An old hoofers’ ditty poses the question: “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm now that they’ve seen Paree?” The US exercises an analogous gravitational pull for British technology entrepreneurs. It must be very vexing for the UK government, which would like more homegrown techies to locate in such deserving places as Hull.

An example of the footloose trend is Neil Jones, founder of Interead, whose Cool-er e-reader is denting the market shares of Amazon and Sony. His company is headquartered in Reading. But when Notebook caught up with him this week, he was in Miami, where he now bases himself.

Another e-reader business, Plastic Logic, which was spun out from Cambridge’s famous Cavendish Laboratory, is touted by government as a UK success story. Its head office is in Mountain View, California.

Meanwhile, Eldar and Roy Tuvey, who have sold their London Scansafe cloud computing business for $183m, attribute their success partly to Roy’s relocation to Silicon Valley.

UK technologists are just following the money. The US is the world’s biggest market for cutting-edge IT. New products have a far greater chance of taking off there.

There is a correspondingly well-developed network of venture capitalists in the US. Some even provide growth funding. This is no more the done thing in City circles than passing the port to the right.

The clincher is that most technology hot-shots aspire to sell out to a new economy leviathan such as Google. The UK does not have any new economy leviathans. We do, however, have a significant industry producing floral frocks and teapots for the Korean market.

Mr Jones says that Miami is a good place for his customer services department because the sunshine gives staff an upbeat temperament. No slight is implied against Hull, whose inhabitants doubtless have equally vibrant personalities.

Dennis, menaced

A Companies House filing raises the intriguing possibility that Dennis the Menace is up for adoption. Dundee publisher DC Thomson says that it has initiated “a full strategic review” of all its businesses, which include The Beano, the boys’ comic featuring the spiky-haired urchin.

The filing, signed off last October and released this week, notes that the market for the title remains “difficult”, as patchy distribution attests. A television animation of Dennis has helped, however, and  DC Thomson has great hopes of a new character, Marvo the Wonder Chicken.

The family-owned company declined to comment on the filing. But if The Beano is for sale, it represents a trophy asset for an acquirer keen to mould young minds. As part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, Dennis might, for example, discover a taste for rightwing political comment. Under Alexander Lebedev’s patronage, Dennis could become a heroic KGB agent.

Guardian Media Group has, for its part, been saved the work of turning Dennis into a wet liberal. DC Thomson has already done so. In this week’s Beano, Dennis helps his granny and gets an A+ at school. Any new owner should reinstitute menacings for Softy Walter and slipperings for Dennis, a formula most small boys would prefer.

Trip hazard

A claims handling business has launched what it says is the first “no win, no fee” service in commercial litigation. This extends a concept that has proved highly successful for personal injury claimants. Soon, happy business folk will surely appear in daytime TV ads too, extolling the pay-outs that financed their own Florida holidays.

£60bn question

This week’s suspect statistic comes from Universities UK, which claims that its members create an oddly precise £59bn in benefits for the nation. Don’t they teach people anything at college these days? It is axiomatic that those concocted “economic impact” figures should always be rounded up to the
nearest 10bn.

Foul-weather friend

The downturn has made heroes of small businesses in the moralising world of politics. Barack Obama plugged them 14 times in this week’s State of the Union address. That’s 11 times more than in 2009 and 12 times more than in 2011 (probably).