Three things you're supposed to know about Cambridge: it's flat, it's got a university, and it's the home of the UK's equivalent of Silicon Valley, Silicon Fen.
Well, perhaps. The first two are certainly true, and if you like hype, then so's the third. But if you're trying to find Silicon Fen, you have to know where to look. It's perfectly possible to spend years in the town and not have a clue that this is the home of Britain's home grown high-technology industry.
You couldn't say that if you went to Silicon Valley; without the industry there'd be quite literally nothing. Not a promising start if you're looking for a clustered network of industry - the intense centres of excellence that are supposed to be powering the 21st century knowledge economy.
However, the discerning eye can spot some signs of social nodes for the local digerati. But expect people to eat curry and swill beer rather than cut deals and download mail into a PDA, or head for established networking events after a day in adjacent campuses on the edge of town.
Shot in the ARM
Compared to the Valley, Cambridge is small. A pretty town with a couple of business parks hardly competes with the wall to wall campuses of the Valley.
The flag carrier is embedded chip design house ARM, worth £2.2 billion and employing around 250. It hardly needs stating that ARM would be tiny by Valley standards, which houses firms on the scale of Cisco, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Apple...
However, things are moving. Venture capitalists 3i boast of making 10 high-technology investments a year from their Cambridge office. A series of major players have made high profile investments here rather than in the traditional spots of lowland Scotland (Silicon Glen) or Thames Valley. Best known of these is Microsoft's decision to create its first non-American R&D facility on the west edge of town last year.
On the Cambridge circuit
At the heart of indigenous entreprenuership are diaspora from the once mighty Acorn, the 80s home computer market leader. The sadly all too proprietary home computing firm was finally dismembered earlier this year after 20 years.
It has spun off its own success stories, principally the chip operation, ARM. But it also created a community of people who to some extent keep in touch.
Former Acorn employee, Alex van Someren, now runs his own successful cryptographic hardware business near Cambridge's railway station. It turns over £10 million and is growing at over 100 per cent. Friends and business contacts stem from those days.
"The Acorn people are now distributed around town but occasionally keep in touch. There's even a mailing list and people meet up occasionally for a barbecue or the like," said Someren.
John Biggs, design methodology manager of ARM, says the contacts are more frequent: "People from Acorn days meet up Tuesday lunchtimes in the Wrestlers on Newmarket Road for green chicken curry. 
It stems from the days when Acorn was a split site and people met up for lunch according to a roster on different days. For some reason only the Wrestlers still remains."
You might also find former colleagues and subsequent accretions on a Friday night in the Cambridge Blue, a friendly non-smoking pub on Gwydir Street. Also popular is the similarly no-smoking Free Press, an intimate boozer just off the open space of Parker's Piece and a location for investment club meetings.
But while old mates might run into each other, the talk isn't that likely to be about technology, let alone the latest three business plans. These are Brits, after all. "It's not the done thing to talk about work in the pub. And you never know who might be listening," says John Biggs.
Hermann Hauser: the man who started it all
Top of the networking pile is Hermann Hauser, Acorn's co-founder. Hauser is now the town's leading booster, effectively the inventor of Silicon Fen. He now runs a venture capital operation, Amadeus Capital Partners, one of the two most important locally.
But if Acorn's failure helped to generate new businesses locally, then ARM's success isn't yet stimulating the local economy. ARM does not heavily use local suppliers - the manufacturers of its chips, which include Philips, are based almost everywhere else - and its employees are very loyal. ARM went public in 1998 with staff holding seven per cent.
Yet of the firm's original complement of 12, 10 remain while one other has passed away. Mike Muller, an executive vice president, adds: "There are certainly people in ARM who want to branch out, but the time isn't right. Most people realise they're not going to emulate the success of ARM."
These are not people hungry to set up new companies, still less create a wider local economy.
St. John's Innovation Centre
A second cluster can be found in two office sites divided by the A14, owned by five-hundred-year-old Cambridge colleges, Trinity and St. John's.
It was the St. John's Innovation Centre that Tony Blair chose as the place to launch his government's ecommerce strategy in September. It is a hive of units that can be leased in any number and at low cost, with shared reception and canteen facilities allowing for easy networking.
Current occupants include already public companies like knowledge management specialist Autonomy down to hopefuls such as 1... Limited, which is trying to commercialise patents to create digital loudspeakers.
All loudspeakers today are analogue, which means their sound quality could be better, they could be made smaller and they needn't have those annoying trailing wires to trip over.
Tony Hooley, the founder and boss of the firm, says he's tapped the network not for technical ideas or staff but, more importantly, for cash. His experience suggests there's an emerging community of 'business angels', wealthy private individuals keen to fund exciting opportunities. Angels have sustained his firm through four rounds of financing, the last of which was worth £1 million.
Hooley's technique has been to borrow "from friends of friends". He has avoided venture capital "because you get a much better valuation from private investors." Included on the investment roster is former IBM UK boss, Barrie Morgans.
At the moment the investments have been based on faith. His business, 1..., was founded in 1995 and based in Hooley's house until last year. It is yet to deliver a working prototype because key elements in the technology have never been manufactured. Hooley says he expects to deliver a working digital loudspeaker in 2000.
Business clubs
Key sources of information and advice for Hooley are the growing network of business clubs in the region, designed as tutorials and serving as schmoozing grounds for local entrepreneurs.
These help oil vital contact wheels -- and helped Hooley meet more backers. Organisations include CHASE (Cambridge High-tech Association of Small Enterprises) which meets fortnightly at the St John's Innovation Centre and the Free Press pub, or the Great Eastern. Then there's the Investment Forum, which is described by Hooley as a "dating agency".
It's hardly dramatic or exciting stuff, but there are signs that a wider culture to support entrepreneurship is emerging. There are limits, however: key employers aren't yet bursting with junior employees waiting to set out on their own. And a good curry and talking rubbish beats the hell out of talking shop all night.
See also:
All IT Management
del.icio.us
Digg this
reddit!
