'Elite' Scottish Universities paper over education cracks
LET'S FACE IT – Scotland doesn’t really lead the world in anything much. Our sports teams are mediocre, we have almost no globally...
Awards' international female role models beg a question
BACK IN 1989, I was chairman of the Scottish Software Federation, the then nascent trade association for the Scottish software industry....
Brexit casts huge shadow over funding of tech start-ups
NOW THAT THE Brexit negotiations are limping into action it is becoming very clear that this is going to be far from a simple process. We...
Code clubs can inspire our children to become digital natives
AS WE ALL KNOW, today’s world is increasingly a digital one. It is pretty much impossible to think of a modern activity that doesn’t, in...
EU stands alone against US digital major's market dominance
THE FIVE MOST VALUABLE companies in the world today are all digital businesses from the west coast of the USA: Apple, Google, Microsoft,...
Scotland needs ignored by 'little Englander' Prime Minister
BY THE TIME you read this our ‘supreme leader’ Theresa May will have won her huge majority which empowers her to do anything she wants to...
Do the numbers add up for merry BrewDog?
AS A REGULAR INVESTOR in early-stage companies, and a beer drinker, you might think that I would have been tempted to invest in BrewDog –...
Why not all start-ups are of equal value
A FEW YEARS AGO I was invited to join a new programme run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was called the Regional...
Are we happy to lead on extreme surveillance?
WHEN I HOSTED a major international conference in Edinburgh in September 1994 I invited Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide...
Now is the time to address alarming IT teaching gap
AS WE ALL KNOW, our world is increasingly a digital one. Whether it is web publishing, online commerce and banking, driverless cars, or...
Fracking could transform our economic performance
HOWEVER YOU LOOK AT IT, the Scottish economy is currently a basket case. Our deficit, were we a separate economy, would be running at...
Call for Scottish campaign to champion female leaders
FOR MANY YEARS NOW, more girls than boys are going to university, and in some particularly traditional professions, such as law,...
The real culprits of the pensions crisis
WHEN I WAS RUNNING a start-up technology business in the 1980s we set up a pension scheme for our employees – it seemed the right thing...
Simplistic columns mislead on Brexit
WHEN WE last voted on our constitutional future here in Scotland, the SNP government provided a 648- page white paper describing in huge...
Education in Scotland heads backwards
WHEN MY late wife graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1973 with a first class honours degree in Mathematics and Natural...
A call to BT - the internet stage is set
BACK IN THE LATE 1990s I was invited to a BT evening event and over dinner I was seated next to the group managing director for BT UK. He...