The judges award is given to the entrant that, in the judges’ view, has demonstrated the ability to succeed, continue revenue growth, attract investment, innovate, and show clear leadership. Fluidata was chosen from 33 award finalists.

Fluidata was founded by Piers Daniell in 2004, with the vision of creating a company that set a new standard in the industry for delivering great customer service. It has grown to a £10.5m company in nine years. Growth has been on average 45% year on year; the company has been listed on the Deloitte Fast 50 and has been in the Sunday Times Tech Track for the last two years. It was listed by London Loves Business as one of the top 20 fastest-growing companies in 2011; and was awarded the Internet Providers Association Best Business Broadband Provider for two years on the trot. It has also achieved Investors in People Gold standard, and has ISO accreditations for environment and quality.

Judges of the ITC Enterprise Awards included Eddie Anderson of Pentech Ventures; Anil Hassebe; Ed Lascelles of Albion Ventures; George O’Connor of Panmure Gordon; Paddy MccGwire of Cobalt Corporate Finance and Guy Rigby of Smith & Williamson – selected Fluidata for the special Judges Award category.

The ITC is the 100^th Livery Company, and received its Royal Charter three years ago. Notable members include Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, and inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Piers Daniell, CEO of Fluidata, said: “It is a huge honour to be recognised by those in the IT industry who’ve built their own businesses so successfully. When I started Fluidata I wanted to build a company with a difference, and one that would set a new standard for our industry. In this business, you have to innovate, and you can do that by giving customers products and services that they really need. All our focus is on our customers. Even the way we structure our teams internally is about delivery to customers. This award recognises the work that the whole team at Fluidata does every day.”

John O’Connell, Chairman of the awards panel, says: “Piers has demonstrated all of the qualities which an entrepreneur needs to have for success, sustained over a period of time too and with minimal external funding. He took a bold step by deciding not to go to University and he was fortunate that his parents were willing to mortgage themselves to fund his early days – which of course he has more than repaid since. The Judges created this special award recognising the special attributes Piers has, which should be inspirational to others.”

However, when first collected, this data is vast and unruly; it must be converted into something coherent so that it can be applied to a purpose. Software is required for the translation of this data into what we might call business intelligence. Historically though, this software, as well as  the storage and server requirements that go with it, have made Big Data cost prohibitive for SME’s, giving big players the advantage.

Take Facebook and Google. Both organisations have been able to access the data collected on their pages and use it to their advantage – think Google Analytics. Ever noticed when you’ve been searching for that special gift that there’s an increase in adverts showcasing pages linked to similar products? Or has Facebook been providing Group and Page suggestions based on what you already like or have commented on within a status? These are prime examples where Big Data is being utilised by to organise copious amounts of patterns formed within an individuals’ or a group activities.

What we see from the above is that Big Data can create targeted advertising. It can lead to the development and formation of new ideas and new products, with trends appearing clearer once the data is organised. Big Data, large as it is, is really here to solve.

Data transfer is increasing the time, and at rates which are which are almost difficult to comprehend. The fact that 90% of data out there currently was created in the last two years (owing much to tablet usage and mobile data). Gives you some perspective of the data explosion we are currently witnessing. As data grows, both the collection of data and the processes to sift and organise it are also getting quicker. These developments are (through increasing expertise, economies of scale and market competition) making the use of Big Data more accessible to small and medium sized businesses.

I recently watched a piece on BBC’s Click which focused on the growth of dynamic, interactive cities. Data can be collected across numerous aspects of the running of a town or city and in turn can create cost savings for that location. Big Data married with new machine to machine communications and smart devices could help a city determine where power is being used from the grid where it needn’t be, or prevent overcrowding in particular areas through predictive analysis. It’s all pretty cool stuff and will undoubtedly have a positive effect on the ways in which we live our lives.

The fact that Big Data is now more accessible than ever means we are likely to see increasing development of its uses and applications. We will see a lot of instances in which one individual, or firm, finds a slight anomaly or pattern that proves transformative to their business. Big Data has the potential to be ‘game-changing’ to a whole host of organisations. If it’s something that you were unaware of, or though previously was inaccessible, it might be time to start exploring.

Certain images may pop into one’s head when thinking of how the internet is policed. Pondering ‘cyber-crime fighters’; guarding against Trojan horses, spyware or any other sinister sounding web menaces, or the ‘internet police’; censoring inappropriate content, we might, in lighter moments , succumb to imagining funny, cartoon miniature policeman, dashing round our screen’s; wagging fingers and blowing whistles, attempting to restore order in the digital world. Fanciful? Well not if you live in China – in China this actually happens! Funny images, but ones that mask something a touch more serious, because Chinese citizens are subjected to unparralled levels of internet censorship and repression. All internet traffic in China runs through a walled garden network, or country wise intranet – fittingly called the ‘Great Firewall of China’ and upto 30,000 people are employed within the internet police – blocking sites and even monitoring what their citizens search. That China has “the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world” also suggests that there are serious repercussions for transgressing internet law.

