You know when you've been iPhoned

And so, finally and inevitably, I have been iPhoned. It’s been a long time coming, and I’ve really got no excuses. I was absolutely wedded to Apple products in the 1990s, using an early Mac laptop to produce magazines on Quark Express, and counted myself as one of the IT rebels proudly resisting the Evil Empire of the Microsoft Death Star.
A senior bean counter put paid to all that, and it wasn’t until probably four years or so ago that I came back into the fold and bought an iPod Touch. It was a revelation, partly because – incredibly – I had no idea when I went to try it that you could hook up to the web. 

At last, the Nokia nightmare is over...

Ever since, my early morning routine has begun with a ritual shave, mug of tea and a gaze at the headlines on the iPod.

May be the fact that I’d got music and the web on the iPod was the reason I didn’t bother with an iPhone. Either way, I stumbled badly on my last two contract renewals with Orange, signing up first for an LG Viewty (early touchscreen, great video, appalling phone/text functionality, slow processing and a stylus which wore out after only a few months) and then a Nokia E72 Blackberry lookalike (decent phone, great texting, slim enough to fit in a pocket, screen way too small for the web, Twitter and LinkedIn).

Last Thursday was the deadline for the Nokia to be pensioned off (and just to mark the occasion the text icon stopped working). I’d thought for sometime that I’d take the plunge on an iPhone this time round, but wavered momentarily thanks to my wife’s Samsung Galaxy. It’s slightly bigger than an iPhone, has a brilliantly vivid screen and made my Nokia look like the cretaceous-era relic it really was. I was almost tempted.
It’s really thanks to the Macoholics among Nottingham’s surveying community that I resisted the siren call of Android (Google is now right up there with Microsoft in my book). I’ve seen the likes of Innes England and FHP bustle round town armed with iPhones and iPads, dribbling like a schoolboy as they bring CGIs and site plans up on screen in coffee shops while I scribble prehistorically into a notebook.
Recently, it’s got worse. My colleague Richard Tresidder spends more time working on his iPad than he does on the office desktop juggernaut, and while I was over at MIPIM I was in the company of the High Priest of Mac, Tim Garratt. I put years on waiting for my Windows laptop to fire up while he was already blogging, and felt so ashamed of my Nokia I had to go into quiet corners to make calls.
Anyway, the technoshame is nearing an end. Yesterday, I came out of Carphone Warehouse in Newark the proud owner of an iPhone 4S. It’s heavy, chunky...and beautiful to use. Twitter and LinkedIn are now an icon away, the screen is luminously sharp and I’m trawling the App Store for stuff which is going to come in useful and wondering where I can find a decent case (any suggestions gratefully received).
I’ve only scratched the surface of the iPhone’s functionality, but the intuitive simplicity of the device just keeps opening doors to new stuff.
The only issue is when it’s going to be joined by an iPad. May be then I’ll feel like the years of Windows start-up yawns, tedious system updates and all-round Microsoft serfdom are finally over.

