100 eCommerce Trailblazers
Edition 16, 2019
Reaching Gen Z
Retail tech report
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the new
PayPal?
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CONTACT US
Executive editor Chris Maguire: 0161 215 7144; chris.maguire@businesscloud.co.uk
Editor Jonathan Symcox: 0161 215 7143; jonathan.symcox@businesscloud.co.uk
Multimedia journalist Alistair Hardaker: alistair.hardaker@businesscloud.co.uk
Business development manager Helena Furness: 0161 215 3877; helena.furness@businesscloud.co.uk
Designer: Richard Salisbury | Cover illustration: Grace Hadley | Writer: Jenny Brookfield
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The changing face
of eCommerce
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Christmas is coming up fast and
the mad rush to buy presents
has begun.
The shopping experience is barely
recognisable today from that of 20
or even 10 years ago. Amazon and
eBay dominate the landscape while
clothes are also largely bought online.
High street giants have been forced to
offer next-day delivery and generous
returns policies to compete with these
marketplaces and fast fashion websites.
However there is also a drive to use technology to push
people back towards physical stores, marrying together
retailers’ online and offline propositions. This is mirrored
in the eclectic mix of retail tech creators in our 100
eCommerce Trailblazers ranking (p9).
I recently visited the no.1-ranked company at its
headquarters on Teesside. eCommerce platform
Visualsoft is flying under the leadership of CEO Dean
Benson, one of the original co-founders two decades ago.
He explains how online retail has changed in that time
and says mining the hidden seam of innovation within a
business is essential to remaining relevant (p21).
We recently held the first of our new-look Insights
conferences and again eCommerce took centre stage.
A string of impressive businesses including Visualsoft,
Shop Direct, Wowcher, Forever Unique, Autorama,
Teespring and Adyen offered insight into improving user
experience, marketing, customer acquisition and the
various eCommerce platforms available.
Full report on p32.
Adyen is a hugely impressive business. Worth an
astonishing €19 billion, the FinTech generates unrivalled
insights into retail customers and is set to replace PayPal
as eBay’s payments partner (p4). It is a worthy cover star
for our final magazine of 2019.
If retail isn’t your (shopping) bag, there is an array of
technology featured elsewhere in the mag. We have
a four-page report on how companies can resonate
with Gen Z (p50) while ‘The Explainer’ breaks down
pentesting – the cyberattack you really need – on p56.
One of the big quandaries facing start-ups is how much
to spend on marketing and how to maximise its impact.
Our Tech Counsel on p74 features advice from a dozen
people on the topic.
We also interview two of our worthy regional Tech 50
winners. In Scotland, Intelligent Growth Solutions is
plotting the transformation of global food production
with its cutting-edge vertical farming tech (p42), while
in the North West, Peak is scaling rapidly as it helps
companies embrace the dawning era of artificial
intelligence (p46).
Another impressive business leader I’ve spoken with for
this edition is Pat O’Connor. A former commander in the
Irish Defence Forces, his start-up VRAI is saving lives in
hazardous environments such as war-torn Somalia and
offshore wind farms (p25).
In Birmingham Nourished is disrupting the health
market with its custom-built 3D-printed vitamin stacks.
Several people I know have signed up for these delicious
innovative gummies since we interviewed Melissa
Snover, including Gadget Gavin!
That brings me nicely back to Christmas: our resident
columnist has revealed the gadgets you should consider
giving to your loved ones this holiday with his annual
Christmas tech wishlist on the final page.
Finally, I’d like to wish our readers a Merry Christmas
and Happy New Year. We have plans to ramp up our
content and events programme in 2020 so watch this
space!
Jonathan Symcox
Editor, BusinessCloud
businesscloud.co.uk
@jonsymcox
@jonathansymcox
2
CONTENTS Q4 2019
FEATURES
eCommerce Trailblazers
UK’s leading eCommerce and retail tech
creators unveiled for 2019
Tech 50
Regional innovation rankings for Yorkshire &
Humberside, Midlands, Scotland and North West
The Explainer
Penetration testing demystified in eight
questions
Tech Counsel
Maximise your marketing spend

INTERVIEWS
Adyen
€19bn FinTech set to take over from PayPal
as eBay’s preferred payments platform
Visualsoft
CEO Dean Benson on how eCommerce platform
remains relevant after two decades in business
09
41
56
74
04
21
25
29
38
42
46
VRAI
Improving safety in hazardous environments
such as war-torn Somalia and offshore
wind farms
Nourished
Melissa Snover on reimagining medication
and vitamin supplements through 3D
printing
iCabbi
Helping local taxi firms embrace the latest
technologies and take the fight to Uber
Intelligent Growth Solutions
Vertical farming pioneer aims to
revolutionise global food production and
reduce carbon footprints
Peak
CEO Richard Potter outlines plans for
world domination at ‘UK’s leading
commercial AI business’
21
3
Viddyoze
100 per cent automated video animation
service taking the business world by storm
Blinder
Former New Zealand rugby league press
officer’s start-up works with world’s top
sports teams
Togee
Innovative app enabling real-time screen
sharing at the touch of a button

REPORTS
eCommerce
Experts offer tips on UX design, choosing
the right platform and customer acquisition
Gen Z
How can businesses connect with the world’s
first truly digital generation?
60
66
71
32
50
64
55
76
INSIGHT
On the Money: Andy Sloane
“It can take 10-20 years to build a ‘Scalebig’
company – but when it is done right, it can
boost the tech ecosystem as a whole”
Neil Lathwood
“We had a product born out of one of the
Black Friday years which has since become
a bit of a de facto standard across the
industry”
Gadget Gavin
“My Christmas tech wish-list includes
Polaroid cameras, audio sunglasses,
fingerprint padlocks and 3D chocolate
printers”
29
60
46
50
56
4
COVER STORY
Words:
Alistair Hardaker
Meet the new
PayPal
ADYEN IS THE BIGGEST
BRAND YOU’VE NEVER
HEARD OF – UNTIL NOW.
WORTH AN ASTONISHING
€19 BILLION, THE
AMSTERDAM-
HEADQUARTERED
UNICORN IS ABOUT
TO BECOME EBAY’S
PREFERRED PAYMENTS
PLATFORM
5
Adyen has already helped
you hand over cash to
Spotify, Uber, Netflix,
Groupon or Booking.com
– you just didn’t know it.
That you don’t recognise the name is
down to the FinTech’s efforts to remove
what it terms friction in the payment
process. However its days as ‘the biggest
brand you’ve never heard of’ could soon
come to an end.
The Amsterdam-headquartered firm,
already worth €19 billion, is soon to
become the preferred payment method for
the majority of eBay’s 182 million users –
earning it the moniker ‘the new PayPal’.
CEO Pieter van der Does (above right) and
CTO Arnout Schuijff founded the business
in 2006 to better connect businesses with
both international card networks and local
payment methods. The duo, who sold previous
start-up Bibit, a billing platform, to the Royal
Bank of Scotland, named it Adyen after the
Surinamese word for ‘starting over again’.
Colin Neil (below) joined the business in 2017
after 10 years as Burberry’s retail director.
The move was prompted by his work with
the FinTech and its approach to the future of
payments, an increasingly important part of
the shopping process – and often the most
frustrating.
Publicly-listed Adyen allows businesses to
accept eCommerce, mobile and point-of-
sale payments through its single platform. Its
goal is simple – to remove friction with every
payment made.
“We shop every day. You put things in your
basket, you put your card details in and it
gets declined, even though you’ve got money
in the bank. That’s friction,” Neil, senior VP
for business development at the company,
explains to BusinessCloud.
This is why Adyen is focused not only on
making the online world an easier place to
pay, but on connecting up its technology with
high-street stores. Alongside its headline retail
clients are the likes of O’Neill, Gap and Tiffany
& Co.
“If you buy clothes online and they don’t fit,
and you try to take them back to a retail store
which says ‘sorry you can’t return that here’,
that’s an example of where the commerce
environment is not unified,” says Neil. “You
need to unify that, because you need to deliver
one consistent customer experience.
“Friction in the checkout is a huge risk for
retailers because it stops the conversion of
sales and means customers leave websites
and never go back. Removing friction for us is
about how we make things seamless, so you
don’t see it and you don’t feel it, you just enjoy
the purchase experience.”
An ‘integrated checkout experience’ is one of
the reasons eBay cites in its decision to move
away from PayPal, a firm co-founded by Elon
Musk and which it helped to create.
“eBay is a fantastic opportunity for us because
they are such a forward-thinking business and
everyone knows the brand. We’re going to
COVER STORY

