It's off to the States we go...

The Hub is going to the USA at the request of the US Patents and Trademarks Office which has given us the opportunity to present the Hub at a public meeting they are organising. On April 1st. Ah well. 

Details (and hopefully an agenda, soon) are here. If you can join us in person in DC or via the webcast you would be most welcome.

This is great timing for us because we are also gearing up for the first service built on the Hub to go live in the next few weeks. In other words the technology foundations we have been building with the Digital Catapult for the last year-and-a-bit can now support real implementations and real automated licensing.

This will be the first of what we can be sure will be many implementations built on the Hub. We now have the quite extraordinary number of over 70 use cases in our pipeline, many times what I hoped for when we started this work. Better yet, it's growing at a very gratifying, not to mention occasionally terrifying, rate.

So now is a great time to be garnering more support outside the UK in the form of interest, discussions and more use cases. I'm sure we'll come back from Washington with some new ones to add.

Our big challenge now, the classic "nice problem to have", is going to be keeping up with the use cases which have far exceeded our expectations. The more we can help launch, the more momentum we will build behind the vision that the Hub is for everyone who wants to exercise their freedom to say what happens to their work. 

So the next phase of our work will be exciting. We have been very fortunate indeed to have had such strong financial support from the creative industries in the UK so far. High on our agenda in the short term is finding the funding and resource to keep up with the demand we are seeing and we'll have more to say about this soon.

I'll update on how our trip went in a couple of weeks, in the meantime as ever please do be in touch and please do make any contribution you can. This could change everything.