Things in the City have been murky recently. Redundancies, reputational-damage and regulatory-overhaul have caused concern (to put it mildly) throughout the Square Mile. However, a good news story emerged about the capital when new research published earlier this week found that London’s ICT infrastructure is as ‘good as anywhere in the world’. The report, commissioned by the City of London, found the City has sufficient depth of network connectivity and enough data centre providers to offer network resilience and security to businesses. Also, from a human point of view, the skills to support the ICT infrastructure are currently a major strength of the City.

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There is an excellent article in the latest issue of Computing about the impact of the downturn on the ability of financial services firms to innovate. Although one might think that the economic slowdown would impact negatively on the levels of innovation occurring, it’s clear that many firms realise the benefits of investing in new or existing ideas to help push their businesses forward during these difficult times.

The three ‘innovation winners’ highlighted in the article are mobile banking, customer networking and ‘un-sexy innovation’. The last of these can be summed as efficiency projects that, although they don’t grab the headlines, improve the customer experience and deliver results. In light of some of the results announced this morning, this would be a wise move.

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No doubt a few of you will recognise this extract from Back to the Future II, courtesy of IMDB:

Marty McFly: [showing the two boys how to play the shoot 'em up video game] I’ll show you, kid. I’m a crack shot at this.
[shoots a perfect score with the electronic gun]
Video Game Boy #1: You mean you have to use your hands?
Video Game Boy #2: That’s like a baby’s toy!

Poor old Marty; he was using outdated technology in a futuristic age. I can’t help thinking we might all be feeling like this as we tap our keyboards in the not-too-distant-future if some exciting ventures in utilising voice recognition come into fruition. In the last week, I have heard of two which particularly caught my imagination.
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