Lucidica The IT department for small business

February 2010

Lucidica Speak about the “Google gin bet” at the British Library

As part of the British Library’s Business & IP Centre’s phenomenally successful “Web in Feb” campaign we were recently invited to speak about our “Google 3 month gin bet”. This was the bet I had with Tom, our CTO, that he couldn’t get us from page 72 to page 1 of Google for “IT support London” in less than 3 months.

Tom and I explained the bet, outlined how he eventually got us to page 1 and share 7 tips & techniques any business owner can implement immediately to boost their ranking. We’ll talk for about an hour, with drinks and networking for another hour afterwards.
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And if you haven’t checked out the Business & IP Centre and the invaluable resources available to you, for FREE, I encourage you to see for yourself. The very helpful staff will outline what courses, information and resources are available and how to use them.

“To cloud” or “Not to cloud”

The crash of WordPress’s servers bringing down 10m blogs and losing 5.5m page views last weekend brought a short sharp shock to its users. The weakness of even a behemoth like WordPress - and the factGoogleAps still only offers a mediocre uptime guarantee - suggests that the fabled land of ‘cloud computing’ may still be a short while off read more ...

January 2010

Introducing our social enterprise - ResponsibleIT

In July 2009 Tom and I recruited two highly experienced Non-Executive Directors and together the 4 of us founded a social enterprise, ResponsibleIT. 
This is a Community Interest Company (CIC) - a cross between a business and a charity (ask Tom or I for a more detailed explanation when speaking with us next!).

Our primary social mission is “to help young people with a passion and talent for, but no experience in, I.T. start a successful career”.  We do this by providing young people aged 16-24 with a 1-3 year Apprenticeship.  We pay for their 7 Microsoft exams so they can become a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE).  Half their paid time is to study and learn while the remaining half is spent providing I.T. support – so we can become self-sustaining in 2011.  More about the social side of the company here.

Commercially, ResponsibleIT provides I.T. support to home users, charities and other social enterprises in London.  So if you know any home users or organisations in the third sector that need great I.T. support while helping a terrific cause, please ask them to get in touch.  Like Lucidica, ResponsibleIT has a Happiness Guarantee to ensure the quality of our work and service remains extremely high.

We now have 5 Apprentices underway and Lucidica has funded the start-up and growth of ResponsibleIT entirely to date.  If you know any young person aged 16-24 keen to start an I.T. career but doesn’t have any experience or qualifications yet please ask them to email me and mention your name.

Lucidica interviewed on BBC Radio 4

One of the reasons we started ResponsibleIT stems from what Tom and I witnessed four of our Engineers experience in the last 2.5 years, before coming to work at Lucidica.  Many had been promised a career in I.T. if they took out a career development loan and paid it to the I.T. training company – who said they’d not only find them a job at the end of it, but also repay their loan for them.  A business model we just didn’t understand. 

All three I.T. training companies these 4 Engineers paid their career development loans to have gone under.  In one case, from what we understand more than 280 young people have been affected – that is more than £1.2m in career development loans weighing down on these young people’s shoulders at the start of their work life!

The BBC Radio 4 show “You and Yours” picked up on one of these training companies, and the affected youth – some without their MCSE qualification and most without the job they were promised at the end.  The BBC interviewed Jamal, one of the Engineers who went through this experience, and myself as an employer in the industry.
The programme aired yesterday at midday but you can still listen to the podcast of the show.