Simon Fanshawe, chairman of the Place to Be executive that is spearheading our bid for city status, updates you on the campaign

It's the Goldrush. It's the next Industrial Revolution. And the investors in dotcoms like Lastminute.com are either lemmings or pioneers. Either way I wonder if after the discovery of fire, or the invention of the wheel, people were running out of their caves or charging off down soon-to-be tarmacked dirt tracks waving share certificates and imagining wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Are we all fools?

In the City bid we pointed out, following on research commissioned by the Government Office of the South-East, that "Brighton and Hove had the potential to be at the very centre of the digital industry in the 21st Century".

And the internet is a central part of that claim. There are a number of significant companies working in town on CD-roms, internet radio and digital design. There are also enough ground-breaking research projects at the universities for the atmosphere of the town to be bristling with the electricity of it all. And while it may be mainly the province of the young to invent or start the new dotcoms, the over 55s are still, by hours spent on screen, the largest group of users of the net.

The money is staggering. Lastminute was valued at £733 million at close of business on its first day. This is a company run by two people aged 27 and 31 that has never made a profit being set at a price twice that of Bovis which recently reported profits up by £45 million on sales of £280 million.

But an even more significant figure was that each investor only got 35 shares. That's a risk of just £133. That's me or you investing. That's not totally far off the woman who told me last week that she had once invested £15,000 in one of the internet plcs in Brighton and Hove and that the proceeds had now allowed her to retire.

She has no stockbroker. She just got fascinated by the Bulletin Boards. She did it herself. The internet changes relationships. In that case between investor and company.

In music, digital technology now allows you to produce in your bedroom for a few hundred or thousand pounds CDs that ten years ago would have set you back tens of thousands. You can barely slide an American Express card in the gap between producer and technology.

It's like punk when suddenly, even in the absence of discernible musical talent as my father used to huff and puff, anyone could be in a band. But they couldn't distribute their records.

The old joke was that in the Soviet Union there was only one record label, whereas in the West there were two. So one bright guy called Geoff Travis, who had been to Sussex University, set up an independent record distribution cartel called Rough Trade. Sadly it eventually went down the tubes. But it did its job. And now the internet can give you a worldwide distribution network, uncomplicated by the need to get a recording deal.

But how much closer will the consumer actually become to the artist? How much will the record shops and the music labels still control things? It is interesting that some of the biggest names in music and media (Branson, Geldof, Richer of Richer sounds and Alan McGee of Creation records) have founded Clickmusic.

Yes the big boys are trying to corner the distribution again. And the big record labels are trying to stop MP3.com, which is currently telling people to put their record collections in cyberspace so others can download them and swap. This is basically piracy.

But for those who don't have a record deal - and how many of all of our friends and children are in that position? - the internet and MP3 type technology is an opportunity to distribute music outside the shackles of the old systems. And presumably consumers' habits will change. We will get used to searching for, listening on spec to, and then downloading music independently produced by the bands themselves.

Brighton and Hove is not just making claims to be at the centre of it but showing that it's more than just a boast with innovative companies growing here that are taken seriously in Europe and the rest of the world.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.