A Budget blunder and the big issue of business investment

It must have been a pretty good afternoon for the Chancellor’s political advisers yesterday, and you can imagine the conversation after the Budget speech was over.
“So, how do you think it went?”
“Yeah, pretty good, I thought.”
“That’s the way I saw it, no real problems.”
“Absolutely, Labour didn’t land any real blows.”
“Job done then.”
Except it wasn’t. This morning, they will have woken up to some universally appalling headlines which transformed what had seem to be an OK performance into a cack-handed raid on a group which no sensible politician should ever willingly offend: pensioners.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs of a decision to freeze the allowances of the elderly (and the sums are far from nightmare territory for a group which tends to spend less), this was an amateurish blunder on two levels. The decision to leave it out of the Budget speech and bury it in the Treasury papers was asking for both trouble and comparisons with Gordon Brown, a past master at parliamentary sleight-of-hand.
And putting yourself in a position where you have to justify taking money off people who have no means of working to make it up leaves you painted into a corner. In PR terms, it was dumb.
The money that George Osborne was handing over by increasing the basic allowance had to come from somewhere because he was committed to not increasing borrowing . And numbers from the independent Office for Budgetary Responsibility suggest that while the economy has probably got enough momentum to avoid another recession, it hasn’t yet latched on to significant growth.
So a straight giveaway would have been politically and economically risky.
This is why many business organisations greeted the Budget with a universal “Is that it?”, with disappointment that there were few tangible measures that either removed a burden from business or gave it a chunky opportunity to pitch for.
The cut in Corporation Tax will be welcome, and raises the question of what businesses are going to do with all the money they are sitting on. In an edition built around signs of recovery in the all-important US economy, The Economist suggested that British businesses are sitting on a cumulative cash pile of around £700 billion, so there is a clear opportunity here for some substantial business investment.
So the corporation tax cut can only help give firms more comfort if they decide they are going to start spending some of the money they have stashed.
As for the decision to cut the top tax rate from 50p to 45p next year, I wonder how much difference it will make. If you have gone to the lengths of setting up a tax structure which minimises your exposure to 50p, will you drop it for 45p? There’s a political calculation at work here: the 50p rate which Labour introduced was gesture politics because few experts reckoned it would yield the revenue Labour had suggested – why pay 50p on income when you can take a dividend for less? The Treasury is betting that 45p won’t bring in any less revenue and that it improves the government’s credentials with business.
This was a transitional Budget. Next year’s will be critical because it will influence what happens to our pockets in the two-year run-up to the next election. If the economy avoids further shocks there should be some solid signs that growth is gaining momentum, in which case tax revenues will rise and the Chancellor can start talking about how he intends to use those gains – both in lower taxes and direct investment.
Budgets always come with a mix of cheers and jeers. Place your bets now that one of the biggest jeers on Budget Day in 2013 will be a measure which puts money back in the pockets of pensioners.

It IS the Budget for Growth...next year

So it’s good news for 330,000 people and good news for 24 million people. But not until next year.
The point to bear in mind about both of these headline grabbing measures is that they won’t cost George Osborne a penny in 2012-13. So he’s effectively trailed next year’s Budget.
The 24 million are the people whose personal allowance will rise substantially next year, putting their tax-free income up to more than £9,200.
The 333,000 are those liable for the 50p top rate of income tax, which will be cut to 45p from April 2013. The line from the Treasury is that the 50p rate isn’t raising any worthwhile revenue, suggesting high earners are taking some income as dividends or not taking it as income at all.
So as I said last night, 45p looks like a more ‘optimimal’ rate – low enough to encourage payment, high enough to yield some decent tax revenue.
And it’s apparently bad news for Nottingham, which didn’t get the cash it hoped for from the Super Connected Cities initiative. It had asked for a comparatively modest sum (around £8m), to fund ultra-high speed broadband embedded in the tracks of the new tram lines.
I don’t think the game is over on that one, though – I suspect the City Council will try to secure the funding from other sources, so watch this space.
The burning question, of course, is whether the headline cut in Corporation tax – which goes down to 24% more or less immediately – will help businesses to put their hands in their pockets and invest.
There’ll be more insights later.

It's the Budget for Growth...or is it?

