It's not really anything new, you can use the current Tier-1 visa for this purpose.
There's a Tier-1 entrepreneur visa which requires £200k investment, however most professional software developers will qualify for the Tier-1 general visa which doesn't require investment.
The general Tier-1 uses a points based system which takes into account education, english language fluency and past earnings. With the Tier-1 general visa you can stay in the UK for up-to 2 years (if you're not making money after 2 years and don't have investment, you might not be able to renew though)
I agree they rarely imitate good ideas, but they respond to competition. So if we could point to startups that happened in other countries as a result of US visa policies, that would apply pressure.
I wish, things here in the US are going very slow about visa. When humans have something important, and they lived with it since long time, they forget how bad is to live without it. You understand the importance of things only when you lose them. Silicon Valley might not be the Silicon Valley 50 years from now; the government has to do something clear and practical to avoid this kind of future. Now.
The proposed new "entrepreneur visa" would allow people with great business ideas and the backing of serious investors to set up shop more easily in Britain.
The most important part. How much of funding to make it a serious investor?
• You have access to not less than £200,000
• The money is held in one or more regulated financial institutions
• The money is disposable in the United Kingdom
• You personally have at least £3000 to support yourself
• You can pass an english language fluency test
Even w/ this visa London will be no more attractive as a startup hub than New York, both of which are dominated by over-paid financiers who have driven up the cost of living to unaffordable levels for normal folks, let alone boot-strapping entrepreneurs. And then there's the weather...
There's this 500-year plan in place to resolve the weather situation. It's finally coming to fruition.
In essence, it involved developing new methodologies (the "Scientific Method"), which were able to lead to new technologies (loosely grouped under the label "industrialisation") which have produced large amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
This has been a particularly tricky plan, but it is basically in place and is now steadily warming up the planet, according to most reports. It should only take another couple of hundred years and England will be a good 5-10 degrees warmer.
SF is a pain in the ass to get around compared to NYC without a car or bike. I love both cities (and especially the weather in the former) but the MTA and London Underground have a much wider network of subway systems and buses.
A definite plus move and the canny thing is locating it near the existing "Tech Triangle" - Shoreditch and moving Eastwards towards Stratford.
That part of London is cheap, well connected and has a large immigrant population. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in reality , but all the good signs are there.
Shoreditch is anything but cheap. It'll fall off pretty quick by the time you get to Stratford though.
I lived in Tower Hamlets (ie, the area in question) for 10 years and loved it. A lot of native Londoners look down on it as it has a reputation and is kinda rough around the edges. I understand a lot has changed in the last few years with the financial collapse and them dumping money in to the area in the build up to the Olympics.
There's been a visa like this for some years already in the UK. I guess he is just changing it, and taking credit.
Basically if you have a whole bunch of money available you can set up a business in the uk. You must hire a certain amount of people over a certain amount of years.
I suspect given that google are one of the people pushing it that it's almost certainly a "common carrier" defence for copyright infringement which would protect websites from user uploaded copyright violations.
No, this is symptomatic of a modern economy. Any advanced economy will have a similar focus.
If you think about it on a higher level, it makes a lot of sense. At first, the great bottleneck was having enough food, so all economies began with an almost-100% focus on agriculture. But then, as that became less and less of a problem, the next bottleneck was having enough stuff - whether machinery to make agriculture more efficient, or other items to make your life better.
As "stuff" gets less and less scarce, and cheaper and cheaper to acquire, what are we left with? The final bottleneck, which isn't going away any time soon, is that we all only have 24 hours in a day. "Services" is a euphemism for "ways to buy other people's time so you can have more than 24 hours of 'good time' (and higher 'good time' than you'd be able to achieve by yourself) per day". Whether that's bank services to speed up your money handling, or cleaning services, or web design services, or any other number of services which basically amount to helping someone, somewhere to make more efficient use of their time.
This is the final bottleneck until we figure out how to speed up our thoughts, and so all activity ends up piling into there.
Company X makes white computers. It has all sorts of employees: hardware designers, software developers, industrial engineers, factory workers, janitors, even gym instructors and aroma therapists. Over time the company evolves or is replaced. The new company mostly manufactures. A lot of the engineering is done by other companies. The hire janitorial service companies and employees can get their own damn aroma therapists.
The second situation is contributing percentage points to the "service," but fundamentally nothing has really changed. Same people doing the same jobs for the same purpose, just structured differently.
