UK Technology Startups

The Tory party at their conference this week is to announce plans to change tax laws. Parties always see it as an easy way of enticing the electorate: ‘We’ll cut your taxes, but first you’ll need to vote for us’.

A new director of Cambridge Enterprise (CE) has been appointed to head up technology transfer and consultancy services.

Yesterday evening EDA firm Cadence held a roundtable discussion on electronics and entrepreneurs, which included about 15 participants: Venture capitalists, start-up CEOs, journalists and Cadence staff.

Has Cadence got start-up fever? Yesterday they hosted a roundtable discussion while simultaneously running a networking event and now they have announced an agreement with the Institute for System Level Integration (iSLI) to support, er…, start-ups.

Trying not to blow a story about Icera that my colleague David Manners has written in this week’s issue of Electronics Weekly, but the firm is up to $140m of funding now.

Richard Irving, a partner at venture capital firm Pond Venture Partners says multiple wireless standards will co-exist and in some places wireless will fail to deliver

We are currently thinking about how to rebuild our start-up map at Electronics Weekly, a map placing all the start-ups we know of in the UK electronics industry.

John Scarisbrick, the outgoing CEO of CSR, told me recently that for entrepreneurs after a certain point their involvement in the technology sector is no longer about the money. It is about keeping score, he said.

There were more manufacturing closures in the UK this week in the electronics industry with the decision by Atmel to sell its fab in North Tyneside. It has cast a further shadow over the Freescale fab in East Kilbride.

For a long time at Electronics Weekly we have admired the Proof of Concept scheme that is run by Scottish Enterprise, supporting very early stage companies at a stage where venture capital firms are not always interested.

I am currently in the process of updating Electronics Weekly’s map of UK start-up firms in the UK and so far I have compiled a list of firms that we have written about since the map was last produced.

A fabless semiconductor start-up in Ireland, which was previously unknown to Electronics Weekly, has a wireless chip that also senses.

An interesting event for entrepreneurs that are looking for funding is taking place in London on November 14.

There have been some bad start-up ideas in the hardware world (powerline technology seems to have accounted for a lot of the UK’s tech start-up failures) but we tend not to point at them and laugh. It would be impolite, of course.

CamSemi, the power management IC speciailist has scooped up $4m in funding from Carbon Trust Investments, as part of $26 million raised in total for its C round funding.

Claiming it as one of the largest VC funding rounds for a European fabless semiconductor company this year, the company is aiming to reduce the 'standby' energy consumption of consumer electronic (CE) products by up to 90 per cent.

Here at the tech start-up blog we like to see any Government move to encourage entrepreneurs and innovation or the two at once.

In a rather strange move it looks like the capital gains tax changes announced recently could be exempted for venture capitalists.

Tonight is the awards night of startupsawards, the awards (thatneednospacingbecausethisistheweb) that are given out by startups.co.uk.