Margate market's organisers failure to understand basic business principles is hurting traders and slowing local regeneration.

In a blog post called "You won't get customers if you don't advertise!!" local craftswoman, Sam, slams the inability of our local civic authorities to even get the basics in place. Come on Margate sort it out and stop being so apathetic she says.

She even lists five separate ways that the market (which I knew nothing about even though I live here) could have raised it's profile and gotten more people to visit. All of them are low effort, low to no cost and quick to do.

She doesn't even touch on the big things (like free parking) or adverts in the paper that might make a significant difference. When I described how How to Revive Margate Museum and Old Town in One Day I foolishly assumed that the organisers would put in the basic due diligence. We are failing here people because the basics are being forgotten.

Perhaps if the likes of Sandy stopped trying to sell as many carpets as they can and try to actually run the town we might get somewhere.

With just £70,000 Thanet could become the British Centre for invention and problem solving.

Given that the reported overspend by TDC last year was £3,000,000 and litigation with Turner Centre designers alone has run to £619,000 an investment of £40 thousand is a something the council should be able to find whenever they liked.

So how could £70k turn around Thanet's ailing economy?

In the USA MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms created an outreach program they called Fab Labs. In the video below Neil Gershenfeld talks about the huge potential for invention and innovation through access to fabrication (not to mention where we've come from and where we are going). click here for the short version



Fab labs have spread from inner-city Boston to rural India, from South Africa to the North of Norway. says the MIT website. Activities in fab labs range from technological empowerment to peer-to-peer project-based technical training to local problem-solving to small-scale high-tech business incubation to grass-roots research. Projects being developed and produced in fab labs include solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.

Neil Gershenfeld describes the surprising result of setting up these fab labs: in turn business started to grow he says (12:41) then he says that as scientists we're learning more from them than we're giving them

If that's not enough to knock your socks of at 13:01 he says there's now three students at MIT doing their thesis on scaling the work of eight year old children because they had better designs.

That could be happening this year right here in Thanet but for a small sum of money and a building to house a few basic tools.

Programmable Matter: Claytronics or Gershenfeld on singularityhub.com looks at micro fabrication including Neil Gershenfeld's fab lab project. They write Children, and adults, were designing chips, tools, and many other inventions to solve local problems. By providing the means, local solutions arose from local inventors.

The cost of this US$40,000 per lab.

What do these labs contain? just basic tools like a laser cutter, milling machines, a sign cutter and programming instruments. Now stop and imagine if we could build two of these in Thanet. Say one in Margate and one in Ramsgate.

Put them on the estates where traditionally people have a little more time on their hands then stand back and watch as human ingenuity transforms Thanet from a sleepy backwater to the centre for technology in the UK.

Now I'm going to head a few nay-sayers off at the pass on this one. No doubt some simpleton is going to suggest that Millmead and Newington are the worst possible places to build these labs and they would be (a) slightly right and (b) utterly incorrect.

These are not great places. There is poverty and crime and all those other issues that a housing estate suffers from. There are also a lot of people facing problems daily and thinking wouldn't it be good if we could just...

If an 8 year old in Africa can do in an afternoon what high tech companies require multiple sites and many workers to do then I think the people of Millmead and the people of Newgton are more than able to perform similar feats.

All I'm asking for is seventy thousand pounds and we could change the face of Thanet in a way that a big over priced art gallery can never do.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. I know that the adverts are all down. So is www.lordmatt.co.uk for many people. It is what is called a balls-up and it is caused by not havign a current card on file with the domain name registrar that cares for the domain in question.

Whoops.

It'll sort itself out over the next 48 hours and let that be a lesson to me. I should know better.

Having endured yet another painful and fruitless trip to Westwood Cross in search of nothing more complex than a bag I see a whole other reason why little shops should, must and will survive.

Faced with a bewildering array of things that I do not want and cannot use it is becoming increasingly hard to find what I am looking for. The bigger shops might "offer more" but in doing so they offer less. Less speed, less focus and less ease of searching.

The total irrelevance of the shopping experience is, for me, exemplified by Debenhams, Westwood Cross. The first floor appears to be dedicated to ladies clothes, underwear and other accessories while the first thing that hits you as you go to clime the stairs is "back to school" which is for sale goodness only knows where.

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» Continue Reading: The surprising parable of the Westwood Cross superstore

I'm probably about to remove an entire market segment from ever wanting to advertise on Thanet Star with what I have to say today.

While I have been struggling with technical difficulties in getting out the Thanet Twitter Podcast I am also actively engaged in other activities of life. Such as taking part in a house hunt on behalf of someone. I've seen a thing or two that have surpprised, shocked and upset me.

Lettings in Thanet is a highly competitive business and yet the companies involved let themselves down so badly that it's a wonder that many of them are still in business. The possible exception to this was Oakwood but more on that later.

