Daniel Mitchell's Blog

Is it a case of ‘goodbye blog, hello Twitter’?

Visitors to my blog tend now to be a few curious clients of my business and more frequently, people referred by Google searches to (hopefully) relevant articles. As I am no longer blogging regularly, there is little point in return visits generally and this is reflected in the traffic levels to the site.

 

Welcome to Twitter?

Whilst I don’t intend to drop my subscription to Typepad and I strongly suspect I will start writing again at some point, for now, my public comments and observations are happening on http://twitter.com/danmitch I have included a feed ‘widget’ for this on the right of this page.

 

Twitter allows me to make quick observations as things happen, without having to take the time to write entire articles, though looking back there are a few to elaborate on:

 

Interesting analysis of RAND Corporation's "Trusted Traveler" Working Paper by @Bruce_Schneier http://is.gd/bZXIln about 15 hours ago via web 

 

The ‘Trusted Traveler’ concept is an interesting one, built around the concept of focussing the scarce security resource at airports around those travellers deemed to be higher risk. In fact as this article and the comments that follow state, in reality this scheme at best allows a small minority to process through a bit more rapidly. It does raise interesting thoughts on profiling of travellers however and some of the concepts, while difficult to implement would surely improve airline security.

 

Dropbox Security Bug Made Passwords Optional For Four Hours http://t.co/kHrk7FO via @techcrunch 1 day ago via Tweet Button 

 

I use Dropbox to keep a small number of photos and documents that I am working on in sync between my Macs and occasionally for sharing documents with friends and colleagues. I never use it for anything remotely sensitive so the security scare didn’t impact me personally. Having said that, it was pretty serious and will dent confidence in cloud based document storage generally. Simple advice would be to encrypt any documents that are sensitive regardless of where they are stored.

 

Rory Story Cubes - new to the site - new, award winning game for imaginative storytellers http://fb.me/D8QWP1Mz 9:48 PM Jun 18th via Facebook Retweeted by you 

 

A retweet of an update posted by my wife Amanda who has set up a great new business selling pre-wrapped travel toys for kids - perfect for busy jetsetting families!

 

Would love @Gladwell to start tweeting again ... 7:42 PM Jun 18th via web 

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of Outliers and Blink, among other books - brilliant writer and thinker and threatened to be an interesting Tweeter too!  

 

Great lunch at http://www.therustygun.co.uk in Hitchin today - highly recommended! 7:26 PM Jun 18th via Seesmic for BlackBerry 

No further explanation required!

 

Shadow Chancellor calls for temporary VAT cut - not convinced and would be an admin nightmare for small business - http://bbc.in/mbn6mV 5:17 PM Jun 16th via BBC Website 

I will resist a long rant! In fact it was the change to VAT in November 2008 that got me blogging in the first place. At the time I pointed out the considerable administrative cost to small business of tampering with VAT, and subsequent changes have been no easier to implement. This is not the tax to be playing with in my opinion.

Other Tweets have included Curb, my work with Graduate Fashion Week, cycling and risk analysis of alien invasions in Nottinghamshire - I could never write a blog article on that!

 I’ll finish with a brilliant article from the superb ISN resource and invite you to follow me at http://twitter.com/danmitch if you have found these of interest:

 

Must read - Bin Laden and the Perils of Liberal Assassination - http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/ISN-Insights/Detail?id=129124 2:17 PM May 19th via web

 

 

 

Inauguration over the Internet - Obama's Science & Technology

Obama's commitment to science and particularly to technology has been widely reported and is evident not only in his internet based campaigning and fundraising, but also in the various social sites that have grown around the campaign. UK politicians have toyed with internet based campaigning and I have no doubt that the most obvious effect will be that the next general election in the UK will take leads from the US and particularly the Obama team’s use of technology. Perhaps this will even filter down to more acceptance by business and organisations of the advantages of social networking. Maybe a less direct result will be IT strategy being taken more seriously at senior levels within business as technology becomes a bigger part of the political agenda.