So, it’s a Budget for growth, which maintains the focus on deficit reduction and brought forth a fairer tax system while failing to tackle unemployment, risking a double dip and missing an opportunity to invest for the future.
And that’s before it’s even been delivered.
The political interpretations of what George Osborne will say in his third Budget are well-rehearsed to the point of staleness.
The point to remember about most Budgets, particularly those delivered during any kind of downturn, is that they have to be neutral – in other words, what the Chancellor giveth, he almost certainly hath to take away.
There are three potential exceptions to this rule (though they’re more likely to surface next year, when the Budget is almost certain to be written with an election in mind).
One is better-than-expected government finances allowing some cash to be thrown at a rabbit-out-of-the-hat Budget stunt. Logic suggests this would be directed at low or middle-income people – putting money in your pocket always works. Just don’t expect much of it.
Second is internal Treasury forecasts suggesting that a pick-up in the economy will yield more tax revenue than government scenarios suggest. Cue a decision to ‘invest the proceeds of our strategy’.
Third is a financial mechanism which allows government to effectively step outside its normal financial rules. An example: the decision to take on the liability for the Post Office pension fund will give the government a one-off accounting gain of £28 billion. In this case, it’ll come straight off the deficit...but a cunning politician might view that as £28bn not needed from elsewhere.
Not this year, though?
If the Chancellor goes ahead with the plan to drop the 50% tax rate on earnings over £150,000 to 45% it will be pilloried for robbing the poor to give to the rich.
In all likelihood, he will have settled on an optimum top rate: the 50p rate has yielded hundred of millions in revenue, but an efficient income tax usually delivers billions – suggesting some entrepreneurs have chosen to take income as dividends or not taken it as income at all.
So while 45% sounds like a cut there’s the possibility it will bring similar tax revenue to 50%.
George Osborne – who is established now as a tough decision-maker who doesn’t play to the gallery – seems unlikely to go for too many stunts. The economy isn’t yet stable enough for that
There has to be a growth message in the Budget because that is the quid pro quo for continued business support of deficit cutting.
In Nottingham’s case, we will be looking for an announcement that our city is among those receiving money to invest in super high-speed broadband (to be buried in the tracks of the tram network).
We will be looking, too, for new schemes which give opportunities to bid for funds.
Government is now desperately hoping there will be no further significant economic shocks this year.
Last year, tentative signs of progress were well and truly snuffed out by the eurozone pantomime, which led instead to a focus on negative economic news.
This year, there is a desperate appetite among business to accentuate the positive. They’ve had enough of recession doom-n-gloom.
Over to you, George.

Broadmarsh: Nothing to see here, says OFT

To no great surprise, the Office of Fair Trading has concluded there are no grounds for a Competition Commission probe into Capital Shopping Centres’ takeover of the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre.
I’m not going to go into a rehash of the whys and wherefores of this process, other than to puzzle over why it happened in the first place – there was little likelihood of it leading anywhere.
All it really meant was further delay in a city where major retail redevelopment should have taken place anywhere between five and 15 years ago.
So, over to CSC and the question of what its intentions are now that it owns both the Victoria Centre and Broadmarsh.
Is it going to run Broadmarsh as a value retailing location and put all the posh frocks in the Vic Centre, or will it go at least some way towards satisfying the city council’s wish to redevelop Broadmarsh in a way which rids Nottingham of what many consider to be an ugly embarrassment?
In particular, what will it do to satisfy Marks & Spencer, which surely wouldn’t want to be in the same centre as John Lewis and House of Fraser? What will it do for Apple and Hollister, who were lined up to go near the foot of Bridlesmith Gate?
CSC has so far managed to avoid saying anything publicly. It can’t maintain that position much longer.

MIPIM 2012: The next time round I'd...

Travel lighter. The smart delegates were one-bag only. Clothes were smart-casual and therefore multi-purpose, while laptops have been comprehensively killed-off by iPads. It’s not that laptops are necessarily technically inferior (though they’re slower to fire up than anything Apple), it’s that when you have to take them out of a laptop case when they go through the airport scanners they are a real faff.
Take an iPad. They are single-handedly killing off laptops and netbooks because they are easy to carry, fire up immediately, run graphics brilliantly and act like a portable office while looking both stylish and professional. The Russians may have sprayed millions at their stands, but the wow factor for me came from Manchester Airport Group’s Stephanie Mullenger, who clipped a laser-cut 3D model of a development on to the screen of her iPad and ran a movie which lit up different parts of the model from underneath while giving a detailed commentary. That’s ‘Think Different’ in action.
Drink more water. Unless you are jetset, corporate or from a Russian republic, you will be chasing meetings morning, noon and night. Breakfast is grabbed, late-night dinner devoured. In between, it’s a desert where you might just be able to grab a table at Café Roma if you’re willing to fight off the foreign hordes.
Walk nonchalantly across pedestrian crossings. English diffidence meant I hesitated when a blacked-out Bentley came at me when I was halfway across. If I’d displayed Gallic indifference the turbo-nutter batard would have stopped sooner. I resorted to a traditional salute to stop him.
Hire a park bench. Yacht for the week - £80-£100k; Stand in the Palais des Festival - £40-50k if you want room for a table; park bench – you could pay someone to hold it for you for a lot less. Alternatively, you could do what the Germans did and live up to your cultural cliché. They took over part of the beach…
Forget to tell people who I was meeting. Because they blag their way in and hog the person you need to talk to.
Get in training for Morrisons. The Irish bar a couple of streets back from the seafront may not be the last word in clubland, but its combination of 80s disco and Guinness is still enough to finish you of after a day pounding pavements.
Bug the Derby dinner. There was a frank exchange of views, I’m told.
Take ear plugs. You know who you are...