6
underpin that brand,” says Neil. The firm will
be the ‘middleman’ between eBay’s customers
and the more than 200 methods of payment
that its global customer base uses to pay and
receive funds, including Visa and Mastercard.
PayPal will instead become one of these
growing number of payment methods. “We
want to take the challenges that eBay bring us
and find out how we can evolve our product.
How do we evolve the product in a way that
not only works for eBay, but can work for
everyone else?
“Because we’ve built the platform ourselves, it
means we can evolve and develop the platform
really quickly.”
Adyen recently signed deals with Apple Pay
and Google Pay. It also supports
Alipay, the most widely-used
third-party online payment service
provider in China, which processes
over 100m daily transactions and has
520m active users.
“Alipay, PayPal and some of the
big retailers that we work with like
Boohoo could be grouped together,
because they think really far
forward,” is Neil’s view. “And because
they think so far forward, it forces us
to always be forward-thinking.”
For all its flagship partnerships, its
relatively small client Vue cinemas might best
demonstrate the firm’s ambitions to rival not
only PayPal, but banks themselves – and the
advanced customer analytics platforms which
run alongside them.
“We can give companies insight from data
that tells you about customers. That insight
is something that more and more retailers
want to work with us on,” says Neil. “A cinema,
for example, sees lots and lots of customers
coming into their cinema, and they’ll come
in and make a purchase for popcorn and buy
tickets.
“The cinema has no idea who those customers
are. If you went into that cinema 10 times they
would think you were ten different customers,
COVER STORY
Keep up to date on tech
The latest investment, deals and appointments
£
£
PROFILEFounded
2006
HQ
Amsterdam
Employees
900
Total funding
€266m
Market cap
€19bn
Six-month EBITDA
€125.8M
Six-month net
revenue €221m
Six-month payment
volume €104.6bn
7
they would have no idea that actually you
were quite a loyal cinema-goer.”
Its technology logs the card details used
by customers and can build a profile of
what is bought, what has been spent and
when. If a cinema customer then decides
to buy a ticket online in advance, Adyen
can add this transaction to the existing
transactions, with the addition of an
email address.
The information not only allows brands
like Vue to build a more cohesive idea
of its customer and their individual
spending habits – without the need
for loyalty cards or memberships – but
it also works retroactively: “Now we
can say to that cinema that all of those
purchases that they thought were
different customers were in fact the
same.”
Neil said these types of technological
developments can be built for one client,
and then quickly rolled out to its other
clients across the world. “If there’s a
retailer in Australia, for example, and
we developed something because
there’s a really good user case for that in
Australia, as soon as it’s ready, it’s ready
for everyone,” he says.
Based in Manchester, Neil is tasked
with representing and working with the
North of the UK to find more clients, and
therefore uses for the tech, which can
then be rolled out internationally.
“Manchester is a really good example of
a city where there are a huge number of
Chinese students and visitors every year.
When they come to the UK, they have a
preferred method of payment,” he says.
“One of the most popular is WeChat,
which began as a simple messaging
app. Its WeChat Pay option is now
deeply embedded in Chinese commerce
infrastructure.”
WeChat Pay is now used by more than
900m shoppers per month, and the
WeChat application is reportedly the
fifth most-used app in the world. A
2017 survey found that 92 per cent of
inhabitants in China’s biggest cities use
either WeChat Pay or Alipay as their
primary method of payment. Last year
that usage amounted to $41.51 trillion in
transactions for WeChat Pay.
“WeChat is a whole ecosystem in China
which consumers never leave: they buy
inside of it, talk to each other and decide
what they’re doing,” says Neil. “We make
sure that we harness the strength of that
platform to let them reach consumers
outside mainland China.”
On the future of the company, Neil
says he is excited to see how payment
and transactional tech could further
disrupt the buying process, and in doing
so reveal what a crucial part of the
experience it is.
“If we think about how technology is
pushing the boundaries, what’s to stop
you arriving a petrol station in a car that
can automatically fill itself up and you
just drive away?
“The key is being able to evolve as
technology evolves. But I think what we
see today, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
COVER STORY
ADYEN OFFICES
London
Manchester
San Francisco
New York
Paris
Hong Kong
Singapore
Reference pages launching in 2020
at businesscloud.co.uk
Adyen’s eye-watering valuation is a
drop in the digital payments ocean
Adyen
€19bn
PayPal
€108bn
Tencent (owns WeChat)
€363bn
Alibaba (owns Alipay)
€407bn
ADYEN CUSTOMERS
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9
01 Visualsoft
eCommerce software and digital
marketing agency which doubled
operating profit to £2.1 million on sales
of £13m last year. Headquartered in
Stockton-on-Tees, Visualsoft works
with more than 1,200 clients and more
than one per cent of all UK eCommerce
transactions go through its platforms,
an annual total of £750m.
02 Bidnamic
Leeds-based Bidnamic is a marketing
technology platform that helps
retailers unlock the full potential of
Google Shopping. It achieves this by
applying machine learning to profile
every single product SKU (stock-taking
unit) in your catalogue, predicting
its optimal bid value algorithmically.
03 GoInStore
Based in London, GoInStore’s live video
streaming app gives you the in-store
shopping experience from the comfort
of your home. It matches customers’
Join the discussion on #100eCommerceTrailblazers
The retail sector has
undergone a massive
transition to online
platforms, with companies
investing billions into the cloud
and data analytics to improve
their eCommerce performance.
Technologies such as augmented
reality and automation are also
having an impact.
Hundreds of our website readers
voted on a shortlist of around 150
UK-based eCommerce and retail
tech creators for the one they
believe is the most innovative,
while a panel of judges also
selected the businesses which
they feel are displaying the most
innovation. The final ranking was
decided by a combination of
these.
The 100 businesses profiled in
the 2019 ranking are reinventing
how we sell, shop, market and
deliver products. It highlights how
the UK is blazing a trail with its
eCommerce and retail technology
creators.
To be eligible, businesses had to
be creating disruptive tech for
the eCommerce or retail sector.
Pure eCommerce retailers were
not included.
Many thanks to the judges, listed
below.
• Nigel Jones, sector specialist:
tech & creative, Department for
International Trade
• Ellie England, sales director,
Microsoft Search Advertising
• Matthew Evans, director
markets, techUK
• Colin Neil, senior VP business
development, Adyen
• Davina Lines, MD, eCommerce
Club and Mixing Digital
• Jonathan McNamara, CEO,
RetroFuzz
• Patricia Keating, executive
director, Tech Manchester
• Julian Wells, director,
Whitecap Consulting
• Darren Ratcliffe, digital director,
Six and Flow
• Jonathan Symcox, editor,
BusinessCloud
Look out for 100 Industrial Innovators in Q1
2020 and 100 HealthTech Pioneers in Q2
10
100 eCommerce Trailblazers
browsing online to the best sales
assistant on the shop floor who can
then demonstrate a product and talk
the customer through their purchase.
04 Airtime Rewards
Airtime Rewards, which is based
in Manchester and has an office in
London, helps large organisations
build customer loyalty by providing
an innovative digital rewards-based
service. Airtime enables shoppers to
be rewarded with a unique currency
that can be converted into monetary
credit on their mobile phone account
or for additional mobile data.
05 Skyscanner
Edinburgh-based Skyscanner is a
flight comparison site with unicorn
status. Acquired by one of China’s
biggest online travel companies Ctrip
in 2016 for £1.4 billion, more than
100 million people across the world
now rely on its app and website each
month to help them with their travel
plans including hotels and car hire.
06 Dream Agility
Dream Agility’s cloud-based Google
AdTech gives its customers the
equivalent of an army of people
working on their digital advertising.
The Ramsbottom company’s
proprietary visual AI and machine
learning has earned it Google Premier
and Microsoft Ads Partner status.
07 Fulfilmentcrowd
Chorley-based eCommerce
logistics company Fulfilmentcrowd
was founded way back in 1984 and
today ships millions of items per
year to customers across the globe.
08 Auto Trader
Manchester-headquartered online
vehicle sales giant Auto Trader listed on
the London Stock Exchange in 2015 and
is a member of the FTSE 100 Index. It
attracts around 50 million monthly cross-
platform visits and recently posted
half-yearly operating profit of £131.4m.
09 Mercarto
Mercarto is a marketplace platform which
provides the tools for any entrepreneur
to build a fully-functional eCommerce
store. It has been built to alleviate
various challenges such as identification
of manufacturers, the sourcing of
products, supply chain, shipping and
logistics. The Manchester firm has since
deployed its technology to a number of
global enterprises via a bespoke product
information management system.
10 Sorted Group
Manchester-based software-as-a-
service company Sorted harnesses
the power of tech to transform the
complex world of parcel deliveries
into a seamless experience. Its API-
first technology runs frictionless
online checkouts, warehouses and
shipping in nine countries around the
world using services from a carrier
library of thousands. It has secured
more than £35m investment to date.
11 Yorkshire Payments
Brighouse-based Yorkshire Payments
provides affordable ways to process card
payments to more than 3,500 businesses.
It provides information on everything
from stock levels to the time that staff
clock in and out. The firm processed
£496m in transactions in 2018.
11
12 IceLolly
IceLolly is the UK’s biggest package
holiday comparison site. The Leeds
business attracts around one and
a half million visitors every month.
13 Shoptimised
Shoptimised provides product feed
optimisation platforms and price
comparison software for eCommerce.
Based in South Shields, it has built
up a rapidly-growing following of
major eCommerce retailers and
digital marketing agencies through
its creation of a platform designed
for pay-per-click professionals.
14 Pricesearcher
London-based Pricesearcher is a
free eCommerce search engine
which checks prices from more
than 10,000 websites on 150 million
products. It recently launched
a Chrome browser extension.
15 Increasingly
AI-powered product bundling and
cross-selling technology to drive
basket revenue. The London firm
works with Samsung and claims it
drove 14 per cent revenue uplift for
builders merchant Travis Perkins.
16 EKM
Established in 2002, EKM was the first
cloud-based eCommerce platform in
the UK. The Preston-based company
is the nation’s biggest eCommerce
platform provider, having helped set
up more than 80,000 online shops
worldwide from
start-ups to
corporates.
Unlike many
platforms,
EKM doesn’t
take any
transaction
fees or a cut of
online sales.
17 JRNI
An omnichannel customer engagement
platform, formerly known as
BookingBug, which has secured total
funding of $23.2m. London-based
JRNI enables companies to interact
with customers online and offline
via appointments, events, queuing,
call centre and insights applications.
18 Aero
Aero Commerce has developed an in-
house eCommerce platform. The
Middlesbrough firm partners
with digital marketing, web
design and eCommerce
agencies to provide
feature-rich websites
for online retailers.
19 BlackCurve
A SaaS platform for retailers founded
in 2016, London-based BlackCurve
helps its clients find the optimal price
for their goods and services through
sophisticated pricing algorithms and
machine learning. Its technology
powers more than 250,000 pricing
suggestions per day and it is actively
managing more than six million
products on behalf of its clients.
20 Carwow
London-based Carwow is a sales
platform which sources vehicles from
local and national dealers. Founded
in 2013, it has facilitated more than
£2bn in car sales to dealerships – a
five per cent market share – and
recently secured £25m investment
from Mercedes-Benz’ parent company
Daimler AG.
21 One iota
Manchester-based One iota helps
global retail brands including Hugo
Boss, JD Sports and Superdry to
continually improve their customers’
shopping experience. The cloud
platform allows retailers to run signage,
social walls and assisted sale services
across a range of devices from mobiles
to in-store screens, all of which helps
bridge the online to offline gap.
22 Ocado
Hatfield-headquartered firm Ocado
is an online supermarket which
uses advanced robotics to
automate fulfilment and
this year announced a
£750m joint venture with
M&S. Its R&D arm Ocado
Technology develops
online retail platforms
featuring AI, machine learning,
Big Data and cloud technology.
23 Wowcher
Roland Bryan and Karen Kemble-
Diaz founded discount eCommerce
marketplace Wowcher in 2011 and
have overseen its growth to more
than 19 million subscribers, with 8,000
deals now available on the platform.
The London firm is Britain’s second-
largest eCommerce marketplace.

24 MoneySuperMarket
Listed price comparison website
MoneySuperMarket is an established
member of the FTSE 250.
Headquartered in Ewloe, the group
has an annual turnover of £355.6m.
Join the discussion on #100eCommerceTrailblazers
12
25 Bizuma
Bizuma’s core goal is to empower
any business, of any size, to trade
globally. A private B2B eCommerce
marketplace, it connects companies
with vetted buyers and sellers in over
50 countries. The London business
recently ranked second in the 2019
Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track
100 of the UK’s fastest-growing
companies based on three-year sales.
26 Deliveroo
London-headquartered online food
delivery company Deliveroo this year
raised $575m in a funding round led
by Amazon, taking the total raised to
$1.53bn. Founded in 2012, its ‘gig-
economy’ app allows restaurants to
offer home delivery via a network of
drivers and cyclists.

