Q&A: Lastminute.com founder on eBay, mobiles and tech hates
We chatted to entrepreneur Brent Hoberman about his role in driving the UK tech industry forward as well as the things that make him happy and angry about the tech world.


Business Council for Britain is a non-political group of business leaders. It's 14 quite important business leaders and then there's me! What's interesting is sitting and interfacing with the government and giving business views on it.
Obviously there are things you'd expect me to be more passionate about such as entrepreneurship in this country, technology and use of technology by government. I'm not pretending that the Business Council is the forum for all of that, I'm also on the Conservative Creative Industry task force (Greg Dyke's), which is also another forum.
It is very interesting to think of the government as a platform and using the internet for that platform for how much more we can do. I think government will be changing a lot and that will be quite exciting.
It's fair to say that the government's use of technology has advanced a great deal in recent years though, isn't it?
We've started to see Tessa Jowell's site on the Olympic tendering, for example. It's all web based. I think the Olympics is a great chance for us to showcase British digital talent. I have been talking there as well to Tessa and her team brainstorming some of the ideas. I'm sure Alex Balfour who runs that will do some really interesting things.
Is there another sector you see as the poster child for tech?
You've got to mention travel and not just lastminute.com but also Ryanair and easyJet. I love to see people putting products exclusively online where you get better deals. Now the corollary of that is digital inclusion
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But it helps everybody because you give a really good reason for people to go online because they can get to Prague for 10. That's great. It gets them online, gets them comfortable buying online and then actually helps other businesses sell online and helps them save money.
Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.
Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.
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