the charge in developing micro-electronics for more than two decades. David Moss at Bristol University developed XMoss multi-chip architecture there. The Pikochip that brings wireless access to your handheld device was also developed in Bristol. Pikochip and XMoss may not be household names, but they are part of the strong, quiet, privately held group of UK tech companyies behind the big name tech brands you use everyday.
Furber, a man with just a slight Manchester bent, reminds us that his town is where virtual storage and the Ethernet were born. Apple’s head of software, John Andrews, is a University of Manchester graduate and the city is home to the mother of all modern computers, the original electronic stored program machine, The Baby.
Across the country, our tech companies have a history of doing so well that their expertise is bought out by the multinationals. Bristol’s ICERA, bought in May 2011 for USD $367 million according to the FT, makes smartphone chips that compete with Intel and Qualcomm. In Manchester, IBM bought out multi-OS players Transitive in 2008 and ICL was bought by Fujitsu, according to Furber.
Back in London, and the hub around Old Street is still growing and attracting more attention. Spotify was recently valued at £1 billion according to the Guardian, and the list of one’s to watch includes music services Soundcloud.com and Last.fm, creative internetists Made By Many, survey company YouGov, jargon busters Word-Bank.com and luxury fashion site Farfetch.com.
The Old Street Roundabout is big, anyone who’s tried to navigate it on foot after a few Friday beverages would attest to that, but it’s synonym Silicon Roundabout is not big enough to encompass the UK’s entire digital and technological output. The UK’s equivalent is simply too spread out.
So readers, over to you. What should we call our technology industry? A Silicon Sprawl nation, a Data Island or a social kingdom? Should it have a nickname, or shall we quietly get on with it like those in Manchester, Bristol and Cambridge have done for years.