27 Ecovend
A Waltham Abbey-based provider
of ‘reverse vending machines’
which offers rewards to those
who return plastic bottles and
drinks cans to it for recycling. Its
machines are usually in areas of
high footfall as they feature large
digital AV screens for organisations
to advertise their products.
28 Fruugo.com
Ulverston-based Fruugo.com is
an online marketplace helping
British retailers drive product sales
internationally. It holds no stock
itself but simply connects customers
with retailers through dropshipping.
Originally launched in Helsinki,
Finland in 2008, it was bought by its
existing directors Dominic Allonby
and Darren Naylor in 2012 and has
been used by two million shoppers
in 17 languages and 32 countries.
29 Localisto
Based in London and Madrid, Localisto
combines geo-targeting and analytics
to understand local customer behaviour.
The SaaS marketing platform for
bricks-and-mortar retailers can increase
foot traffic to physical stores and
manage brand interactions on all digital
platforms, from maps to store pages.
30 Proximity Insight
Based in London, Proximity Insight’s
app-based platform is built on Salesforce
and helps in-store sales staff to organise
their day, interact with customers,
access product information and carry
out back-office store management.
31 Depop
Fashion marketplace
app Depop is aimed
primarily at Gen
Z and millennials
and allows its
13m global
users to buy
and sell clothing.
The London firm
secured a £49m funding
round this year to power global organic
growth, increase its engineering team
and invest in product development.
32 Incopro
Incopro uses machine learning
technology to help brands
like Ted Baker and Harley
Davidson tackle the threat
of counterfeiting online.
The London company’s
Talisman product monitors
IP infringements by scouring
all corners of the web in
real-time, pulling in data from
major platforms ranging from
online marketplaces and social media
through to websites and app stores.
33 Threads Styling
Fashion tech start-up business Threads
Styling uses social media channels
including Instagram, WhatsApp,
Snapchat and WeChat to help its
customers find luxury products and
works closely with brands including
Dior, Fendi and Chopard. The London-
based company’s customer base
is spread across 100 countries.
34 Formisimo
Salford analytics start-up Formisimo
improves checkout conversion
rates for eCommerce companies by
measuring user behaviour. It recently
launched a new platform focused on
enterprise, Zuko, which is designed
to meet advanced requirements
of data-centric organisations.
35 Yieldify
London firm Yieldify predicts behaviour
to optimise the customer experience.
It delivers a combination of website
personalisation and email remarketing
to help drive conversions and
increase lifetime value and has built a
roster of big-name clients including
Domino’s and Marks & Spencer after
securing investment from Google
Ventures and SoftBank Capital.
36 Divido
Founded by former Sky News technology
feature writer Christer Holloman, Divido
lets customers spread the
cost of any purchase
over a period of time
while the merchant
gets paid in full
right away. The
platform is aimed
at independent
businesses which
cannot afford to
offer the finance
options of bigger
100 eCommerce Trailblazers
13
companies. More than 1,000
customers and partners work with
London-based Divido including
BNP Paribas, BMW and Lastminute.
37 PureClarity
Launched in York in 2017, PureClarity
uses artificial intelligence to
analyse customers’ behaviour and
deliver a personalised customer
experience through product
recommendations, marketing
campaigns, search and email, helping
retailers to boost online revenue.
38 White Label Loyalty
Leeds firm White Label Loyalty turns
bank cards into loyalty cards and also
designs mobile apps for restaurant and
bar chains with built-in loyalty systems.
It claims its cloud-based engagement
engine increases customer
retention by 15 per cent or more.
39 OnBuy
Based in Poole, Dorset, OnBuy is
one of the world’s fastest-growing
marketplaces and sits somewhere
between the C2C model championed
by eBay and B2C model of Amazon.
Cas Paton launched OnBuy in
November 2016 and has built it up
to host 16 million products in more
than 6,000 categories, with plans to
hit 100m by 2022. More than a million
people a month visit its website.
40 Festicket
London-based Festicket helps
fans to discover and book tickets
and travel packages for over 1,200
festivals worldwide. The two-sided
marketplace uses a network of over 4,000
accommodation and travel suppliers to
create end-to-end experiences and to
date has served more than two million
travellers from more than 120 countries.
41 Captify
Consumer search behaviour analysis
provider Captify is the largest holder
of first-party consumer search data
outside of Google. The London firm’s
unique technology understands the
intent of consumers across all channels,
including voice search, desktop web
search and in-app search. It powers
advertising for many of the world’s
largest brands including Apple, Disney,
Adidas, American Express and Microsoft.
42 KhooCommerce
KhooCommerce provides cloud-
based eCommerce inventory and
order management solutions. The
Ashford business’s ERP software
integrates with existing internal
systems and shipping partners.
43 OmniCX
London-based OmniCX’s cloud platform
for eCommerce businesses includes
product information management,
content management, multi-site
support, advanced merchandising
and promotions, personalisation
and advanced SEO capabilities.
Its API-first approach helps
companies to grow revenues quickly.
44 Amplience
Another London company, Amplience’s
content management software is used
by the likes of retail giants boohoo and
Shop Direct. With more than $47m
of funding behind it, the firm’s
solution – which disconnects a
website’s front-end design from
back-end processing – allows for
mobile-first shopping experiences.
45 Parcel2Go
Based in Bolton, Parcel2Go is the UK’s
biggest parcel delivery comparison site.
It provides door-to-door collection,
delivery and parcel drop services at
over 25,000 locations throughout the
UK.


46 Poq
A SaaS provider for mobile app
commerce, Poq closed a £9.5m Series
B funding round last year, bringing
its total investment to £16.5m. The
London company’s platform allows
retailers to build customised native
apps with clients including Missguided,
House of Fraser and Holland & Barrett.
47 TopCashback
Based in Stafford, app TopCashback
is free to join. Users can browse its
site and choose from thousands
of retailers and exclusive cashback
offers, with the commission being
passed straight back to the customer.
48 UXG
Established in 1983 as Unicam and
rebranded in 2017, UXG designs
and manufactures bespoke digital,
LED and retail solutions for branded
environments such as sensor-
based digital mirrors. The Leeds
company counts retail group
Sports Direct among its clients.
49 DigitalBridge
Manchester-based interior design
augmented reality tech firm which
enables customers to design
and buy their dream
bathroom or kitchen.
Integrating directly into
a retailer’s website,
DigitalBridge guides
customers through
the entire process from
concept to design to
visualisation and completion.

Join the discussion on #100eCommerceTrailblazers
14
50 Autorama Group
Hemel Hempstead business Autorama
is looking to bring the slick Amazon/
ASOS experience to vehicle leasing
through its brands Vanarama (vans) and
Motorama (cars). Described as an online
concierge service, it is now rolling out
credit check and ID verification which
can inform someone within 30 seconds
whether they are eligible to lease
from a photo of their driving licence.
51 Ometria
Ometria recently raised $21m in
Series B funding for its predictive
eCommerce marketing tech which
enables retailers to better understand
and communicate with their
customers. Since its $6m Series A
funding round the firm has expanded
its client base to 200 retailers, including
Hotel Chocolat, Fred Perry, MADE.
com and Notonthehighstreet.com.

52 Trouva
A curated online marketplace for more
than 600 independent shops, London-
based Trouva gives local bricks-and-
mortar retailers the benefits of global
reach and allows them to thrive and
compete with eCommerce giants and
chain retailers.

53 Paddle
London-based Paddle was named the
fastest-growing software company
in the UK in the Deloitte Fast 50 with
revenue growth of 3,300 per cent in
the last three years. It is a platform
for software companies which solves
every part of the sales process.
54 Pouch
A free browser extension which
applies discount codes automatically
on checkout, Pouch was acquired
by German publishing technology
platform Global Savings Group.
Available for Google Chrome, Safari
and Firefox, it previously received five
offers of investment on Dragons’ Den.
55 WeGift
Digital rewards platform WeGift was
established in 2016 by founder and
CEO Aron Alexander and automates
incentives and rewards for employees.
The London-based platform operates in
more than 26 countries in 22 languages
and in 20 currencies, with more than
500 brand partners. Its clients include
employee perks platform Perkbox, New
Look, Sodexo Engage and Halfords.
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15
56 yReceipts
London business
which custom
designs
email
receipts.
Retailers
around the
world use
yReceipts’
software
to identify in-
store customers through their
digital receipts and connect 100 per
cent of in-store transactions into
any platform they use in real-time.
57 R.O.EYE
Launched in 2004 as a performance
marketing agency, Manchester-
based R.O.Eye repositioned as an
eCommerce insight specialist and is
now driving transformational change
for online advertisers. Its media
tracking and optimisation platform
SingleView now utilises machine
learning for more impactful insights.
58 Yoobic
London-based Yoobic is a SaaS
company which seeks to help retailers
and brands track merchandising
and marketing operations. It has
worked with fashion brands including
Lacoste as well as Aldi and automotive
giants Peugeot and Citroen.
59 Edited
Trusted by more than 42,000 retail
professionals including John Lewis,
Mango, boohoo and Zara, London firm
Edited provides AI-driven analytics to
ensure its clients get their products
and pricing right. Its data covers every
market and segment around the
world with more than two billion SKUs
(stock-taking units) available on the
platform and 500k+ added every week.
60 Dotdigital
Dotdigital Group provides email
marketing automation services for
digital marketing professionals. The
London-based company, founded
in 1999, is listed on the AIM.
61 Adimo
Glasgow-based Adimo’s platform
integrates with marketing channels
including display adverts, landing pages,
websites, social media and video.
Shoppers can select products and add
them directly to their online supermarket
basket for later purchase with the rest of
their weekly shop. Adimo then analyses
which products have been viewed, added
to online shopping baskets, and the
revenue generated, and links that data
to specific marketing campaigns. It has
worked with consumer goods giants
including Nestle, P&G and PepsiCo.
62 Veeqo
Swansea-based Veeqo allows retailers
to manage orders, inventory, shipping
and accounting – syncing up their retail
store, website, eBay shop and Amazon
Marketplace – from a single automated
cloud-based platform, allowing them to
focus on increasing sales.



63 Viddyoze
The world’s first and only 100 per cent
automated video animation service
for marketers, Preston firm Viddyoze
generated $500,000 in revenue in its
first four days and predicts revenue will
reach $12.9m this year. It believes video
content is a more effective engagement
tool than traditional methods,
leading to improved conversion rates.

64 NearSt
NearSt is a retail technology
company driving more people to
the high street. Based in London,
it does this by connecting the
live inventory of nearby shops to
local shoppers searching online.
65 Nexus Vehicle Rental
Online vehicle rental booking and
management platform Nexus Vehicle
Rental secured a £142m private equity
investment last year as Phoenix Equity
Partners bought a majority stake in the
business. Each year the Leeds business
manages around 200,000 individual
vehicles on behalf of clients including
66,000 commercial vehicles and 6,000
HGVs following a dedicated HGV rental
booking platform launch in 2017.
66 PCMS Group
PCMS is a retail technology and
software group which provides point-
of-sale software for major retailers
including the likes of Walgreens,
John Lewis and Arcadia Group.
Led by CEO Tony Houldsworth, the
Coventry business employs more
than 500 staff in the UK, US and
Singapore and was acquired in a
management buyout in late 2017.
67 Endless Gain
A revolutionary
conversion rate
optimisation
business,
Endless
Gain uses
biometrics
to understand
human emotions
and behaviour and
psychology to optimise them. The
biometric assessments utilised by
the Manchester company include
eye-tracking, facial expression
recognition, galvanic skin response,
electroencephalography (electric
activity in the brain) and pupil dilation.
Join the discussion on #100eCommerceTrailblazers
16
68 Gousto
UK recipe box company Gousto
announced an additional £30m funding
round in July, taking its total funds
raised to over £100m. Gousto supplies
its subscribers with recipe kit boxes
which include ready-measured, fresh
ingredients and easily followed recipes.
The London firm, founded in 2012,
has a fully-automated production
line powered by data science.
69 Market of Mums
Mum-to-Mum online marketplace
Market of Mums makes it quick and
simple to buy and sell kids’ stuff with
other parents. Every sale concluded
on the Leeds/Sheffield company’s
platform supports children’s charities
while it is used by celebrities including
Ferne McCann and Amy Childs.
70 Henderson Technology
Newtownabbey-based Henderson
Technology is the largest electronic
point-of-sale system supplier in
Northern Ireland with over 450 sites
across the province. Its EDGEPoS
system was designed by retailers, for
retailers, and supports businesses
from 1-100 lanes. It recently embarked
on a significant sales expansion
with partners and customers in
the United Kingdom and Australia.
71 Kalibrate Technologies
A Manchester-based fuel and
convenience retail analytics
platform. Kalibrate offers fuel
pricing, location planning, market
data and traffic count data solutions
in more than 70 countries with
clients including oil companies,
convenience stores and supermarkets.
72 Cortexica
Cortexica’s
technology
enhances
customer
experience
through
real-time
video analysis.
Developed within
the bioengineering department of
Imperial College London as the result of
research to reverse-engineer the human
visual cortex, the company has also used
its tech to protect the safety of workers.
73 Cybertill
Founded back in 2001, Cybertill
developed one of the world’s first
electronic point-of-sale systems
and is a leading cloud-based retail
management software and services
provider today. Based in Knowsley, it
provides its tech to charities as well
as retailers and visitor attractions.
.
74 Brightpearl
Founded in Bristol in 2007, Brightpearl
is an omnichannel retail management
system which places orders, inventory,
financials, point of sale and CRM in
one location. It serves more than
1,000 brands and has transacted, it
claims, more than $1.8bn worth of
trade across 26 different countries.
75 CloudSense
CloudSense is an omnichannel
commerce platform which claims
to improve customer retention
and revenues. The London firm’s
end-to-end platform seamlessly
connects commerce processes
and centralises customer and
commercial data in Salesforce.
76 Tebex
Lee McNeil founded Tebex at the age
of 16 and ran it from his bedroom
after spotting a gap in the market
for people wanting to sell in-game
products. Starting out with Minecraft,
the Nottingham company has now
branched out to offer its services in 12
games including Grand Theft Auto V
and has processed more than 21 million
payments worth more than £300m.


