AT THE British American Business Council’s Transatlantic Conference this month, in San Francisco, a parade of UK and US business opportunities were presented to an audience of British-focused US business leaders.

Intriguingly, there was a strong sports bias accompanying the more hi-tech presentations you would expect, being so near to Silicon Valley.

The Americas Cup is being staged in San Francisco in 2013, and, of course, the London Olympics as a business opportunity was presented by the broadcaster NBC as potentially the most lucrative ever, set against the iconic London locations. However, it was three British entrepreneurs who impressed on the first day by articulating their significant success in growing USA- based tech businesses. Ironically, one of their most daunting challenges is recruiting high specification technical staff in Silicon Valley and their solution in all cases was to look elsewhere and import the talent or off shore the work to places such as Romania and India.

However, the big story that was running as a backdrop to the conference was Microsoft’s purchase of the one-time European venture, Skype. Microsoft surprised and indeed shocked many by its acquisition for a mere $8.5bn. Surprising given that Ebay, who originally bought Skype, couldn’t get their teeth round it, having spent $4bn, and then offloaded it to a venture capital-based consortia for a snip at $1.5m that many analysts criticised at the time for being a poor investment. Who’s laughing now?

So it was timely to be in Silicon Valley, or at least very near it, to hear several notable analysts giving their view. Among them were Peter Moore, President of EA Games and a Liverpool FC-supporting Brit, and Michael Moritz, managing partner of venture capital giant, Sequoia Capital.

Digging further into the rationale for Microsoft’s spending spree, you begin to see where it may be heading by combining Skype’s computer delivered voice systems with its motion control software, Konect.

The prospect is of making a telephone call with no touching, that is by speaking at your computing device to enable actions. For example, by saying “call the office” the computer would make the call and connect you in a direct video link without you, the human, actually touching anything.

That is one of the more compelling possibilities offered by this move by the software giant. But there is also the mere fact that it gives Microsoft a dearly sought-after telecoms presence with the most ubiquitous video conferencing capability. And, of course, there are the odd 500m or so Skype users that Microsoft may be interested in . . .

STEVE SMITH is digital industry director at Liverpool Vision