North East has most tech start-ups outside London

The North East has the highest number of technology start ups than anywhere in the UK outside of London according to a speech from the director of Newcastle company, Accenture.

Speaking at the Thinking Digital Conference at the Sage, Gateshead, Bob Paton told the hundreds of assembled delegates that currently more than 25,000 people work in technology in the region.

Taking to the stage at Hall Two of the Sage, Bob unveiled plans for a North East North East of England IT Forum, spearheaded by the industry leaders.

He said: “Over the last few months there’s been a meeting of minds of the leaders in the technology industry saying ‘we need to shout a little bit more about what we’re doing in the North East.

“So we’re going to create a North East of England IT Forum, we’re going to have a number of objectives, we’re going to promote what we do, we’re going to grow our industry

“If you’re going to have a growth in the industry you’ve got to have the skills agenda right, so we’ve reached out to all the major universities and colleges and schools in the North East to work on what we can do to create the programmers of the future.”

Next to present their ideas to the audience was Drew Purves, head of Computational Ecology and Environmental Science at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

Drew works with large swathes of data, computer science and ecological theory to build software models that address environmental challenges.

He also develops software tools to enable users to carry out their own ecological modelling.

During his presentation, Drew demonstrated the Fetch Climate software that can zoom in on any area on map to find ecological and climate data such as wind-speed, it is also able to capture historical trends and year on year data.

Speaking at the conference, Drew said :“If we’re going to solve the variety of environmental problems that we’re facing, just like solving any other problem we’re going to do that by anticipating the future and what we can do to change that future.

“What we’re trying to do is build predictive models of various aspects of the natural world, whether that’s the carbon cycle, oceans and biodiversity or some aspects of the semi-natural world like agricultural sustainability or deforestation.

“What that requires is to build new models about how a given aspect of the environment might work and bring in lots of data and train those models against the data, and that then enables us to choose between competing models and in that way improve our understanding about how the world works.

“So with uncertainty, that we can then hand off to decision makers who can then make a joined up decision about the world.