77 Dropit
Karin Cabili started bag collection
platform Dropit when, during a visit
to New York, she was unable to make
a purchase as she was on a way to a
meeting and didn’t have any way of
getting the bags back to her hotel. Dropit
users can leave bags at partner retailers
– even if they didn’t purchase the items
there – or at designated drop-off points.
A courier will deliver them to their
home at a convenient time no matter
where they are in the UK. The London
firm works with likes of Karen Millen,
Molton Brown, Jimmy Choo and Adidas.
78 Farfetch
Farfetch is the leading global technology
platform for the luxury fashion industry.
Launched in 2008 by Jose Neves, the
marketplace today connects customers
in over 190 countries with items from
more than 50 countries and more
than 1,200 of the world’s best brands,
boutiques and department stores. The
$3bn London firm’s auxiliary businesses
include Farfetch Platform Solutions,
which services enterprise clients with
eCommerce and technology capabilities.
100 eCommerce Trailblazers
17
Cybertill (73)
Cybertill provides complete retail management solutions for service-focused
businesses. Its dedicated cloud platforms, RetailStore and CharityStore, feature a real-
time single view of stock, sales and customers across all customer touchpoints including
branded retail shops, pop-ups, franchises, concessions, online and mobile.
Cybertill pushes boundaries and works with customers to build solutions that suit their
business needs. It serves over 700 businesses globally, helps process over 64 million
transactions a year and helps to securely process over 23,000 transactions every hour.
CloudSense (75)
The CloudSense platform is an end-to-end solution for the full commerce journey
across every sales channel. Whether you are a communications provider, media
business, utilities supplier or high-scale company looking for a comprehensive
commerce solution, CloudSense can help.
CloudSense is 100 per cent built on the scalable, reliable and secure Salesforce platform.
Its platform is designed to transform sales effectiveness from high complexity business-
to-business products to high volume business-to-consumer services.
Dream Agility (6)
Dream Agility’s machine learning and visual AI platform is everything you need to
transform your digital advertising. Whether you advertise on Google, Microsoft
Advertising or eBay, it’s got you covered.
It includes feed management and optimisation to bidding tech delivering machine
learning reports not available in Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising. It also has the first
visual AI of its kind in the market which, from an image, can generate an attribute-rich
product title and description.
BlackCurve (19)
BlackCurve helps retailers optimise the prices of the items they sell. Its platform
analyses data from different sources including sales history and website page
performance to competitor pricing and stock levels.
BlackCurve currently optimises the prices of more than one million products and
makes more than 15 million price changes per month. It works with retailers in various
industries, including sporting equipment, DIY, consumer electronics and photography,
pet supplies, stationery, automotive parts, beauty and healthcare.
Visualsoft (1)
Visualsoft’s enterprise-level eCommerce platform offers everything a retailer needs
to run their online business, while its growth marketing services help drive sales and
increase customer numbers through SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, affiliate
marketing and conversion rate optimisation.
Its USP is Shared Success. Rather than charging big upfront project fees like other
agencies, it charges a small fee per successful transaction and partners with its retailers
to drive growth.
18
79 Appear Here
Appear Here is one of the world’s
largest short-term pop-up retail
space platforms and has raised $21m
of capital across five funding rounds
from real estate investors. The London
firm plans to launch in a new city each
month over the next six months, with
Miami and Amsterdam launching first
and cities like Austin, Portland and
Stockholm also in the pipeline.


80 Swoopos
A mobile payments and electronic
point-of-sale start-up which also
helps merchants take advantage of
loyalty rewards and data analytics
software, Birmingham-based Swoopos
has worked with international brands
including Subway and Costa Coffee.
81 Parcelly
Parcelly is looking to solve the
problem of missed deliveries.
The London firm has built up a
network of more than 2,000 drop-
off locations in 60-plus towns and
cities across the UK ranging from
convenience stores to bars and gyms.

82 Unmade
Fashion software
company
Unmade was
founded
in 2013
to disrupt
the fashion
manufacturing
processes,
allowing brands to make only make
what is actually sold, in support of
sustainability. To date, the London
company has raised £10m including
funds from leaders from the fashion
and retail industries including José
Neves, founder and CEO of Farfetch.

83 Leasing.com
Leasing.com is the largest dedicated
marketplace in the UK for new car
contract hire and leasing offers. Based
in Stockport and founded in 2000, it
provides the widest choice of offers
from franchised motor dealerships,
independent brokers, motor
manufacturers and leasing companies.
84 TruRating
TruRating
CEO and
co-founder
Georgina
Nelson set
out to fix
the broken
consumer
feedback industry,
helping merchants boost sales and
making consumers feel heard. London-
based TruRating asks one question at
the point of payment – whether on a
payments page online or a card terminal
in physical locations – which means
consumers are more likely to answer,
and to answer accurately in the moment,
and ensure feedback is legitimate.

85 Wevat
Wevat helps tourists get their VAT
refunded on UK shopping by combining
all purchases into one simple fee which
is cheaper than getting their refund from
every store. An alumnus of Seedcamp,
which is also a pre-seed investor in
the start-up, the London firm’s tech
automatically generates a refund
form from photos of the receipts.
86 HERO
HERO’s tech has empowered global
retailers to transform their shopping
experience by making their bricks-
and-mortar stores and eCommerce
work smarter together. Used by
thousands of stores worldwide
including Nike, Adidas and Harvey
Nichols, the company has bases in
London and New York and connects
online shoppers with sales assistants.
87 Love the Sales
An AI-powered aggregator for designer
sales items, London-based Love the
Sales has around half a million sales live
on any given day from hundreds of
retailers. The site’s AI retail
merchandising tool learns about the
products then classifies them to 99.9 per
cent accuracy, doing work which would
take humans years.
88 Esendex
Nottingham-based Esendex builds
mobile messaging solutions for improved
business communication and marketing.
It works across SMS, email, voice and
web channels to increase engagement.
89 Bizdaq
Leeds-based Bizdaq is an online agent
helping owners sell their businesses.
Its scalable online marketplace gives
confidence to buyers and sellers
through transparency and moderation.
The firm, founded in 2014, also
reduces cost, time and effort by
removing the need for intermediaries.
90 REDU Group
Based in Seaham in the North East,
REDU Group is a shopping influencer
100 eCommerce Trailblazers
19
whose brands include discount app
Reward Me Now. It produces bespoke
digital content across a multitude
of channels, finding the best deals
for its 1.5 million followers and
connecting retailers to a money-
conscious consumer base. REDU
now sells more than £40m of goods
for UK retailers every year through
brands such as Ashleigh Money Saver.
91 Swipii
Loyalty app Swipii, founded in
Glasgow in 2015, is the first in the
UK to use ground-breaking card-
linking technology. Its 1.1m users are
rewarded every time they shop in one
of 1,700-plus Swipii-participating
locations. In return, businesses receive
data which they can use to analyse the
spending habits of their customers and
run automated, tailored marketing to
increase retention and revenue.
92 Touchretail
Based in Cheadle, Staffordshire,
Touchretail supplies inventory
management and point-of-sale
software to retailers. It has worked
with football clubs including Stoke City
and Ipswich Town as well as the Welsh
Rugby Union and many other sectors.
93 Motorway
Motorway, a comparison site to sell
your car, allows users to compare
headline offers, read buyer reviews,
fees and collection options to find
their best deal. As a two-sided
marketplace, the London company’s
buyer platform provides a way for
car-buying firms to buy the best used
car stock direct from consumers
in hopes of getting a better deal.
94 HoloMe
HoloMe is a self-serve platform that
puts real humans into augmented
reality for brands to increase conversion
and engagement. Users can upload
typical camera footage into the portal,
which loops in with any existing CMS
to provide a streamlined experience.
It recently helped the London College
of Fashion to host the world’s first
real-time AR fashion show while ASOS
trialled a new ‘virtual catwalk’ feature
that beams a lifelike human hologram
into your bedroom to model clothes.
95 Expandly
Milton Keynes-based Expandly makes
it more accessible for retailers to sell
on different marketplaces such as
eBay, Amazon and Etsy by providing
a central platform where they can
manage all their product listings and
inventory and process and fulfil orders.
96 Dressipi
Dressipi enables retailers to predict
the fashions their customers will buy
and not return, optimising profitability.
The London business’ personalised
fashion recommendations are
delivering revenue growth to some
of the UK’s biggest retailers including
John Lewis, Topshop and River Island.
97 YR Store
London-based YR Store delivers live
design and printing, embroidery and
patches for retail and events. It has
worked with some of the biggest
brands in the world including Google,
Nike, Adidas, Toyota, Star Wars,
Nickelodeon, Levi’s and Oreo. With
offices in London, New York, Los
Angeles, Tokyo and Hong Kong, its
customisation experts provide full
support to projects around the world.
98 Floom Ltd
Floom is a digital marketplace which
connects independent florists with
customers. The London company
allows these florists to create and
deliver bouquets to a global network of
customers in over 125 countries.
99 freewebstore
Burnley-based freewebstore develops
software which enables clients
to easily build free eCommerce
stores. Almost 700,000 people
have created stores on the platform
without the need for a credit card.
100 GreenJinn
Free app GreenJinn provides
personalised cashback coupons on
everyday groceries. Based in London, it
connects in-store and online shopping
at Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose.
Join the discussion on #100eCommerceTrailblazers
The rise of faster networks, artificial
intelligence and Internet of Things
technology has created the perfect
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Our latest BC Insights conference
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What you’ll learn
• How to save time, money and energy
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Where and when
Auditorium, UKFast Campus, Birley Fields,
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8.30 – 12pm, Wednesday 12th February 2020
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• Sponsor the event or a panel
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For more information, contact business development
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INSIGHTS
| SMARTTECH
21
Mining The
Hidden Seam
Of Innovation
eCommerce platform
Visualsoft is thriving after
21 years in business and
heads our 100 eCommerce
Trailblazers ranking. CEO
Dean Benson says the key is
creating a company culture
where anyone can step forward
with a game-changing idea
Words: Jonathan Symcox
INTERVIEW
22
Every native tech business
has workers at the coalface
developing the technologies
used by its clients. But are
they tapping into the rich seam of
ideas within those employees?
One company which has embraced
a culture of innovation is Teesside-
based Visualsoft. Incorporated
back before the rise of Google, the
eCommerce agency has evolved its
proprietary platform with millions of
lines of code over the last 21 years.
CEO Dean Benson says the key
to staying ahead of the game is to
actively encourage people to step
forward and pitch. “Ideas can come
from the most unusual places,” he tells
BusinessCloud at the firm’s Stockton-
on-Tees HQ. “It could be the most
junior person that comes into the
company with an idea. You must create
a culture of innovation where people
can step forward.”
He cites the example of electric
car maker Tesla. “An apprentice
scribbled an idea of how to automate
a factory line to shave so many days
off the factory process. Within 24
hours they’d improved it and she
was credited with that innovation,”
he says. With 300 employees across
Teesside, Newcastle and Manchester,
the nuggets which could shape
Visualsoft’s future business could
come from anywhere. “Having so many
staff within the company that program
and create and innovate, we’re
fortunate we can just keep rewriting
code to the latest technology,” Benson
adds. “We’re not restricted by having
a couple of developers. Supporting
old code, rewriting where appropriate,
testing and rolling out new code: it’s
the circle of life.”
Visualsoft doubled operating profit
last year. “Most of the profit is used to
futureproof for the industry we are in,”
explains Benson. “If you stand still, you
go backwards. R&D is one of the most
important things for our company:
without it, you wouldn’t be in business
after 21 years.
“Constant technology-driven
innovation, not using profits for the
sake of extraction for shareholders but
using them for driving the company
forwards, is essential in any tech
business. Every single year with
Visualsoft has been amazing and
many things have happened along the
journey that have got us to where we
are today.”
Another example of agile working is
an employee who pitched the idea of
setting up an arm of the business in
Dubai. Visualsoft now counts Coffee
Planet among other big-name clients
in the region, according to head of
brand marketing Vikki Hawkins (top
left).
“A member of staff who was originally
from the region saw an opportunity
there and asked whether they could go
and test it,” she says. “We’re starting
to see the results off the back of that
now: Coffee Planet is basically the
Starbucks of the region and we’ve got
a couple of other big brand names that
have just signed.
“We reckon Dubai is about two years
behind the UK in terms of their
development of eCommerce – and
there is a lot of investment from them
as a region on that side.”
To date the only external investment
taken on by Visualsoft is a £20,000
loan from Barclays to fund the initial
business – a website hosting training
courses – and £80,000 from Benson’s
parents. The Middlesbrough-born
entrepreneur, 44, holds 80 per cent of
the business and is the final remaining
founder after a 2014 management
buyout.
He says a “risky” move towards
performance-based marketing three
years ago is now paying dividends.
Rather than charging a retail client a
large fee upfront, the ‘Shared Success’
model effectively partners Visualsoft
with them to drive sales which benefit
both parties.
It’s a throwback to the company’s first
eCommerce site with shoe retailer
Charles Clinkard. “It was probably our
most pivotal moment,” he reveals of
the shift towards monthly recurring
revenue. “It’s about putting our
mindset back to where it was with the
first eComm site: how do we get more
revenue and profits to that website?
What tools can we write today,
what code can we deploy, to make a
difference?
“The beauty of it is that we can then
roll that across every single client
on Shared Success. We’re no longer
creating something to try and sell it
1,000 times: we’re creating it to give a
INTERVIEW
23
INTERVIEW
genuine return. It means we look at
the whole industry and think about
how to innovate.
“We’ve just finished a five-year
strategy and the overriding ambition
is to double that market share. It
could be with our existing clients,
new clients or a blend of both – but
what gets us there is world class
customer service delivered with
the platform and marketing that
sits around it. And we can’t do that
without the people we employ:
without them, we’re just a bunch of
laptops.”
It is clear that Benson cares deeply
for the Tees Valley, which employs
7,000 people in tech and is growing
at 17 per cent per year, compared
with a national average of eight per
cent. He sits on the board of the
region’s Entrepreneurs’ Forum and is
a governor of Teesside University.
He believes the digital sector
should collaborate with education
providers, training organisations and
universities to ensure businesses
have access to a well-trained and
agile workforce.
“We give a lot back in terms of the
industry that we work in: experience,
education, work, apprenticeships,”
he says. “We want to get people into
the area, into jobs and just help them
understand what the future looks
like.
“I’ve been working with a number
of people in the area, including
Teesside Uni, on creating an agile
digital skills academy – like a
finishing school for tech where you
can get your digital skills brushed up.
You might have a qualification, but
that doesn’t place you a job. It’s that
gap that really fascinates me.”
Indeed Teesside Uni students can
often be found at the firm’s HQ, as
Hawkins explains: “We’re helping
them reshape their courses to
ensure that their graduates are the
best they can be. They can come
in here and use our space for a
week, and then we have our various
teams come down and teach them
more about what it’s actually like in
practice.
“We take a lot of graduates from
that university and that’s the same
for all of the digital sector around
the Tees Valley. We want them to be
work-ready and we need more of
them. It’s a real issue.”
The softly-spoken Benson
introduced unlimited holidays for
staff in 2014 but there is an inner
steel to his character. For instance,
he once climbed Scafell Pike in the
Lake District before heading into the
office – to demonstrate the benefits
of flexible working – while he also
completed an arduous 14-hour
Ironman triathlon (above right).
“I like challenges,” he acknowledges.
“I’m really driven. I don’t know
if that’s the qualities of an
entrepreneur or just of a very
stubborn individual!”
Founded: 1998
Employees: 300
Clients: 1,200
Sales: £13m
Operating profit: £2.1m
Annual transactions
on platform: £750m
UK eCommerce market
share: 1.15%
I once signed up for an Ironman
after a couple of pints with a valued
client – despite having no idea what
it entailed!
It turned out to be a 2.4-mile swim
followed by a 112-mile bike ride and
marathon-length run.
I had to learn to swim; to buy a road
bike; and to work out how my legs
could move 26 miles!
It took nine months of training, nine
months of quitting alcohol, nine
months of quitting TV. Nine months
of pure focus on one event.
In both my personal life and
professional life, if I set myself a goal,
I achieve it – it’s a matter of breaking
it down and working out how you get
from A to B.
Dean Benson on training for one
of the most difficult one-day
sporting events in the world
IRONMAN
TRIATHLETE
VISUALSOFT
IN NUMBERS
© 2019 HPED LPAccelerate your cloud transformation
with HPE hybrid cloud expertise
and build an ecosystem that’s
perfect for your business.
FEAR NO
CLOUD
h p e . c o m / u k / f e a r n o c l o u d

