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IT icon Martha leads the drive to get everyone logged on
MARTHA Lane Fox is all excited about travelling to Barnsley today.
She may be a little tired of the label "poster girl for the dot-com boom" or "the 'It' girl for the IT generation", but she is putting her experience and the huge profile achieved by the success of lastminute.com to good use in helping to turn a South Yorkshire town into a vital location on the map of superhighways.
"Barnsley has big ambitions and very real plans to make them happen," says the 36-year-old, who is in Barnsley in her capacity as head of the Government's rather clumsily-titled Digital Inclusion Taskforce (DIT). She refers, laughingly, to "my ridiculous title," and grateful that her friends only occasionally, and in jest, call her "The Czarina".
Her purpose is to represent the estimated six million adults in the UK who are "digitally excluded" for one reason or another, and therefore unaware how they might benefit from new technology.
A range of events for today's Get Online Day are being held to lure in those who perhaps view the internet as remote from their own lives, or too expensive. Under the umbrella of Totally Online Barnsley, the council, local business and other agencies are driving towards everyone in the borough being online by 2012.
Research by Martha Lane Fox's team shows that the average household not connected up to the internet is missing out on a saving of 560 a year they would enjoy if they paid their bills
and shopped online.
Barnsley is perfectly placed to be a pioneering IT town, as South Yorkshire is set to switch on to its own 90m new super-fast broadband network, now being installed and eventually servicing 550,000 homes, 40,000 businesses and 1.3m people.
Lane Fox has the kind of charismatic image that would enhance any business or campaign, and her own life has been changed by the world wide web – although she did once describe herself (back in 1999) as "about as technical as a peanut".
The Westminster and Oxford-educated daughter of historian and gardening correspondent Robin Lane Fox, she read ancient and modern history at Oxford, and after a few years in other jobs was invited by Brent Hoberman to join him in a new venture, the online travel booking company lastminute.com.
Within six years the company reached a floatation price of 733m. The overvalued stock price nosedived in the following 18 months as the dot-com bubble burst. But Hoberman and Lane Fox soldiered on, the company recovered, and in 2003 when Lane Fox left it, lastminute. com was valued at 667m. When it was subsequently sold to Sabre Holdings she received about 18m.
Five-and-a-half years ago her drive and determination shifted focus dramatically when she very nearly died in a car accident in Morocco. She was thrown out of the car on to rocks, and suffered 28 broken bones and a stroke. She's still recovering and walks with the aid of a stick. Crucial to her survival was swift repatriation to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, made possible thanks to good health insurance cover.
"They fought for two days continuously to save me, including a 16-hour operation. What I saw in the NHS was the most amazing level of service and dedication."
There were further operations and today her body is held together by titanium plates.
Her acumen and drive remained intact, with ventures in karaoke bars (she loves to sing), board membership at M&S, and a charitable foundation called Antigone – "a classical heroine who stood for what she believed in" – which supports causes to do with criminal justice, health and technology.
From a very young age she has been a fervent opponent of capital punishment, and now works with Reprieve, the charity set up by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith to support prisoners on Death Row and those rendered by the UK or US governments to secret prisons, which she calls "completely absurd."
She manages to marry up entrepreneurial zeal with liberal and altruistic tendencies, and would like to see the internet offering guidance on health services. "Pages which allowed patients to rate health services would help to shift power towards users, and that would
be a good thing."
Lane Fox would also like to see providers offering introductory packages to web users which show them the "best bits" of the internet, and pull together details of 10 or 15 services that are of essential use – including local government and shopping.
She feels people should not be deterred by fears over internet safety and scams.
"These scares can feed fear of technology, but part of the facilities being offered in Barnsley is free skills training that shows people how to stay safe.
"For individuals and as a country, fast and efficient use of technology is vital. At the very personal level it's not fair that some people have access and others don't, and that's why some great packages are on offer and computers will be easily available in public places in Barnsley. There needs to be fairness of opportunity. The case for that is both moral and economic."
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Weather for Yorkshire
Friday 10 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -9 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 15 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
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