e-mango's 10 years
by Gordon Fong, Managing Director
As we enter the New Year, 2010 signals the 10th anniversary of e-mango as a business. I thought it would be an excellent opportunity for me to stop and reflect over that period on the enormous changes that the industry and the Internet have undergone. I would also like to acknowledge the contributions that the staff, past and present, have played on the journey so far.
With the exponential rise of the Internet and a huge wave of entrepreneurial spirit washing over the world I left my previous job in 1999 with a company that had specialised in ISDN, a technology soon to be made obsolete, with regards to Internet access anyway, by ADSL.
The Millennium bug was looming, as was the farce of the Millennium Dome and soothsayers of doom. It was the dawn of a new decade and century. For me, it was the dawn of a new chapter in my own life.
I co-founded e-mango.com Ltd, as it was first named, and it began trading in 2000. Those were heady days with high ideas and aspirations, with many examples of businesses gathering astronomical valuations and no real underlying business revenue models. That still exists today, just look at Facebook and Twitter, but there is much more scrutiny now.
e-mango's original vision was firmly focussed on delivering Internet services for small to medium sized business, starting with smaller items like domain name along with e-mail and web site hosting. As the clients' needs grew, e-mango's range of services would grow accordingly to encompass web site design, e-commerce, bespoke development and onto fully managed services.
We survived the dotcom boom and bust and following that the company name was shortened to just e-mango Ltd. That period saw a clearout of many businesses large and small as well as vast sums of venture capital and personal investment get used up. As I reflect I have to swallow hard at the thought of spending a five-figure sum on our domain names. Those were strange times indeed.
One memorable moment was crawling in the loft above the studio of local radio presenter Matt Hopper with a pair of Marigolds gloves on installing an Ethernet network. Matt produced some radio adverts for e-mango featuring the actor Art Malik doing the voiceover.
What we learnt from that blip was for e-mango to focus on mature well-established businesses and organisations. The days of the son of a wealthy father having thousands to spend on a hobby website were gone. This is why e-mango focuses on Public Sector and the Membership and Associations sector and works in long-term partnership with its clients.
The usability and sheer beauty of websites have also come a long way. The core infrastructure to facilitate the bandwidth and computing requirements has meant that the IT manufacturing industry has had to deliver rapid growth and technological improvements at a staggering rate. In many respects our lifestyles and work life have changed quite radically, it has also meant a growing environmental impact but opened the doors into new ways of working and living. I will now touch on these areas.
I recall watching Tomorrow's World as a child and how there was a perception that computers would one day enable us as a society to have more leisure time and let computers take up the work. I don't think this has happened at all in the main. For some people with the right business model that might be true, they sit back and let their online system do all the work and take in the money. The fact that business processes have become highly efficient and society now demands instant service means that we are working just as hard as ever. Furthermore, people seem more attached to work even outside of work hours. Mobile phones, PDAs and broadband are all technologies that keep us in constant communication with work whether we like it or not. In the same way, as consumers, we demand up-to-the-minute information and access to services from home at anytime of the day. We expect to call up or go online, 24 hours a day, and get done what we need to do.
As we now enter a new decade the whole concept of technological convergence and ubiquity is becoming more of a reality. We first had phones, then camera phones, then smartphones, then even smarter phones with Internet access, and finally the whole culture of 'applications' to suit any need that you may have for your smartphone. Let me give an example of the contribution and positive impact these devices can make.
I was on holiday in Brussels and had arranged to meet a friend in the business district. Having made the long journey from Leuven into Brussels, then across the Metro I came out the station and was 5 minutes walk away. I spent 40 minutes wandering the streets thinking I was going in the right direction. In the end I succumbed and turned on data roaming for my iPhone, which when overseas costs £3 per Mb of data. Within a few minutes I finally met up with my friend.
One barrier to really forging ahead is providing Internet access globally: for example, by opening up data roaming so it is either free or not prohibitively expensive, as well as providing free wireless access across city centres. My feeling is that by having the same freedom of access outside the home as we do from home, meaning those with ADSL or Broadband, the whole mechanics of the nation's economy would turn even greater. I also believe things such as AR (Augmented Reality) and Location Services via your smartphone will greatly improve how we venture out into the real world.
By increasing the availability of Internet access, society and technology will work out newer and more effective ways of using what is currently available or derive something new when required. One could call this technological engineering through social interaction and feedback.
The advances in IT equipment over the past decade as well as the reduction in costs has meant our homes can be furnished so that Internet access, music and video can be at the touch of our fingers. At home I frequently do the ironing while watching programmes via the BBC iPlayer on a small £200 PC over my wireless network and playing music from a shared 2Tb Network Storage.
Having extolled the virtues of technology I do think there are some huge side issues namely the reliance on IT and the reliance on power. Virtually every business relies on IT in some shape or form. Just think how much business and servicing your customers you could do if someone came along and turned off all your PCs and servers. As well as using computers for processing there is also the need to store all the information and to back it all up.
We expect to go to a search engine like Google and to type in a phrase that we want to read about and have the results returned within an instant and from that point to delve into any of the results that we see in an instant. To make this possible means that there will be millions of computer servers, disk drives, storage systems and backup systems all permanently running to facilitate this global access. Facebook supposedly has 5000 to 8000 servers in a London data centre. Having all of this data on tap 24/7 means that servers and disks need to be powered, kept running and cooled. This represents a huge energy and carbon impact. The dependency on energy is critical and hence the rise of the term "energy security".
With the low fuel reserves, the consequences of extreme cold weather spells as recently experienced brings life closer to that recent episode of Spooks where the UK was held to ransom over gas supplies from former Soviet states. Are we truly a few days away from using up all the UK energy reserves? A very scary thought indeed.
We no longer live in an insular corner of the world. The global impact is right at everyone's door. The influence on international law and economics for example with the growing numbers of graduates in China, India and Africa will grow and the world will move from the US and Euro-centric view towards something that bears more African and Eastern influences.
Even the huge increases in computing power cannot predict weather to the level we would like. The Met Office is even rethinking whether to provide long-range forecasts due to the recent furore over the BBQ summer that never was and then the big freeze that hit the UK.
Where computers were thought to be clever and the ideal tool to manage automatic transactions on the stock markets, in fact they nearly brought it to its knees. For me one of the best facilities I have used is Facebook. I have learnt more about my family relatives over the last year than all the previous years put together.
So in closing, which will it be: greater openness and availability of information to delight and engage the right-minded, or more safeguards, barriers and restrictions in the fight against the wrong-doer? I wonder how the World of the Web will look in another 10 years......