25
Extending Reality
To Save Lives
Dublin start-up VRAI is harnessing the power of
artificial intelligence and virtual reality to improve
safety in hazardous environments such as war-torn
Somalia and offshore wind farms
Words: Jonathan Symcox
INTERVIEW
S:270 mmT:297 mmB:303 mm
26
Perched high up in the turret
as the tank rumbles slowly
along the dusty road, you
scan the roadside for signs of
an unexploded bomb.
Your heart is pounding in your chest and
you tell yourself to ignore it. Stay calm. Do
your job.
The bomb explodes, rocking the tank and
leaving your colleagues maimed upon the
road.
It is a brutal introduction to the work of
Dublin start-up VRAI. “Back in 2017 in
Somalia, the United Nations Mine Action
Service had personnel being deployed
on to these dangerous routes on a
daily basis,” co-founder and co-MD Pat
O’Connor recounts to BusinessCloud.
“Because it was such a high-threat
environment, a consequence of decades
of civil war, a lot of the civilian support
staff couldn’t leave the base in Mogadishu.
And yet their operational colleagues were
going out every day and one in 10 of them
were being hit by an IED.”
In 2017 alone almost 2,300 people were
killed or injured by IEDs in Somalia. The
UN turned to VRAI to produce a training
simulation which would help limit the
danger posed to its staff by improving
their ability to identify ground signs that
indicate a roadside bomb. “We drove the
routes with the African Union troops and
created a hyper-realistic, 3D 360-degree
video of the routes,” says O’Connor.
“Within that we built
high-quality, high-
poly 3D assets so the
environment you’re
interacting with is
essentially real footage.
“That helped us to show
how difficult it is to spot
indicators of roadside
bombs. Not only did this
help to reduce deaths
and serious injuries,
but it also created an
empathetic link because
for the first time the
support staff could see how difficult it is for
the deployed troops to do this job.”
VRAI, founded in August 2017 by
O’Connor and co-MD Niall Campion, looks
to combine concepts from videogame
development and cinematic special effects
to create what it terms ‘extended reality’.
It provides services to the defence,
security, energy and utilities, aviation and
construction sectors.
“These are very serious industries which
are dangerous by nature,” says O’Connor.
“If you’re going to train people, it can’t
look like a game – it has to look for real.
Immersion is key: you need to forget
you’re in a virtual
environment.”
Early big-name
clients include
International
Airlines Group
at Heathrow and
Samsung UK.
“These are large
organisations
which put a high
value on making
sure staff are
trained properly
and safely,”
says O’Connor.
According to the ERM Global Safety
Survey, 52 per cent of Fortune 500
Companies have suffered a death or
serious injury in the past 18 months,
despite spending £80 billion per year on
employee training. “That tells us that the
training can be improved,” says O’Connor.
“About half of it is conducted by lectures
but the science suggests you retain about
five per cent of information per hour in
that format, whereas if you practise by
‘doing’ you recall about 70 to 75 per cent.
“The challenge with high-hazard
environments is that practice by ‘doing’
is in itself inherently dangerous; it can
be costly to bring people from remote
locations to one area; and there can be a
rarity of equipment or instructors.”
VRAI’s aim is to reduce workplace deaths
and serious injuries to zero through its
main product, Hazardous Environment
Awareness Training (HEAT), which aims to
improve the quality and safety of high-
hazard training through AI reporting and
analytics. “Approximately 100,000 data
points per minute are captured about what
you’re doing, how you’re doing it and also
the movement of your hands, head and
body,” explains O’Connor.
“The back-end of our platform then takes
that rich data set, correlates it to your
individual training record and starts giving
you insightful reports on how people
are performing in certain areas, allowing
you to make the training bespoke. But
where it gets very exciting is when you
INTERVIEW
EXTENDING
REALITY
27
INTERVIEW
have, say, more than 500 people
passing through the same training
experience and the system has
enough data to start applying
artificial intelligence. It will then start
finding insights and correlations
between behaviour and activities,
which can improve the product
over time and therefore reduce
deaths and serious injuries in the
workplace.”
An example he offers is training for
maintenance work on an offshore
wind farm. “The UK is the largest
offshore wind market in the world.
All the easy spots near the coast are
gone so the new farms are like 100
miles off the north coast of Scotland.
“Put yourself in a maintenance
person’s shoes on the first day on
the job: the waves are bigger than
your house; the turbines you’re
climbing to the top of are 110 metres
high; they sway three metres left
or right in the wind. So you tell me:
are you going to be focused on your
essential maintenance tasks or your
own feelings of anxiety?
“What we can do is recreate those
environments onshore in a highly
safe environment
without having
to stop a turbine
generating
electricity.”
Key to that sense
of immersion is
haptic feedback,
where people
act within the
simulation as they
would in real life
instead of using
videogame-type
controllers.
However VRAI is
looking to go even further. “We’re
now building biometric sensors into
our haptic gloves so we can judge
how you feel. Let’s say we both
land an aircraft inside a training
simulation fine: what you don’t know
is that inside, my heart is pumping
and coming through my chest. It’s
important to identify that we’re
having different reactions: could I
land that aircraft repeatedly without
having a serious problem?
“If we can identify how people
are feeling in those high-stress
environments, we can almost
inoculate against that feeling in the
real world. The equivalent concept
in the military is called ‘battle
inoculation’: at a very simple level,
before you deploy overseas, they
stick you in a hole and they blow stuff
up all around you and shoot over
you so that when you go to that war
zone, you can operate safely when
it’s happening for real.
“We’re always trying to push the
bar – we pride ourselves that
we innovate on behalf of large
companies because we have the
nimbleness to do that.”
The military analogy comes from a
very personal place: O’Connor spent
20 years in the Irish Defence Forces
including more than three years’
experience of overseas operational
deployments in high-threat
environments including the Syrian
Civil War.
“One of my last roles was as
squadron commander of a cavalry
unit,” he reveals. “Training was
always a challenge: organising a lot
of people to move across a country
is difficult and costs a lot of money.
I always felt there must be a better
way to do this.”
Headquartered in Dublin, VRAI has built a
high-quality team of 12 with a diverse skillset.
“One of our 3D artists comes from a fine art
background in Ireland while we also have data
engineers from India and a strategy consultant
from Japan. Diversity is a mindset as much
as anything else,” says O’Connor. “We’ve got
five different nationalities and we’re gender
balanced. For me, that counterbalances the
complexity of the tech landscape, because the
pace of change is so fast.”
The company has €575,000 funding including
backing from the Enterprise Ireland High
Potential Start Up Programme. It is now also
registered in the UK and looking at potential
bases in the North East, Scotland and London.
“We just started our first major job there on the
ground with HEAT at IAG and Heathrow,” says
O’Connor. “We certainly see the UK as a big
focus for us in the next 12 months.”
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29
Reimagining medication
An airport incident led novelty sweets entrepreneur Melissa
Snover to 3D-print customisable vitamins with a world-first
technique – and now she is turning her attention to medicine
Words: Alistair Hardaker
Complex medicine
dispensers could one
day be a distant memory
thanks to 3D printing.
Melissa Snover already had a
successful sweets business with
Katjes Magic Candy Factory.
Indeed, two years ago we gave the
thumbs up to a 3D-printed gummy
BusinessCloud logo which was
presented to us by the Birmingham
tech entrepreneur.
However the American has since
moved beyond novelty ‘candy’
and set her sights firmly on the
healthcare market with the recent
launch of new venture Nourished.
Described as the world’s first
3D-printed vitamin and supplement,
the heptagonal product is created
by piping a sugar-free vegan formula
into a seven-layer chewable sweet.
Customers select these layers from a
possible 28 vitamin and supplement
options after completing a lifestyle
questionnaire, and a month’s worth
of the daily chews are then ‘printed’ to
order and delivered to the door within
3-4 days.
The new venture was inspired after
an accident during her travels. “I used
to carry a plastic bag of vitamins with
me everywhere I went. I was in airport
security in Dusseldorf and spilled
them all over the floor,” she tells
BusinessCloud. “It was horrible picking
them all up. I was thinking ‘there’s got
to be a better way to do this’.”
The thought reminded her that she
had the technology at her disposal at
Katjes Magic Candy Factory. Snover
and her team began using the 3D
printers to create a ‘stack’, a chewable
produced from seven different 3D
printers adding one layer at a time.
“No one’s ever done anything like this,
combining seven materials into one
single chewable thing. Even in plastic,
seven layers has never been done,”
the Dragons’ Den survivor says. She
and her team realised that the level
of customisation possible during
production would also allow them to
cut down on the waste traditionally
associated with manufacturing
separate vitamins and supplements.
“If you think about traditional factories,
making tons and tons of a single
thing, and then you think of a 3D
printer that’s making one thing at a
time that’s unique, we’ve come to the
middle where we can make 28 of the
same thing really fast, but they’re all
unique,” she says. “In effect, we make a
unique product every seven and a half
minutes. “And each and every blend
that we can make is totally unique for
that one person. I think that’s where
the value-add is.”
It also allows the firm to remain agile to
the ever-changing trends of the health
and wellness market. “Traditional
factories and companies take 18
months to three years to develop a
new item. This gives us a massive
opportunity to truly respond to the
market, new research trends, what
people want. And I think that will really
take up our time for at least the next