And China aren’t alone, the likes of Pakistan, Syria, Burma, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and North Korea, to name a few, also exercise an iron clad grip over how and what their citizens use the internet for.

Of course in the UK a far more liberal policy towards the internet and internet crime is in operation. Our version of the ‘Internet Police’ is the PceU (Police Central e-crime Unit) which provides investigative response to web crime – effectively it’s a reactionary unit. Most prosecutions for ‘web crimes’ in the UK are either for hacking, security breaches etc or related to inappropriate content which is generally confined to ‘criminally obscene adult content’. However, as more of our lives and lived out and expressed over the net, changes to policy are inventible , and indeed already in process. For example in 2012 Matthew Woods and Liam Stacey both spent time behind bars for comments classified under the title of ‘menacing communications’ which loosely pertains to anything deemed either ‘racist or grossly offensive’. When does policing the internet become more about monitoring individual’s speech, right or wrong, rather than its initial use for clamping down on criminally obscene content?

The UK is also beginning to witness battles over the issue of internet privacy. The recently drafted Communications Data Bill proposed for ISPs to store all the details of a user’s communications for a year- including social media usage, voice calls over the internet and gaming. Additionally police would not need permission to view these communications should they require them. With drafts of the bill constantly being reexamined, those in opposition are questioning its ‘big brother’ effects. Would the UK’s Communications Data Bill extend internet policing power too far and actually constitute an infringement of people’s privacy and freedoms?

Though the Communications Data Bill would give police access to user’s information- other ISPs and service providers have made it clear policing the internet is not their job. ISPs have been asked in the past to disconnect their users who may be using their service to illegally download video or music (no criminally obscene content) and refused- stating they are neither in control of what is on the internet, nor the supervisors of what their users choose to look at. ISPs have even appealed provisions to the Digital Economy Act (another piece of UK’s technology driven legislation) that would force them to send out letters threatening service cancellations to users who have downloaded illegal material.

Regardless of your position on policing the internet, monitoring cyber activity isn’t going to stop. The question becomes not about whether policing the internet acceptable, but rather how far is too far? When does policing the internet for those abusing it actually become an abuse to the benign users as well?

If this services was easily accessible to the general public, FTTPoD could be a big step towards competing with the likes of Hong Kong and South Korea in terms of average speeds. However, the number of the general population that will be able to access this service may be limited. FTTPoD runs off BT’s existing FTTC cabinets, which are still out of reach of large sections of the country, and in many areas may never be rolled out. BT has generally targeted highly populated residential areas for this infrastructure, leaving business areas out of reach. FTTPoD also cannot be installed into multi-tenanted premises, which further shows that this is not designed as a business service.

From what information we currently have available, the on-demand product will have a high install cost, but without contention or uptime guarantees normally associated with EAD services. This will raise interesting questions on how this service will be marketed – will home users be prepared to pay hundreds for the install in order to get speeds that arguably are not required by the majority? Will small business owners jump at the chance to access speeds previously only available through leased lines or bonded FTTC. While the install costs may well fall in line with the work that needs to be carried out, FTTPoD is offering BT a chance to begin the replacement last-mile copper lines with cheaper, faster and easier to manage fibre optic cable. No doubt over the next few decades copper will be phased out and fibre will be the main choice for last-mile connectivity, so this is a chance for BT customers to foot the bill for them.

While the lack of contention guarantees and SLAs will put off businesses that are more reliant on their connectivity, this technology could be very appealing to prosumers and start ups. It will be interesting to see if BT’s restrictions will impede businesses putting this to use once it is roll out across the country.

This year we entered as the biggest group Tough Mudder UK has seen to date, and we successfully completed the challenge without any major injuries (only a few bruises). The relentless training, long distance running, and dieting helped to prepare the team to run through mud, electricity, fire and an ice filled plunge pool. The atmosphere in the office has been at high spirits and the team will continue to train over the coming months to keep in shape and prepare for the next big challenge.

The question is what is next for the Bandwidth Bandits?

The privitisation of BT in 1984 represents both a watershed moment for Thatcher and her government as well for our industry. Whist it also reveals much about how the ‘Thatcher Revolution’ gathered pace. Before 1981, all telecoms services in Britain were provided through the Post Office Telecommunications (known as BT from 1980). Widely considered a ‘natural monopoly industry’ ( due to the high infrastructure costs associated with it)  liberalisation of the market had been given little consideration up until the late ‘70s. However against the backdrop of public dissatisfaction with increasing delays for telephone line installation and with new technologies reducing capex costs required to enter the industry, this was soon to change under the first Thatcher government.