Au revoir MIPIM 2012



My Range Rover parked at Cannes...in my dreams



There’s something almost comfortingly familiar about a four-day trip to an exotic sun-drenched Riviera resort ending in an Irish bar with your ear drums being hammered by 1980s disco music.

But that’s how Nottingham’s mission to MIPIM chilled out last night. There were some notably impressive performances by ‘DJ’ Ashley Cowdrey of M&E firm CPW and the impossibly hip Tim Garratt of Innes England, but those shocking revelations are for another day (or sensible negotiation).

Before you run away with the idea that Team Nottingham’s trip to MIPIM has been a thinly-disguised journey to the usual boozy haunts, let me reassure you that the downtime has been well-earned.

The model Nottingham has adopted for MIPIM is a solid and sustainable one: a core of private sector property and construction industry businesses paying their way and bringing key public sector decision-makers with them to let would-be investors know that great development opportunities will not sink under a painful planning process.
David Bishop, Nottingham City Council’s corporate director of development, maintained a professional distance from raw deals while offering authoritative reassurance that planners understood what business was trying to achieve.
Solidly supported by the widely-respected Lorraine Baggs, the city’s head of inward investment, and the seasoned experience of Mike Taylor, head of Nottingham Regeneration, the council team provided a back-up which added authority to the whole delegation and off-the-cuff advice at the kind of impromptu meetings which dominate MIPIM.
If you want to criticise the glitz and glamour of MIPIM you can, because Cannes has a lot of it. The closest I came was nearly being glued to the tarmac by a be-chromed Bentley driven by someone for whom pedestrian crossings and the people who use them were clearly an inconvenience too far.
I’m ashamed to say that I showed my appreciation of his driving in the traditional English manner.
If you haven’t been to MIPIM what you have to get your head round is the fact that this is a veneer of glitz and glamour (and sometimes grossness) which comes from a Riviera resort within spitting distance of Monaco, the place where millionaires and billionaires go to look at their money.
The veneer is there to serve them, not the likes of Team Nottingham or most of the other ordinary business people who come to pack into four days meetings which would otherwise take months to tie down.
The truth is that this isn’t a playday away from home, but a frequently foot-destroying round of meetings and discussions which stretch from dawn until dusk.
The results of those meetings I’ll write about in Business Post on Tuesday. For now we’re well beyond dusk and Cannes has gone quiet.
But Nottingham has come away with a lot to talk about.

MIPIM: Another away win for Nottingham

It began in Derby, wandered through some of the best cities for business in Europe, and ended in a pizzeria not far from the yachts that bob up and down in Cannes harbour.