30
18 months,” she says.
“One of the cool things we also learned as
we were starting the development was that
because we make them fresh to order, it means
the nutrient density is 99.5 per cent. When
you compare that to traditional vitamins in the
supermarket, they have a protracted supply
chain because of the way the distribution model
works.
“They could be made
up to 18 months
before you actually
get it in your house,
which means that it
loses efficacy from
day one. Some of
those vitamins have
as little as 10 per cent
of what it says on the
bottle. So it’s even
better for you in that
way.
“In addition, because
it’s in that vegan gel,
your body digests it
like food. So you absorb up to 70 per cent more
of the actual nutrients, which means you get the
maximum benefit.”
Adding new ingredients to the gummies also
allowed for the company to think beyond
supplements and into medication with its
medicinal arm, Scripted. The firm has been
working on medicinal use for 17 months, and the
concept is at the human trial stage.
“I think that the future implications and
possibilities for Scripted are way more far-
reaching than Nourished, because customised
medicine is a must,” she says. “The fact that
right now our medicine isn’t customised is quite
shocking. Your T-shirt is more customised than
your medicine.”
Snover hopes that the same gummy will allow
the young and very old to take combinations of
medications in a single customised chew, while
reducing the waste associated with traditional
medicine production at an industrial scale.
“There’s a huge amount of drugs being thrown
away. This is a major problem,” she explains.
“Each one of the health organisations has
different rules, and also has a different view on
3D-printing.
“We’re working with the ones that are the
warmest to the idea, and if we can get a pilot out
to market, and show the benefits that it has to
both the patients and the health organisation,
then we can start to get the world to take notice
of it and see the ways that you can apply it.”
A US and Middle Eastern launch is due in the New
Year while Snover is already working on product
concepts for children, pets and protein bars.
So are we one step closer to that Star Trek idea
of calling out for a cake and having it emerge?
“The market doesn’t want that yet. It isn’t
warm to it,” says Snover. “We’re trying to bridge
that gap and continually push the mindset of
the consumer towards how wonderful and
empowering 3D printing can be, as opposed to
a cold machine taking away ‘my mom cooking
dinner’. We have to find this in-between point.
“I think in the future people will be able to print
something that’s like a French fry but made of
protein. These are the beautiful ideas that we
have. But there is a ways to go.”
MAKING IT PERSONAL
A selection of the questions Nourished’s online
consultation will ask you - and the suggested
vitamin stack for our journalist
• Do you have to wear glasses or contacts?
• Do you get hungry or have dips in energy
between meals?
• How often do you eat fast or processed
food per week?
• How often do you fall ill with the flu or
an infection?
• How many hours a day do you sit in front
of a computer?
INTERVIEW
31
32
KEEPING YOUR CUSTOMERS IN THE FAST-PACED WORLD OF
ECOMMERCE IS A HUGE CHALLENGE AND DEPENDENT ON
SLICK USER EXPERIENCE. WE ASKED THE EXPERTS FOR
TIPS ON UX DESIGN, CHOOSING THE RIGHT PLATFORM AND
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION TECHNIQUES
Words: Jenny Brookfield
USER EXPERIENCE
‘Customer journey
should be frictionless’
Customers are studied as they navigate online
shopping sites – and staff travel out on delivery
vans to observe parcels being opened.
It’s all part of the process
to gauge the effectiveness
of the user experience at
Liverpool-based Shop Direct,
the online retailer whose
brands include Very and
Littlewoods.
Such is the importance of the
customer journey that the
business has invested in a UX
research lab. Customers are
brought in on a weekly basis
to test out the company’s
tech under the watchful eye
of employees right up to chief
executive level, while eye-
tracking tech records where
their gaze naturally lands to assess where the
most important messages should be placed.
“It’s one research method. It’s not going to fix
the whole UX model, but employees can come in
and see the troubles our customers are having,”
says UX research manager Kate Rylance. “We
have to complement that with other techniques,
though, as just because somebody looks at
something it doesn’t signify positive intent.”
Rylance has followed orders right through to the
item being unwrapped by the customer. “You
can have the best experience online but if the
parcel turns up late, no one will remember how
easy your filtering options were,” she adds.
It is an approach also taken by Manchester-
based fashion brand Forever Unique, which
restructured its teams to ensure consistency of
experience. “Retaining customers is a constant
battle and I don’t think loyalty exists anymore,
apart from with very specific brands,” says head
of digital Emma Warrington, who led an overhaul
which included separate marketing plans for
TAILOR-MADE
TRADING
REPORT
33
every day of the week. “It’s not even
like the customer has to leave a shop
to go elsewhere, they close down one
window and open another – so it’s
very easy to lose them through lack of
attention to detail.”
Manchester digital agency Return.
co takes a similar approach to Shop
Direct, with a biometric testing lab
that uses eye-tracking and facial
recognition technology to understand
how customers interact with sites.
“When I see a site has had 500 visitors,
that’s 500 real people that all have
desires, challenges and needs, so we
need to talk to them,” says founder
Guy Levine. “Customers don’t have
loyalty but if we remove the friction
in their experience, we allow them to
have the preference.”
Small changes can also make a world
of difference: an insurance company
client of Return.co had testimonials on
its landing page praising its customer
service when taking out a policy but,
when this was changed to testimonials
around claims handling, business went
up. “Trust is so important,” Levine
adds.
David Hughes, head of digital products
at Hemel Hempstead-headquartered
vehicle leasing company Autorama,
says businesses should look to other
sectors for inspiration. “Netflix raised
the bar for us. When people are used
to the digital experience being easy,
we have to make sure our service does
the same,” says Hughes. “We say that
our competitors are
anybody else with
good UX or a good
eCommerce site.”
While drivers
previously test
drove cars before
buying or leasing,
69 per cent of
customers to its
Motorama and
Vanarama sites now
make a purchase
without doing so.
They also come
armed with product
knowledge from
elsewhere, Hughes
says, meaning the experience they
provide should reflect this. “We tailor
our approach for our different brands
and different audiences but my main
aim is for us to have a UX that is
transparent and frictionless so that
customers instantly understand how
to progress,” he adds.
CUSTOMER
ACQUISITION
‘Don’t ever assume
one size fits all’
Personalisation is the key when
it comes to marketing, with
customers increasingly expecting an
approach tailored to their needs and
preferences.
Roland Bryan, chief executive
of London-based deals website
Wowcher, knows all too well the
rewards from drawing up different
content and engagement strategies.
“Don’t ever make your content
strategies one-size-fits-all,” he says.
“Customers on your core website
might not be very engaged but
sometimes you can find the channels
where they become super-engaged.”
Social media, including shopping via
Instagram, has been “explosive” for all
eCommerce business, Bryan says, and
that’s certainly the case for Wowcher.
Half a million customers that were
dormant on the main website have
come “back to life” over the last couple
of years. “That’s not because we
changed our content but because we
found a better channel that resonated
with them,” he adds.
Bernadette Kelly, director of
Manchester digital agency ActiveWin,
agrees. She advises eCommerce
clients on best practices for multi-
channel campaigns, including taking
their customer databases and
breaking them down to come up
with bespoke solutions to ensure
you win customers, but also don’t
lose them. “If you receive an email
from a business, you could be a loyal
customer, but the message is focused
around acquiring new customers and
that can alienate you as an existing
customer – especially if the offer is
attractive,” she says. “It’s making sure
REPORT
34
that every single communication is personalised
for the person receiving it and takes into
consideration where they are in the overall
lifecycle.”
The business is working with rugby league team
Wigan Warriors, where they have found the new
generation of tech savvy fans would prefer not
to speak on the phone. “They want to text and
type and Wigan is embracing the new way of
connecting with their fans through live chat,
which includes being available in the evenings
and weekends,” Kelly says. “If you’re sticking
with 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday, you’re missing
a golden opportunity to create a solid fanbase
and increase the lifetime value of that.”
Merchandising platform Teespring, based in
Silicon Valley, has partnered with the likes of
YouTube and gaming platform Twitch, whose
captive audiences have turned hundreds
of social media stars into millionaires. The
business, which has been going for nine years,
creates custom products for influencers and
the means for them to be sold quickly and
easily. Chris Elsheikhi, global director of creator
growth and head of Europe, says own-branded
products – which could come from a particular
catchphrase or event in the influencers’ stories –
sell much better than any products they are paid
to advertise.
“We had 100 people become millionaires
working on this model in the first year,” says
Elsheikhi, who recently worked with Jared
Leto and his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.
“Instagram, for example, is doing some really
exciting things to enable people to buy and sell
products, so this is a huge opportunity.”
Of course, it’s not
just the online space
that can benefit from
digital advancements.
Entrepreneur Michael
Lawes is aiming to close
the gap between online and
high street retailers as chief
executive of Manchester-
based BizzleIt. Almost
3,000 businesses have
signed up to the business’s
My GMCR app, which aims
to allow bricks and mortar
retailers to enjoy the
same fortunes as online
stores. It uses geolocation,
targeted personalisation,
live reporting and instant
marketing to show
shoppers what’s going on
in the area, at the same
time feeding back data to businesses about
shoppers’ habits.
“We’re levelling the playing field for bricks and
mortar retailers because online retailers have
so much more at their fingertips,” Lawes says.