The 1981 Telecommunications Act removed BT from the Post Office and this was followed in 1982 by BP, Cable and Wireless and Barclays setting up Mercury – injecting competition into the market place. However at neither of these junctures is there evidence that privatisation was the ultimate vision of Thatcher or her government. Denationalisation was still viewed as a radical and risky policy against the backdrop of 30 plus years of state ownership consensus and state sales prior to ’84 reflected this tentativeness; in that they were small and discreet. The reasons for the sale coming to fruition were on the most part pragmatic; responses to the problems of the time formed gradually through multi-stakeholder negotiation.

Modernising BT was a key objective under the move to separate it from the post office, however financing that moderinisation was a challenge; in 1983 the government’s finances were deep in the red, with a deficit of around 4% of GDP and nationalised industries were competing with key services (health, education etc) for the treasuries limited coppers. Transferring assets into the private sphere not only opened up the options to find investment via other sources (i.e the city) but also raised money for the public purse.

Whilst the primary motivation for the sale of BT was raising funds for future investment, public shared ownership was also attractive to Thatcher for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. Knowing that both Labour and the unions were likely to be opposed to privitisation, the government was able to offer BT employees pre-registered share options (of which 90% took them up on) as a populist bulwark to any attempts to reverse the trend. In tandem with the ‘Right to Buy’ policy, it also began to shape the neo liberalist narrative Thatcher was developing on ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’ and empowering the people through private equity purchases.

The sale of BT encapsulates how Thatcher’s early pragmatically reasoned social and economic policies evolved into a political ideology. Arriving at the conclusion to privatise was a policy building process over a number of years, which always kept a firm eye on what was considered acceptable. When, in November 1984, more than 50 percent of BT was sold to the public through share option, it became the largest ever most successful SOE privatisation exercise in the history. It was also an almost immediate political success, popular with the millions who purchased shares, invigorating the UK stock exchange (very much the beginning of the ‘Big Bang’ in the City) and raising money for the government. The sale would pave the way for a further 40 mass market sell off’s during the Thatcher years and irrevocably altered the relationship between state and market. In many ways the embryo of ‘Thatcherism’ was also hatched during the process – setting a template that one could argue has been followed by all subsequent British governments, as well as many others internationally.

As for the impact on telecommunications, opening up the sector allowed for other operators to enter the market, challenge BT, and invest in new technologies (such as mobile and Internet services). Of course without regulation BT’s ‘natural monopoly’ ( i.e owning the underlying infrastructure) would have made for an uneven playing field so Oftel ( later Ofcom) was established at the point of denationalisation to introduce price caps and optimise BT’s levels of efficiency. Ofcom oversaw further moves to liberalise the market in 1991; when authorising independent companies to bulk-buy telecommunications and sell in packages to customers, and again in 2003 when opening up the telephone exchange for LLU operators.

As of 2012, there were over 200 fixed telecommunications providers, over 100 mobile service providers and over 1,000 Internet service providers operating in the UK. For most consumers there is a wide array of services and providers to choice from and value for money to be gained from doing so. But not for everyone. Many areas of Britain (mostly rural) are without access to fast broadband; for those the wrong side of the ‘Digital Divide’ , in an increasingly digital world, there are serious social and economic consequences, for communities and individuals. The reasons for this divide? It’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that privatisation constitutes the root cause; given that historically operators have reframed from investing in areas where there are unable to identify significant ROI. The establishment of BDUK (Broadband Delivery Fund) in 2009 represents a move from the government to intervene in the market and initiate state led solutions to this problem.

When Margaret Thatcher set the wheels in motion for the liberalisation of the telecommunications, she did so with more modest than radial intentions. Just a few years later, she would find herself presiding over change which would not only revolutionise the telecommunications industry, but which constituted a seismic shift in the relationships between the state, individual and market and had both immediate and long lasting economic, political and social consequences across the UK.

When people now debate Thatcher’s legacy, they debate the merits of policies and philosophy’s which were sharpened, developed and ultimately given momentum, by those changes to our industry, over 30 years ago.

The target of what became the largest DDoS attack in history (up to 300 Gb/s) was Spamhaus – an anti-spam website whose practices and methods have made them unpopular within shadier corners of the internet. The attack, began on March 18^th, fully saturating Spamhaus’ connection to the rest of the Internet and came close to knocking their site offline. If not for the intervention of Cloudflare (who provide protection against such attacks) it’s likely it would have done. Cloudflare ‘rescue’ story below.

http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-ddos-that-knocked-spamhaus-offline-and-ho

The Spamhaus DDos attacks may be the biggest to date, but they are not in isolation, rather they are the latest in a long list of recent incidents. American Express and HSBC fell victim to large scale attacks last year and it’s a trend security vendor Kaspersky expects to continue. “In general, attacks of this type are growing in terms of quantity as well as scale. Among the reasons for this growth is the development of the Internet itself (network capacity and computing power) and past failures in investigating and prosecuting individuals behind past attacks.”

