Martha Lane Fox launches online campaign
Web guru Martha Lane Fox has launched a bid to get Mersey firms online. She shot to fame as a star of the dotcom boom – and Martha Lane Fox is still enthused by the power of the internet.
Ms Lane Fox co-founded travel website Lastminute.com, and saw it grow into one of the web’s best-known brands.
Today, she is the Government’s “digital champion”, leading the Race Online push to help millions of people who have never been online to get to grips with the internet.
She was in Liverpool on Tuesday 2nd November 2011 to launch the city’s own campaign to get more citizens online – Go On, It’s Liverpool. Campaign leaders estimate that 100,000 people in Liverpool have never been online.
Going online can help people save money, access Government services, and stay in touch with their family and friends. But, say Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and regeneration agency Liverpool Vision, the city’s economy will also benefit if more people use the web.
The web offers many opportunities for people to start their own small firms, whether through their own websites or through sites such as Ebay.
Vision estimates Liverpool needs up to 9,000 more small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to be formed if its economy is to keep pace with those in cities of a similar size. Many of those businesses, it says, could sell their wares online.
Search engine giant Google, meanwhile, is holding a three-month campaign to get Mersey firms online.
It is the first time the search engine giant has spent so long in one city. Liverpool was chosen because it lagged behind other UK cities in terms of the number of firms with their own websites.
In addition, the Chamber says that Liverpool will become a more attractive destination for inward investors if its population has digital skills.
So, Go On project leaders are looking to recruit 500 Liverpool businesses to become digital champions and help people get online. Organisations that have already signed up include Merseytravel and Liverpool One.
And Go On wants businesses to ensure that all their staff, at all levels, have adequate digital skills.
Nationally, Ms Lane Fox is also promoting the Give An Hour campaign, which calls on internet-savvy people to give an hour of their time to help people to discover the value of the web.
In 2004, the entrepreneur was almost killed in a car accident in Morocco. She spent two years in hospital and still walks with a cane, leading her to describes herself, with a smile, as a “wobbly champion”.
But behind the smile lies a determination to get Britain online.
“I’m going to try to turn this one wobbly champion into many thousands of champions,” she told the Go On It’s Liverpool launch event in Liverpool Innovation Park yesterday. “Everybody benefits when everyone is online.”
Speaking to LDP Business before the event, Ms Lane Fox said she was as excited about the web now as she was when she first started Lastminute.com
She said: “I was asked in 2009, by the Government, if I could lend a hand to help people use technology.
“I got on this crazy mission to try to make the UK one of the most developed countries in the world, in that everyone has the opportunity to use the internet. I didn’t know how much I’d be bitten by this mission.
“I started Lastminute.com and had an incredible experience of technology. Then I fell out of a car and spent two years in hospital, and had another incredible experience of technology.
“I still wasn’t sure I’d be bitten by this incredible energy I get when helping people to get online.
“I was given every opportunity. My family is pretty well off. I went to a great school. The internet still changed my life.
“For people who haven’t been given the privileges I had, it’s pretty inspiring to see that the internet is then one of the things that has helped them get back to education or get a job, or if they’re elderly feel a bit less lonely.
“I’ve worked for three years now with local communities. And it’s got to happen locally – it won’t happen with just me.”
Ms Lane Fox was pleased that, in Liverpool, several organisations had pulled together to promote her campaign.
“I’m delighted with what’s happening in Liverpool,” she said.
“The whole idea of this campaign is to try to bring partners together.
“I really feel that we can repeat what Liverpool has done in other places around the country. Liverpool can be an exemplar.”
Ms Lane Fox echoed Liverpool Chamber’s message that businesses hoping to grow could not afford to ignore the web.
She said getting people online could help to create a whole new generation of “mini-entrepreneurs” who could start businesses online and one day follow in her footsteps.
“It’s relatively easy to start a business online”, she said, “for example through Ebay. Or you can start a website pretty quickly to test your idea.
“As an example, there was a woman I met from Birmingham, originally from Somalia, who had six children and was on benefits.
“But she said ‘screw that – I can speak six languages’. So she set up an online translation business. It now employs three people. She’s a great example.
“Yes, we’re still trying to create the next Google in this country, but we also want to create that kind of small business. That’s where the internet is extremely valuable.”
Another speaker at yesterday’s event, Peter Barron, of Google, told the crowd that he recently visited Liverpool for the first time in many years, using the ferry to Belfast. He had no ideas from where the ferry left, or when it sailed – but he was quickly able to find out online. Small firms, he said, should learn from large firms such as ferry operators.
He said: “A lot of small businesses are intimidated, or think it’s not necessary to have their own websites.
“But the truth is that those people who are searching for, for example, Liverpool ferries, are searching for all their services online.”
Referring to Google’s three-month campaign in Liverpool, Mr Barron said: “We know we’re in difficult economic times at the moment. But we know the companies that are growing fastest are the ones that are online.
“Companies that use the internet are growing about four times faster than those without. So we can see the importance of this campaign.”
Professor Dennis Kehoe, chief executive of Innovation Park tenant AIMES Grid Services, talked about his company’s work connecting businesses and homes to high-speed broadband.
He said, with a smile, that the case for the benefits of widening internet access “is so well made that even Prime Ministers understand it”.
Phil Blything, director of Liverpool-based Glow New Media, said he believed that the growing use of cheap smartphones meant that many people who could not previously afford the internet were now able to do so.
And later, during the panel discussion, he said that it was vital that young people learned not just how to use the internet, but learned how it worked through software coding lessons in schools.
With those skills, he said, they would be able to start web firms of their own rather than relying on other firms’ technology.
He said: “There is a risk that we all end up customers of Amazon or Google, and all we end up with is a warehouse in Warrington. That’s not the economy I want.”
For more information on Go On It’s Liverpool, visit www.raceonline2012.org/liverpool
To become a “Digital Champion”, visit www.go-on.co.uk/giveanhour
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