35

THE RIGHT
PLATFORM
‘We want a site
that’s right for us’
You can have the best product in
the world, but if your eCommerce
platform doesn’t match up then
there’s no guarantee you’ll reach your
potential. Laura Beattie and sister
Rachel began their fashion brand
Careaux on SquareSpace, but have
found it’s not quite the right fit.
The luxury ethical womenswear brand
centres around a dress that is zipped
together at the centre, allowing
designs and sizes to be mixed and
matched. As a company with a lower
marketing budget, they believe their
brand will be built
around content,
which is why they
will transition
their eCommerce
business to Shopify.
“We don’t want
people to choose
a dress and then
move on, we
want to build a
community, and
we want to make
the customer
journey as easy
as possible,” says
Laura. “We also do
everything in the
business ourselves,
so we want
something that’s
going to be easy for us to manage as
we grow.”
Manchester entrepreneur Sean
Brown’s Mercarto does just that, a
one-stop platform to make it as easy
as possible for people to launch their
own business. The site takes care
of web design, sourcing products,
storage, delivery and payment, with
each step in the process joined up
to allow for a smoother customer
experience.
Eighteen months in, Mercarto has hit
seven figures due to its success with
what Brown calls the “wantrepreneur”.
“Although creating a store online
was relatively easy, the difficulties
arrived when trying to fund and source
products, the storage,
delivery and ultimately
handling returns. The
solution was to lower
the barrier to entry
with Mercarto.” he
says. A trader creates
their site, adds in
sourced products
from the platform and
then, once a customer
places an order, it
goes straight to the
supplier’s warehouse
location with shipping
instructions.
Mercarto has
also deployed its
technology to a
number of global enterprises. “We can
white label the technology to retailers,
brands and to the B2B marketplace
too, so we’re quite agile with our core
platform,” says Brown.
Manchester-based Shopit is also
keen to make the process of setting
up shop much easier. Founder Adam
Pritchard had worked in digital
agencies for 15 years previously and
witnessed clients with limited budgets
wanting more features for less.
Shopit allows businesses to give
the impression they are large-scale
operations without having to spend
a fortune up front, offering multiple
websites in different languages in one
place. One client went from £500,000
turnover to £6m in three-and-a-half
years.
“An eCommerce site is really a
warehouse of cardboard boxes of stuff
they are trying to sell,” says Pritchard.
“If you keep features back depending
on how much they pay you end up with
frustrated customers.
“The two biggest costs when you start
a business are stock and marketing,
we’re trying to limit the cost they’re
paying for
our platform
because we
want to be
here to see
that shop
grow.”
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38
to
Uber
TAKING
FIGHT
THE
FAST-GROWING DUBLIN FIRM ICABBI IS HELPING LOCAL TAXI
FIRMS EMBRACE THE LATEST TECHNOLOGIES AND PROVIDE
AN EXPERIENCE TO RIVAL DISRUPTERS SUCH AS UBER. IT IS ON
TARGET TO REACH A BILLION BOOKINGS WITHIN TWO YEARS
Words: Jonathan Symcox
39
ech disrupters are often held up as
shining examples of companies which
are shaking up business sectors for the
better.
In FinTech digital banks such as Monzo
blaze a trail in showcasing new products
and services, forcing traditional banks
to play catch-up in meeting customers’
climbing expectations. But disruptive
force can bring negative as well as
positive change.
When Uber launched in the UK in 2015,
it heralded a sea-change in how people
navigated the urban environment.
But the ‘move fast and break things’
philosophy also posed serious questions
around passenger safety, fair pay
and unfair competition, leading to its
licence being temporarily suspended
in the capital. At the time of writing,
it continues to operate under a
temporary licence from Transport
for London, while its losses are in the
billions after an underwhelming stock
market debut.
But what if you could take the
seamless booking and rapid dispatch
experience brought to the market by
Uber into established taxi companies
which are trusted by the population?
Step forward iCabbi.
“In the taxi world, Uber and Lyft
have disrupted the whole sector
and brought massive change,”
Philip Macartney, head of marketplace
at the Dublin-headquartered dispatch
platform, tells BusinessCloud. “iCabbi
have found a space where it can help
the local taxi and private hire companies
really take this fight back. It has
revolutionised the industry.”
Founded in 2009 by Gavan Walsh, Bob
Nixon and Niall O’Callaghan, iCabbi
provides taxi fleets in Europe and North
America with cloud-based dispatch
technology, apps for customers and
drivers and intelligent voice assistants.
These local firms, which pay iCabbi per
driver, per week on a subscription basis,
may well be operating in places where
Uber isn’t even available.
“They can be anything from 50-2,000
drivers in size,” says Macartney (below).
“You can’t just expect local businesses,
which have operated in a successful
way for so long, to just ‘get’ innovation
and change overnight. You have to bring
them on a journey and prove each part of
the journey is working for them.
“We start off with getting them more
rides and improving the passenger
experience; then we help them to
understand services which might help
them recruit and retain drivers and keep
those drivers safe and happy; then look
at their back office processes.
“Over the space of two or three years,
we’ll work with them to innovate in their
town or region.”
Marketplace is iCabbi’s open-source
innovation arm which launched in May
and is headed up by Macartney. It brings
the partnerships API model popularised
by digital banks to the mobility space
with 53 commercial partners live at the
time of writing. In essence, it looks at
the most important developments in
customer expectations, assesses the
companies which are delivering them
most effectively and plugs the service
into iCabbi. “The best idea wins the day,”
explains Macartney. “For example we
have smart data-led insurance, which
allows taxi drivers to pay for insurance
based on when they’re a taxi
driver and not pay for it when
they’re not.
“There are booking aggregators
which push bookings directly
into taxi fleets without the need
for any receptionist, such as
from the NHS or airlines.
“We’ve got a solution where
you can watch your child being
picked up from school in the taxi
and taken right the way through
the journey all the way to the
front door. That could also
be useful for more vulnerable
people in society, such as those
with mental disabilities.
INTERVIEW
T
40
“We’ve also got a brilliant partner
which utilises taxi drivers’ time to do
deliveries for the Co-op or Amazon.
“It’s a really bold move and we’ve been
very successful so far. We’re bringing
these services and new ways of
thinking to the industry to help them
build their businesses to move into
the 21st Century. It’s creating such a
buzz that our rivals are now starting to
make marketplaces as well.”
In June 2018 Groupe Renault took a
75 per cent stake in the business as
part of a strategic partnership while
iCabbi has opened a development
hub in Montréal alongside its base in
Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Its total
headcount is now almost 150, with
around half involved in product R&D.
This year the company surpassed 500
million bookings on its platform, with
CEO Walsh publicly targeting a billion
within two years. It currently handles
750,000 bookings
a day and is used
by 75,000 vehicles.
iCabbi says it now
powers 40 per cent
of the enterprise
taxi market in the
UK and lists eight
of the nation’s top
16 companies as
clients.
“It’s been a
stratospheric rise
to dominancy – not
just in the UK and
Ireland, but Europe,
the US, Canada
and Australia,” says
Macartney. “An
enormous amount
of money is being invested in the
mobility sector.
“When Renault effectively bought
iCabbi, that really changed the
landscape in terms of how iCabbi
saw the world. So now instead of
scrapping with some of these players
over dominancy in the dispatch arena,
iCabbi was able to take a broader view
of the sector and say, actually, our
mission should be to put taxis at the
centre of mobility.”
Macartney, who is currently
overseeing launches around the
world, is quick to dismiss the
possibility of autonomous vehicles
taking away taxi jobs any time soon.
“There may be autonomous vehicles
in San Francisco or San Diego now, but
there’s no licensing for them, they’re
incredibly limited, and there’s no
uptake for them,” he explains.
“So let’s say it takes 15 years for even
the notion of autonomous vehicles
to start in tight urban areas in the UK.
Look at the surrounding areas of a
city like Newcastle: how many other
places need to be mapped, tried and
tested for autonomous vehicles to
rival your firm’s coverage?
“But more importantly, you’re
always going to need someone to
operate those vehicles: they need
to be dispatched, there needs to
be someone overseeing customer
service, customer satisfaction, and
there needs to be someone cleaning
them. Just because it’s the future it
doesn’t mean people aren’t going to
be getting kebabs on a Saturday night
in Newcastle – you know they will be!
“This vision of the future, no one really
knows it yet. But the more you look at
it, the more you can see our role in it –
and the local operators’ role as well.
“I think that the sort of scary Death
Star-type scenario of Uber and
Google just rolling out cars all over the
place, while it makes for a good movie,
in practicality terms, it doesn’t really
exist.”
41
REGIONAL
TECH 50
BUSINESSCLOUD’S LATEST RANKINGS CROWNED THE MOST
EXCITING TECH CREATORS IN YORKSHIRE & HUMBERSIDE,
MIDLANDS, SCOTLAND AND NORTH WEST
Advertising opportunities:
Business development manager: Helena Furness - helena.furness@businesscloud.co.uk
General queries:
Editor: Jonathan Symcox - jonathan.symcox@businesscloud.co.uk
1.
rradar
2.
Panintelligence
3.
Hark
4.
The Data Shed
5.
Slanted Theory
6.
Gala Technology
7.
The Floow
8.
Sky Betting & Gaming
9.
Team17
10.
Dietary Assessment Ltd
1.
Intelligent Growth Solutions
2.
Speech Graphics
3.
TravelNest
4.
TVSquared
5.
Airts
6.
Swipii
7.
Myway Digital Health
8.
4J studios
9.
DeltaDNA
10.
Current Health
1.
Enlighten
2.
Guykat
3.
Kaido
4.
Oncimmune Holdings
5.
School of Code
6.
Intelligent OMICS
7.
UNiDAYS
8.
Ensek
9.
Grid Edge
10.
Voxpopme
1.
Peak
2.
Immotion
3.
Blue Prism
4.
MGISS
5.
Angel Solutions
6.
ORCHA
7.
Dream Agility
8.
Mercarto
9.
Mojo Mortgages
10.
Energi Mine
50
INNOVATION WINNERS
42
A REVOLUTIONARY
NEW FARMING
TECHNIQUE COULD
ALLOW THE GROWING
OF ALL CROPS CLOSE
TO THEIR POINT-OF-
SALE, DRASTICALLY
REDUCING
OUR CARBON
FOOTPRINT. WE
SPEAK TO VERTICAL
FARMING PIONEER
INTELLIGENT
GROWTH SOLUTIONS,
WINNER OF OUR
SCOTLAND TECH 50
RANKING
INTERVIEW
Words: Jonathan Symcox
V
E
R
T
I
C
A
L
G
R
O
W
T
H
43
A
pioneering vertical farming
firm crowned Scotland’s
most innovative tech
company has the potential
to transform global food production.
We are increasingly made aware of the
carbon footprint of many of the foods we
eat and it is not just lamb and beef which
is coming under scrutiny: for example,
supermarket shelves are stocked with
blueberries from Uruguay and broccoli
from China.
An obvious way of drastically reducing
the miles food racks up en route to our
fridges and dinner tables is to grow
it in the UK. Eating seasonal fruit and
vegetables is one option; but now we have
become accustomed to choosing from a
rich variety of produce on supermarket
shelves or websites, are we realistically
going to limit our options once more?
Step forward Intelligent Growth Solutions.
From humble origins in the mind of an
Aberdeenshire farmer via university
research and now £7 million of Se’ries A
fundraising, the start-up believes it has
the answer to the conundrum of growing
quality, high-yield crops in all weathers –
and all year round.
“You could be talking about food for
schools, communities, hospitals, contract
catering, local artisan food producers,
normal supermarket brands,” CEO David
Farquhar tells BusinessCloud. “Rather
than import all this stuff, we could grow
it right next to the point of consumption
or production. That’s what we’re talking
about.”
IGS is headquartered in Edinburgh
while its pilot vertical farm, where crops
are grown indoors using LED lights on
stacked trays, is
located outside
Dundee. Its crops
already include
various herbs,
greens and salads,
strawberries,
sweet potatoes,
broccoli and root
crops such as
radishes, baby
turnips and baby
carrots.
“The way I describe
it to my mates in
the pub is take a field, cut it up into
snooker tables, put the crops on the
top and the weather on the bottom,
stack them nine metres high inside
a box and control it with your mobile
phone,” Farquhar, a trained chef
and former British Army captain,
explained.
Yet the hardware is only part of the
solution. IGS is working closely with
globally recognised crop research