This afternoon I watched the inauguration via the internet on CNN.com via collaboration with Facebook, very fitting with the online campaign - this unique partnership allowed many hundreds of thousands of viewers not only to view live coverage but see comments and thoughts streaming side by side with the video feed. From a technical point of view I found it pretty amazing that streaming held really well over a standard ADSL connection, while still maintaining my VPN link to the office and a link to my mail server.  This must be one of the greatest bandwidth bursts globally in history and really has set the scene for the future.

On a more political note, I can't help feeling that some of the joy felt across the world at Obama’s election is due to a restoration of dignity among Americans who previously sanctioned a second term in office for a man who history may well judge as the worst president of all time and perhaps even more importantly had as their government a team that sanctioned the shameful history, not to mention legacy of Guantanamo Bay.

I will however miss the humour from eight years of "Bushisms" so will leave the final farewell to Whitehouse.org.

Small Business Act for Europe

Yesterday the Small Business Act for Europe received approval. For a programme described by EU Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen as "the most ambitious project the Commission has ever proposed", it seems to have received very little coverage in mainstream or business media. The act has proposals including improved access to funding, consideration of SMEs specifically in implementation of new business regulations, options for member states to reduce VAT for locally provided services and guidelines on public sector procurement, it was first proposed in June 2008.
 
There are however some notable omissions in the approved act compared with original proposals. Ministers failed to reach agreement on the implementation of the Statute for A European Private Company, a framework for SMEs to set up businesses in their home country, to run in various EU states without having to establish individual entities complying with each member states statutory requirements.
 
This change alone is disappointing, as director of a business looking to expand our presence in Europe over coming years, bureaucratic barriers to this market can be quite daunting, not to mention expensive. 70% of EU jobs and GDP are attributable to small business and as such our sector should be receiving massive support from governing bodies.
 
On a brighter note, with ambitious targets on funding, we should look out for new options from Europe specifically for small business and improved access for small business to public sector contracts. Whilst I remain sceptical of the UK governments real understanding of small business, it does seem that at least for the EU, small business is beginning to get the attention it earns.

VAT - the cost of change on Monday

Following the change in VAT rates that will come into effect next Monday, I looked around to see how business opinions were being reflected, some press coverage emerged and the IoD issued a press release. Whilst I generally agree with the sentiments expressed in the press release from Mr Templeman, it has failed to make issue of the significant time costs and financial cost, particularly to small businesses, of this VAT rate change. The government estimates the administrative cost to be around £300 million.

Several large companies have already commented on the logistics nightmare of this change, but for small businesses the implications are often massive. According to the standard letter issued on 24th by HMRC to VAT registered companies, “most software packages should have the in-built ability to deal with the changes in the rate”, however in my experience over the last few days, this vastly underestimates the real difficulties, particularly with businesses that may have little in house bookkeeping resource. Accounting software companies and  EPOS providers have been inundated with support requests on how to make code changes, resulting in one major provider closing down completely to “regroup” on Monday of this week. Moreover, small businesses with less standardised or bespoke systems have been suffering terribly, with at least two of our clients having to have major rewrites to databases to cope with these changes at exceptionally short notice.

Small companies involved with e-commerce are in a number of cases having costly changes made to websites, whether or not they wish to pass on the rate changes to customers. Those involved with affiliate schemes or that have overseas sales with automatic “tax free” VAT crediting are experiencing significant expense and problems in rapidly modifying websites.

Businesses, including mine, that receive regular contract payments by Standing Order have to choose between reissuing mandates to all clients and suffering the cashflow consequences of errors and delays in processing these, or having to deal with manual refunds of overpayments for the next thirteen months.

Whilst many small businesses are choosing not to re-ticket merchandise or reprint literature and catalogues, a number have no choice, such as those operating concessions in larger retail outlets, again this carries significant cost.

A further cost to business has arisen with the fact that VAT reductions on vehicle fuel have been replaced with duty, which in fact means an increase in cost to VAT registered businesses, since while VAT is reclaimable, duties are not.

With it being generally accepted that the VAT rate will have little effect on consumer spending, it is my opinion that businesses selling to consumers will have significant cost and little benefit from the rate change, whilst those selling “business to business” will have only costs. At least businesses now have thirteen months notice of the next change.