Such was the second day at MIPIM.
I reflected yesterday on what Nottingham had to offer the biggest property and development exhibition in Europe, but today began with a breakfast reception for what is grandly characterised as the Derby Embassy, the slogan for the travelling show that is Marketing Derby.
Unlike Nottingham, Derby has managed to pull together a comparatively substantial public sector budget which supports not just the activities of Marketing Derby but a walloping chunk of commercial projects ranging from phase one of a spec office development in Derby (elsewhere, no one digs earth without a prelet) through to a comprehensive revamp of Derby City Council’s HQ, and half the lease of the old Egg call centre (a deal which has enabled Indian-owned Hero TSC to set up a similar operation in the same building).
Fair play to Derby. It punches above its weight at an exhibition where many similarly sized conurbations simply don’t figure, and has a cohesive message which other locations will be jealous of (notably Leicester, which I’ll come on to in a moment).
The strength of its focus has already been well-illustrated by its refusal to take the decision which lost Bombardier’s Derby factory a huge rail contract lying down, and the fuss it made has almost single-handedly led to government looking again at the whole issue of large-scale public procurement rules.
Leicester, by contrast, is a curiosity. This is another substantial Midlands city which has a strong economy with plenty of hefty businesses and logical opportunities. So why isn’t it at MIPIM? The few people from Leicester who are here certainly felt jealous of what Nottingham and Derby are up to, wondering why there was no marketing material about their own city to hand out.
England’s provincial cities do get noticed at MIPIM because they talk tangible opportunities rather than grand, barely believable visions. Birmingham and Manchester have thrown several hundred grand at their presence and there is an expectation that they will be here.
Even though its presence is comparatively small-scale and supported by the city council rather than paid for, Nottingham’s presence has been discreetly effective. It made headlines on one of the big property consultancy stands, and it was rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest locations in Europe yesterday when it received an award as one of the best micro cities for business.
The award came from FDi Intelligence, a division of the Financial Times, and ranked Nottingham ahead of Geneva as a business-friendly location.
Stockholm, which won the main FDi award, has plastered its name all over the entrance to MIPIM. I’m not suggesting Nottingham should do the same, but there is every logic in gently ramping up the city’s marketing budget to support an award which has put us front and centre on an international stage.
Those who don’t come to MIPIM will inevitably focus on the yachts and the money because they make easy pictures and easy headlines. For many cities, that’s just not what MIPIM is about.
Sure, there will be some cities smooching would-be investors at some very expensive tables in Cannes. But not Nottingham. Last night it was largely in a pizza parlour reflecting happily on another day and another good win.

MIPIM: The only way is Up

Well, the Bar Up, anyway, which is where I finished my first day at that inimitable experience known as the Marché International des Professionnels d'Immobilier in Cannes.
MIPIM is the place where anyone who is anyone in European property comes to, variously, strut their stuff, network furiously and meet people away from home in circumstances which might allow conversations a little less complicated than usually permitted by the conventions of home turf.

As of mid afternoon today, it was also Suits On Sea, with people who could not be anything other than surveyors, developers, financiers, architects, engineers and consultants of all kinds necking bottled beer ten-deep on what must be one of the single busiest days of the year for the perfectly-placed Café Roma.

It’s perfectly placed because it sits opposite ‘The Bunker’, the less than pretty seafront Palais de Festivals, in and around which most of the stands at Cannes are based.

At MIPIM, there are stands and there are stands. There are the stands which simply satisfy the requirements needed to enable you qualify to buy a £1,500 entrance pass; there are the stands which project corporate brand values; there are the stands where wearily familiar commercial development schemes tend lose out to tired feet in search of a beer.
And there is Krasnodar (below). Krasnodar is the economic centre of south Russia, and it has not a stand but its own pavilion, one on which it is thought to have spent a cool £1 million. It is vast, full of enormous models which kids with Hornby train sets could only dream of, and technical tomfoolery which allows you to ‘hold’ an office development in your hand and twirl it round.

It is not alone. Other Russian regions and former Soviet republics appear to be engaged in a vast, political ‘look at me’ contest where enormous stands have massive models of new business districts, leisure developments, seaside resorts and statement buildings.

They have the look of some of the regeneration CGIs touted around the UK market when it was awash with debt funding all those years ago. As it stands, Russia has got rich on gargantuan oil and gas revenues, but I’m still left wondering whether there is really a market for this kind of computer-generated political ambition.

I’m out here with Team Nottingham, and my initial reaction was that our fair city simply didn’t stand a chance against this kind of development firepower.

But I’m not so sure.

There are cities like Krasnodar, which have thrown the financial kitchen sink at getting noticed. There are regions like the Catalan part of Spain, which appears to be chasing European regional development funding.

And there are cities like Nottingham, who have come to discuss specific, tangible development opportunities. Nottingham doesn’t have a vast stand, there are no Hornby train set models (though we could have done with a Corgi tram to hand out), and we are not touting schemes which looked like they were dreamt up simply to qualify for a slice of the euro pie.

What Nottingham was doing at a modest dinner at the Brasserie Bar Up was announcing an extension to the city’s enterprise zone, listening to Boots’ Mark Chivers explain the detailed plans for it, and hearing City Council director of development David Bishop pointing to the certainty that enormous sums of money are about to be invested in extending the tram and widening the A453.