Another trend that we are witnessing is that of cyber criminals exploiting a fundamental feature that allows us to use the internet – DNS. Domain Name System converts from name to IP through your computer asking a server what the IP address is. However the chances are that the server you ask won’t know the answer, so it will go and get it for you from a list of known authoritative servers. Once it has the answer it will reply back to original sender. These ‘recursive’ DNS servers are the life blood of how we use the internet, without them you would have to memorise each IP address!

However there are thousands of ‘recursive’ DNS servers out there which will accept queries from any IP address. If spoofed DNS packets are then sent to those unsecured servers they are susceptible to what is known as a DNS amplification attack – where only 3 or 4 KB of data can be sent, but where the request can generate as much as 100x that amount. This means that even with a relatively small number of nodes the bandwidth hit can be enormous. Combating these attacks is possible, but the way in which we do so may hinge on the answers to many other much broader questions about the future of the internet and in particular – who governs it.

Looking at the Spamhaus attack, it would appear that both unsecured DNS (by design) and unsecured DNS (by misconfiguration) were responsible for the amplification of the attack. One way of nullifying this would be for all ISP’s to only allow their customers IP’s to query their own DNS servers (as we do at Fluidata) however the processing overheads deter many others from doing so. As it stands customers also have the option to build their own recursive DNS servers on their own infrastructure; moving DNS outside of the ISP’s responsibility and increasing the potential for misconfiguration; which can be exploited for malicious purposes.

In theory ISP’s could form a united front against DDoS attacks of this nature; through insisting that customers only use their recursive DNS servers and ensuring that those servers are secure. To increase security further BCP-38 could also be deployed – providing filtering on every edge port so that customers cannot spoof traffic from their links. However the move to a more regulated system would rely on (if it was to be truly effective) cross national coordination and likely meet opposition from service providers who do not wish to incur the processing overheads associated with such measures.

Overcoming that opposition (i.e. by turning regulation into something more akin to legal statute) would inexorably carry this issue into the contentious territory of who governs the internet, who polices it and whether anybody has the right to do; a proverbial Pandora’s box with far reaching consequences and considerations for subjects ranging from security to freedom of speech, right to privacy and the debate over the openness of the web. Given this, raising awareness around responsible DNS use seems the most viable course of action; the Spamhaus attack legacy might just be encouraging people to think a little more about it.

The study has suggested that with the imminent widespread release of the technology resulting in faster and more reliable mobile connectivity, consumers will be increasing the number of online purchases whilst on the move.

4G will allow shoppers to browse the web with speeds between five & ten times faster than the current 3G networks, meaning that shoppers are less likely to become frustrated with slow downloads and slow loading pages; an all too familiar experience – especially in densely populated areas such as cites, busy train stations, and of course high streets.

Whilst great news for retailers on the most part, further increases in online purchases could speed up the decline of an already contracting high street. In response, some retailers are seeking to innovate and diversify to enhance customers’ in-store experience.

For example, Topshop and Selfridges in London have now built ‘chill out’ style rooms- giving shoppers (or bored husbands and boyfriends) the opportunity to relax before venturing back out to the busy shop floor. While the likes of Burberry have gone a step further; turning their Regent’s Street store into ‘Burberry Live World’, where they are piloting interactive technology such as 22ft-high screens, 500 hidden speakers, a hydraulic stage, and even RFID mirco-chipped clothes and ‘smart mirrors’. Guest Ipad’s for customers to browse collections and view video content are fast becoming a common feature in brand high street stores.

Of course while the likes of Arcadia group can afford to have snazzy technologies and gadgets in store, and spend huge amounts of money on Google adwords and Big Data, the same is not true for smaller, independent stores. How those will cope in a choppy economic climate and on what is increasingly looking like an even more uneven playing field, remains to be scene.

Interestingly, it looks like researchers in the Netherlands have figured out a way to use weather associated network problems to monitor the weather itself! In this instance; using mobile phone signal power loss to map rainfall patterns. To me personally, I already monitor the rain in real time by stepping outside. However if it means the weather forecasters can watch a rain front travel across the country, and then give me a warning about it, all the better.

The system uses the attenuation (power) differences through the mobile networks. They cross referenced their information with weather stations across the country and realised there was a correlation. Off the back of that they can see the fronts; as they aim for the most inappropriate place on land to dump their contents.

We will see if O2, EE or Vodafone develop into weather forecasting companies in the near future. Further reading can be found here: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/52322