smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

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The oft-mentioned ‘digital divide’ is apparently still growing, with the Department of Trade and Industry’s new ‘e-commerce Impact Study’ uncovering that 23 per cent of retailers had not even thought of using e-commerce.

To help bridge this electronic inequality, the Digital Content Forum (DCF), a professionally managed network of members that provides a ‘conduit between industry and government’, has launched its new online Broadband Showcase (www.broadbandshowcase.org.uk). This site’s objective is ‘to gather together information about projects and applications to illustrate and promote broadband use in the UK’. The DCF and the Government hope this showcase will help posit the UK at the vanguard of international e-commerce, transforming the country ‘from a poor relation into a digitally rich nation’.

For those that do utilise the potential of the internet, the DCF is inviting all UK businesses to submit information on instances of innovative broadband use and how it has benefited business. Example applications can include ingenious website design, novel use of web-cams, or any development of communications technology that uses broadband in an inventive way.

A competition has been created for companies that believe their use of broadband is particularly creative, and they are being encouraged to submit further details to the website about their business. A panel of experts will judge the entries and the 20 subsequently chosen will be given a prestigious showcase on the homepage this autumn.

‘The showcase will help forward-thinking businesspeople justify investment in broadband technology and help people understand the ways this new technology can improve their business,’ reasons Emma Williams, director of the DCF.

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