As the evening wore on, it was also reflecting on the one-woman regeneration locomotive that is Jackie Sadek. Earlier in the day, the motormouth chief executive of UK Regeneration stood shoulder-to-shoulder at MIPIM with the head honchos from property consultancy Jones Lang Lasalle and Barclays Capital and announced a £33 million scheme to build 200 homes-to-rent in a new Sandfield Village development in Lenton.

This is a complex, potentially ground-breaking scheme borne out of the government’s decision to allow local authorities to kick-start city redevelopment through buy now-pay later deals for developers.

I’ll be writing more about this in the coming days in the Nottingham Post, but Jackie Sadek’s point was that where others were waffling Nottingham was making it happen.
Sandfield Village may not rival the glitzy ambition of Krasnodar. But I know where my money will be going if we lay odds on which scheme comes out of the ground first.

Clock ticks on Broadmarsh

For some time now, there’s been very little in the way of news about Capital Shopping Centres’ intentions towards Nottingham.
You’ll recall that the owner of the Victoria Centre shocked nearly everyone in town when it pulled off a late night deal back in November to buy the rival Broadmarsh Centre from Westfield.
The shock came not just from the fact that no one locally had any inkling that the bombshell was about to drop, but also because it called into question whether an decrepit 1960s eyesore was ever going to be dragged into the 21st century.
Those fears may be well-placed.
CSC has kept its counsel in recent weeks, officially because it was waiting to find out whether the Office of Fair Trading - which had decided to cast its eye over a deal which handed over an entire city to one operator – thought the purchase merited intervention on competition grounds.
The OFT told me upfront that it had been its own decision to examine the acquisition because it routinely looks out for major transactions of this kind. Perhaps; but rumours suggest the OFT may have been economical with the truth there, and that what we’ll call a prominent industry institution had been whispering in its ear.
Even more intriguing was a statement buried away in CSC’s annual results last week, which said it was “optimistic” about Nottingham’s retail potential provided there was a “pragmatic approach” from Nottingham City Council, the planning authority.
Put that together with a statement elsewhere in the results where it talks about “complementary redevelopment” in Nottingham and what have you got?
Pretty clear evidence that CSC wants to plough serious money into the Victoria Centre, not Broadmarsh.
How come? Suggesting optimism about Nottingham’s retail potential, rather than the new asset it’s just bought (Broadmarsh), tells me it thinks the immediate potential is in its existing asset, the Victoria Centre. Remember that this has a book value of £333m, while CSC says Broadmarsh has a book value of only £65m. This is not only less than the Vic Centre, but £8m less than it paid for it only four months ago.
The giveaway is surely the use of the term “pragmatic”. While it never said so publicly, the City Council was desperate for Westfield to go ahead with an ambitious redevelopment of Broadmarsh because it would have replaced Berlin Wall-standard concrete blight with a new gateway to the city centre.
CSC presumably believes a pragmatist would realise that it is unrealistic to expect the owner of a £333m shopping centre to spend disproportionate fortunes bringing the ugly sister down the road up to the same standard. After all, what would that do to the asset value of the Vic Centre?
The whole point of CSC’s purchase of Broadmarsh was to take out the competition.
The prospect of Broadmarsh being left to fester as a relic full of cheap retailers is one which will appal some people inside the City Council. They had been looking for a commercial partner who, in return for wholehearted support, would invest in development which dovetailed with the long-term strategy for the city centre.
A “shed half way up Mansfield Road” (as the Victoria Centre expansion plan was described to me privately) doesn’t tick that box, and may drastically tip the commercial centre of gravity away from a Southside quarter which is, in every sense, front and centre of City Council thinking.
When the City Council next gets round the table with CSC it still has a couple of cards left in its deck. One is its ownership of land near the Victoria Centre which CSC theoretically needs to allow expansion there.
The other is a ticking clock. A number of upmarket retailers had been ready to sign deals for units in the first stage of the (now abandoned) Broadmarsh redevelopment. They have already been waiting a long time to come to Nottingham. Will they continue to kick their heels if CSC gets involved in a drawn-out battle about the Vic Centre with city planners?
Or will they go elsewhere in the city centre instead?