Yoni Assia: Tomorrow’s Tech City could be anywhere

Old Street has been dubbed 'Silicon roundabout'

1 July 2014

Today, 'Tech City’ is a fashionable nickname given to a cluster of technology start-ups in east London.

The initiative was born of a desire to build on the area's regeneration after the Olympics. It provides access to the nearby financial district and competes globally to attract promising, high tech success stories.

Tomorrow’s Tech City could be right here - wherever you are.

Any community can have a Tech City. You don't have to be in the nation's capital to build a network of like minded people, because so called 'digital natives' are everywhere.

Every family has one and every county has tens of thousands. This means that every UK community is already automatically evolving from a Digital City, in which citizens already access local services and share interactive maps on line, to a Tech City, whose constituents want a vibrant ecosystem of ideas and companies.

In an interconnected world, a Tech City is becoming less of a physical space, and more like an iTunes or a Facebook, a living breathing organism that creates its own community. It invites people to share their opinions and developers to debate and refine their ideas.

These relationships built through technology are genuinely revolutionary. There is a profound difference between established conventions and the so called sharing society. This is not some abstract, virtual revolution. It redefines the real world, a socially connected world.

With the young people, high speed broadband, tablets, iPhones and social precedents such as Facebook already in place, all a Tech City needs to evolve is a civic understanding of the power of interaction, and an emphasis on attracting start ups as much as established companies.

All cities are platforms. To make start-ups want to come to yours, find them on line by extending the physical platform with its infrastructural connectivity into an online portal. Create an informed interaction between schools, colleges, employers and businesses and enable them to feed off each others' ideas.

In the digital age, that's how to turn the platform into a magnet. It is also how to foster and attract local and international start ups, prevent talent flight, attract international innovators, raise cash from venture capitalists and crowdfunders and find customers from across the world.

Take it from us. Our social investment network has no boundaries. We built a platform, 3.5 million people created the crowd. We organise the data they share, but they create the knowledge, wisdom and interaction that enables us to anticipate the services they want us to provide.

We are just one among thousands of global, emerging companies in search of robust foundations on which to innovate and grow.

All these companies need is an informed urban development strategy where start ups are made welcome in a like-minded community, with organised access to skills and business advice, where clusters are arranged as much to provide us with affordable space as access to professional services at reasonable costs – where sharing is made scalable, easy to create and benefit from. These firms want to hire a desk by the day as easily as an office by the month. And lockable bike racks.

In return they can give apprenticeships and help dent unemployment, give vent to the productivity of young minds, contribute to the teaching of computer science in schools and help attract parallel services such as restaurants and bars that add colour and life. These companies can put you on the digital map.

Tomorrow’s cities will thrive with a measure of the unexpected that feeds on their proud traditions of the past while fuelling the imagination of those who create its future.

The successful ones will guard against the creation of exclusive and introspective communities where success means segregation between those who can and cannot afford to stay. Cities that depend too entirely on technology can dehumanise themselves, and even become obsolete.

If the social revolution can work for us, a seven year old technology start up, it can work in a dynamic community or a mighty metropolis with the talent base to compete with anywhere on earth.

Yoni Assia is founder and chief executive of social investment network eToro

Yoni Assia: Tomorrow’s Tech City could be anywhere

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