U.K. Gov?t Aims Cash At Driverless Cars, Internet Of Things And Digital Currencies

by Natasha Lomas - Tech Crunch, Mar. 18, 2015 – 

Giving his final budget before the U.K. general election this May, and inevitable sales pitch to the U.K. electorate, Chancellor George Osborne has announced several tranches of cash for nascent technologies - including £100 million for driverless car technology; £40 million for research into the Internet of Things; and £10 million to go towards investigating the "future potential" of digital currency technology.

The budget also set out plans for a so-called 'Google tax' on diverted profits. So, should a Conservative (or Tory-led) government be elected to office later this year we can expect to see it taking extra money off Silicon Valley-based tech giants and putting some of that cash to work to try developing homegrown alternatives to SV tech.

There's precious little detail about how these tech-focused cash injections will be spent at this point, beyond specifying they are intended for research initiatives. This is really about listing (and quantifying) a few tech priorities for a future Tory government.

After (fixed and mobile) broadband, which Osborne pledged £600 million for in this budget, driverless car tech comes out top of the tech priorities list. (Although he also announced £140 million for research into "infrastructures and cities of the future" - aka smart cities - which is pretty vague but will likely shake out into technology investments of some sort.)

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