I want to call the entire industry out on it's attitude to tenants, landlords and each other.

Each and every estate agent that also deals with lettings should be ashamed of themselves. Your standards are shocking and it is the customer (both landlord and tenant) that is suffering. It will take only one agency to take on board the need to change and it could spell the end for any number of other agencies.

It's first come most likely to survive.

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» Continue Reading: Thanet Estate Agents

I have just discoverd that the phone system will make you wait 30 seconds before giving you the option of recording an entry for the Thanet Star podcasts when I'm redirecting calls to my home. This did not seem like a good plan so I have set up a new number that is always in "out of hours" mode.

08443 511 485 will allow you to leave messages for the podcast without the 30 second wait.

The next podcast is all about Twitter.

To successfully create a profitable and local online presence one needs to have some understanding of "local search" what it is and how you can take advantage of it.

A problem for small business owners is the irrelevance of much of the traffic that their website gets. A lot of such sites get more global visitors than the local and so the Return on Investment (ROI) seemed to remain low. The conversion rate had been too poor and so any sales were few and far between.

It does not have to be this way.

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» Continue Reading: Profiting from Websites in Thanet

Roughly £11.5 Million (a tiny fraction of the £3 Billion pound overspend by TDC) is all it would cost to give an educational tool to every child in Thanet and the same number of third world children too. The result would be a potential blow to the cycle of poverty such as has never been dealt in the history of the United Kingdom.

Edit: The over spend is in fact £3M not £3B the entire budget being £20M which wouldmean TDC would need to pull down KCC funds...

The laptop in question is the XO and it has been created expressly as a learning tool. As of January 2008 it will be available in the UK under the Give One Get One offer whereby you can buy yourself an XO if you also buy one for a child in the third world. Sadly due the pound tanking quite hard of late the $399 price tag comes in at £275. Still not bad for something built and destruction tested to last at least five years in rugged conditions - per unit thats just £27.50 a year.



The astounding results of early years intervention demonstrated by educational nurseries like those in Millmead (Sure Start's Meadow Nursery) show that with the right tools the impact of poverty that sets the stage for future poverty can be undone. The price is a drop in the ocean for the area's education budgets and something the Council should easily be able to find.

To put this in perspective that's just £450 per councillor per day for a year. More than that is daily spent on lunches, fact finding trips to the US and China failed experimental builds for failed galleries.

I know the money for some of these things comes from different pots but what if inside of fifteen years we could start to see the trend of unemployment and unemployables reversed? Imagine what commerce, what business and what improvements we could make.

More than that imagine what all those young people might have to blog about. Imagine the impact on the political scene as these soon-to-be young adults start asking questions. Potentially this could set the stage for a year on year increase in the number of people voting.

I can see that our conservative overlords might not like that idea very much but those of us that still dream of things like justice, truth and the occasional bout of competence feel very differently.

Failing the council (TDC or KCC) actually doing something amazing and helping the area out you can make a difference on a child by child basis by taking up the offer on behalf of a child you know. You can order the XO from amazon.co.uk

I believe that within every one of the 125,000 or so people that live in Thanet is that spark of genius sufficient to radically redefine our very ideas about what Thanet is and just what it can do. It's not just the territory of a few famous names. Each of us has the gift but we all regularly do not use it.

e, the people of Thanet, have talent enough to spare - if only we'd realise it. Some of us write blogs. A few more of us read them but mostly we carefully and studiously follow patterns of behaviour that mean that the likes of Sandy Ezekiel will always be in power. It is this that lets us down.

We are careful to never be wrong. We are careful to never say the wrong thing, to never make a mistake and to never risk even the slightest loss of face. As such we are largely insignificant and our impact, if it exists at all, is negligible because we are set to consistently fail to do anything new or invigorating.

If you are not prepared to be wrong you'll never come up with anything original.

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» Continue Reading: Why you might fail to change Thanet

In this Friday's Extra comes the story that your average Thanet citizen earns a whopping £30,000 a year (or so says the Halifax). ("Typical Thanet Salary £30,000!", Martin Jefferies, The Isle of Thanet Extra (KM Group), Friday December 5. 2008, (DE) page 3).

While this might seem outlandish and is clearly unrepresentative it requires interpretation to be understood. It seems that Martin Jefferies did at least get some one to talk to but that Dave Kinnear of the Margate Town Partnership was clearly not experienced with interpreting data.

So it leaves Thanet Star to explain exactly what the numbers mean while attempting not to send you to sleep. Read on to find out just how badly you are being misled by Halifax and others who cite these figures and why they want to mislead us. It's an old slight-of-hand and today it gets exposed.

(hint: it's all about getting you money from you).

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» Continue Reading: How they came up with the £30,000 a year lie