Digital Entrepreneur and founder of Lastminute.com, Martha Lane Fox visited the city’s launch the Go On It's Liverpool initiative at Liverpool Innovation Park on Tuesday 1st November. While there, Martha opened a new UK online centre in the reception area of the Innovation Park. The Park’s pledge is to support the campaign by opening up new, free public wifi hot spot to mark Martha’s visit.
With some of Liverpool’s top digital companies such Merseytravel and Liverpool One having already committed to signing the Digital Pledge, and many more signing up at the launch, The Chamber is urging more companies to back the pledge and ‘give an hour’ to help people in the city to get on line.
Liverpool Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive, Jack Stopforth who lead the discussion at the event stated: “There are innumerable opportunities provided by the web to help build economic future for Liverpool. We need to use the web to bridge the skills gap in the city and help the communities in the city to maintain and generate wealth through savings online savings and increased job opportunities.”
Panel members who spoke included Martha Lane Fox, who talked passionately about: the role local business leaders can play in supporting the campaign. According to Martha, measures such as ensuring all staff are online, providing mentoring support to other businesses; giving an hour to support off liners and opening up wifi spots in business premises to the wider community will make a huge difference and help to reach out to the estimated 25% of people in Liverpool, and the 8.7 million people nationwide who are not online.
Google’s Peter Barron, presented the company’s ‘Get Liverpool Business Online’ campaign, and explained how and how Google Juice Bars are supporting the Go ON it’s Liverpool campaign by building the capacity of local businesses to use the web to grow their business. 80 local businesses will attend the event. All have been asked to sign-up as digital champions and make a pledge of what they will do to support the campaign.
Peter Barron, who is Director of External Relations, Google EMEA, said: “The Internet offers exciting opportunities for everyone – individuals and business owners – so we fully support the Go On Liverpool initiative. We’ve been running our Getting Liverpool Business Online campaign for six weeks and have seen first-hand how the Internet can help both local businesses and the online economy grow. We encourage people to get online and experience what the Internet has to offer.”
Aspiring digital champions can sign up at www.go-on/champions.co.uk to access resources and tips to help people go online for the first time and find out about cheap connectivity and hardware offers.