facility the James Hutton Institute,
which houses 300
scientists, to develop
its Internet of Things
and artificial intelligence
capabilities. “We’ve
basically now given
these guys a sandbox
to play in so they’re
running experiments
all the time,” says
Farquhar.
“We can go further than lighting and
sensing and cameras: the weather
is made up of the sun, the wind and
the rain. We’ve got the ability to
completely control them all.
“Each of those three dimensions
has multiple characteristics to it
[such as] the colour spectrum, the
intensity, the brightness, the pulsing
and dimming. And each one of those
individual factors then has an almost
infinite number of possible values.
“The mathematics is absolutely
enormous, which is why we have to
use artificial intelligence to figure
it out. We use machine learning to
watch what happens to the crop
and, on the back of that, review
how effective a particular recipe
of ‘weather’ was and adjust it
accordingly.
“And so on an iterative basis, you get
to a point where you are absolutely
optimally growing crops.”
Increasingly extreme weather
conditions in recent years including
drought and floods have on occasion
wiped out entire crops while
variations from year to year can also
play havoc with yields, often affecting
the sale price of the goods.
This may even have led to farmers
growing lesser varieties of fruit and
vegetables, as IGS product manager
Douglas Elder explains. “We’re
currently working with existing plants
which are bred to deal with drought,
light resistance, pest resistance and
disease resistance – factors which
crops in our vertical farms aren’t
affected by,” he says. “Sometimes,
looking back, people say things like
‘strawberries used to taste much
better than they do now’. But it wasn’t
because of the way they were grown;
it was because that strawberry in the
past was a stronger-tasting variety.
However, because it was just so
difficult to grow and there was so
much wastage, the farmers moved to
a more robust variety.
“We use machine learning
to watch what happens to
the crop and review how
effective a particular recipe
of ‘weather’ was and adjust
it accordingly.”
INTERVIEW
44
“We can start looking back at these
sorts of things and figure out whether
we should return to previous varieties,
or new varieties altogether.”
Elder foresees a time when IGS is able
to develop special brand IP for retailers
– “say they want to purple vein the
basil plant” – and believes it is software
which will drive the business forward.
“The more crops we’re growing, the
more people we’re working with, the
more we can start bringing the AI
system side in – because what it needs
is data,” he says. “When we teach it,
that’s when we’ll see the acceleration
of our understanding of how quickly
we can optimise the crop.
“The hardware will stay the same
for growers, but we can update their
growing recipe software and allow
them to build a business model based
on proven growing data and real
yields.”
Farquhar (above) has enjoyed a long
and distinguished career in business,
including executive and board
positions at companies around the
world alongside angel investments
in the likes of craft beer scale-up
Flavourly.
“I took over a ‘marooned’ business in
2013 and pivoted it from HR software
into a mobile app for employee
scheduling. I did a million-pound
turnaround on the bottom line in 100
days – literally improving it by 10 grand
a day,” he says matter-of-factly of his
impact as CEO of Workplace.
“I grew it at 100 per cent for a couple
of years, sold it and on the back of that
very, very good transaction, retired. In
my mind I was 25 [years of age], but in
truth I was 57 or 58!”
Speaking to me from Dubai - where
he is working with that state’s
government on IGS’ potential to
optimise climatic conditions in places
such as hospitals, airports and sports
stadiums - he explained how he was
tempted out of that retirement by
IGS in 2017 as it had “spent four years
struggling to get out of R&D mode”.
The company, which employs almost
25 people, now has hubs in Chicago
and three other European countries
and is looking to open a base in
Southeast Asia as it prepares to
export its vertical farms around the
world.
After IGS topped BusinessCloud’s
recent Scotland Tech 50 ranking,
securing backing from both an
independent judging panel and the
general public, Farquhar described the
accolade as an “honour” for such an
early-stage company.
WHO IS DAVID FARQUHAR?
Former British Army captain and
volunteer has been involved with 20+
companies in his business career –
here is a selection
CEO
Intelligent Growth Solutions
WorkForce Software
Workplace
Avvio.com
2in10
Idesta Group
Atlantic Information Systems
NON-EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR/CHAIRMAN
AislePlus
Rockall Technologies
Stipso
SeeByte
Calico Jack
MediaXchange
INVESTOR
Swipii
Flavourly
Media Match
Essential Product Marketing
River City Brewing Company
SCOTLAND TECH
50 JUDGE KAREN
MEECHAN, HEAD
OF OPERATIONS AT
SCOTLANDIS, ON IGS
They have created a system that
allows for high-yield, organic-
quality produce to be grown with
a very small carbon footprint
and which can be installed
almost anywhere from cities to
brownfield sites.
They are incredibly worthy as
being named No.1 in the top 50
companies to watch in Scotland –
and I can’t wait to see where the
next part of this journey takes
them.
46
INTERVIEW
47
No one doubts that artificial intelligence will power
the businesses of tomorrow.
As data increases exponentially and the algorithms
trained upon it become ever smarter, AI is beginning to
assist with – and sometimes take over – the more menial
tasks historically completed by human workers.
So how can companies capture that lightning in a bottle and
electrify their business today?
Richard Potter founded Peak with CTO Atul Sharma and
COO David Leitch in 2014 after the trio became frustrated
by the difficulties growing businesses faced in accessing
predictive data analytics services.
“AI can create value in a business: it can optimise efficiencies
from a working capital perspective, from a margin
perspective and it can also help grow revenues,” CEO Potter
tells BusinessCloud. “Every company in the world is going
to need to power itself with machine learning and artificial
intelligence in the future. Our belief is that they are going to
do that from a dedicated enterprise AI system.”
Potter believes Peak can win the race to become that
system after blasting out of the starting blocks. It is one of
only a few UK businesses to achieve Amazon Web Services
Advanced Machine Learning Competency Partner status.
“We’ve taken that concept to market and proven that a
single central AI system is going to be the catalyst for mass
market adoption within enterprise,” he explains.
“We think there’s a category of product there that is as
significant as the market for CRM systems – and we want to
create that category and then dominate it worldwide. We’re
a long way away from achieving that, but that’s the course
we’re on. I think we’ve managed to hit upon something
that’s really needed.”
Peak’s subscription-based service model helps companies
of all sizes harness the power of AI to drive growth. Its
cloud-native platforms plug into a client’s business to clean,
crunch and analyse data before making recommendations.
For example, high street retailer Footasylum introduced
Peak’s AI and machine learning algorithms into its social
media advertising campaigns to make them ‘hyper-
personalised’ to people most likely to engage with its
footwear products. It says the partnership has yielded a 28
per cent increase in marketing-driven revenues.
Creating long-term partnerships with clients is key to Peak’s
business model, says Potter. “If our system is adding value to
the bottom line of your business and helping it grow quicker,
why would you ever want to turn that off?” he asks.
Companies as varied as PepsiCo, Regit and Footasylum
have plugged Peak’s artificial intelligence into their
business processes, with incredible results. CEO Richard
Potter outlines the North West Tech 50 winner’s plans
for world domination
HYPER-
PERSONALISATION
Winning the
AI race
INTERVIEW
Words: Jonathan Symcox
48
“We are a bit different to a lot of
SaaS (software-as-a-service)
businesses because we have built
the product but we also set it up
for our customers and then, if it
creates that value, we create a
long-term relationship.
“I think that’s how people want
to engage tech companies going
forward, rather than through a
customer-supplier relationship –
and partnerships are even more
important when it comes to
something as fundamental and
complex as AI.
“Our customers also benefit
from each other indirectly. Every
business is different and the more
of them that run on our system, the
smarter and smarter it gets – and
the better it will be for everybody.”
Alongside retail, Peak has built
a significant presence in the
consumer goods, automotive
and manufacturing sectors which
are keen to gain insights into
supply chain forecasting and
fulfilment. Clients ASOS, Speedy
Hire, The Economist, Morissons,
AstraZeneca and Regit were also
recently joined by one of the
world’s biggest companies in
PepsiCo.
Former Northern Stars winner
Peak tripled its growth in both
2017 and 2018 with the help of £5
million funding. “We’ve certainly
established ourselves as the
leading commercial AI business in
the UK, but also in the sectors that
we work in,” says Potter.
“We want to continue to grow in
line with the best SaaS businesses
globally.”
A fresh round of investment is
planned for next year alongside
a strategy of expanding into the
United States. For now, more than
a quarter of the firm’s 100-plus
workforce is based in Jaipur, India.
“We’ve a very tight and firm view
on how we’re going to grow the
business,” says Potter. “Headcount
is a great way to describe the
size and scale of your business
to somebody, but it’s not the
barometer for us: I would think in
terms of how many companies are
going to be running our system;
how big the commercial cycle is
going to be; and where do we think
our revenues are going to be.
“Part of delivering that for our
customers is to build [top-class]
engineering, data science and
commercial teams, so the by-
product of the growth ambition
is the size of the team.”
INTERVIEW
GLOBAL
AMBITION
49
INTERVIEW
Adding the right people is an
essential ingredient to future
success. Potter says it recently
interviewed 115 people for just
three positions. “It’s hard to scale a
high-quality team and continuously
build and strengthen your culture.
We’re very rigorous with how we
select people to join the business
and we have a zero per cent attrition
rate.
“Most of our selection process
is geared around the company’s
values and behaviours. We also set
ourselves some strong diversity
targets a couple of years ago, which
we’ve recently blown through.
That’s helped us build a cohesive
organisation with a great team spirit,
I think.”
He adds: “Everyone’s role has to
matter, they need to be trusted to
do that job and empowered to do it
and make a meaningful contribution
every day. Work should be difficult
and demanding, but it should also be
rewarding.
“We’re trying to create a really
high-performance but sustainable
culture which could be a competitive
advantage for us: we’re only going to
win in the market that we’re trying to
create globally if we’ve got the best
team in the world.”
Headquartered in Bruntwood’s
flagship Neo building in central
Manchester, Peak was recently
voted no.1 by a judging panel and
BusinessCloud’s readers in our
North West Tech 50 ranking.
“It’s great recognition for all the hard
work the team have done,” reflects
Potter. “Everyone is empowered
here to make it the most amazing
company in the world to work for, so
they’re delighted that we’ve been
voted top.
“Everyone can take that as a
personal pat on the back and a great
bit of recognition. Hopefully, over
the years, we’ll be recognised on
more and more lists.”
TOP
TEAM
Service: Hyper-
personalised marketing
communications
Results:
• 8,400% return on
ad spend
• 28% uplift in email
revenue
Service: Predicting
when users will
change their vehicle
Results:
• 27% increase in sales
within 30 days
• 35% reduction in
operational costs
Service: Natural
Language Processing
classification model
Results:
• More efficient and
detailed labelling
• 80% accuracy in
NLP classification
Service: Improved
lead generation
targeting
Results:
• Significant savings
• Strong revenue growth
in selected segments
50
The Z Factor
GEN Z WERE CELEBRATING THEIR 10TH
BIRTHDAYS WHEN STEVE JOBS UNVEILED THE
FIRST IPHONE. NOW TURNING 18, THEY SPEND
MORE THAN SIX HOURS A DAY CONSUMING
ONLINE MEDIA. SO HOW CAN BUSINESSES
CONNECT WITH THE WORLD’S FIRST TRULY
DIGITAL GENERATION?
REPORT
Words: Lowri Wiliams and Alistair Hardaker
51
“If a marketing campaign aimed at
young people doesn’t work and a group
of older white men created it, that lack
of diversity is already there. That’s one
of the biggest problems at the moment.”
The words of Zaynah Din, a digital
marketing apprentice at Facebook,
reframe the ‘problem’ of reaching Gen Z
in two sentences.
As a member of the fast-maturing
generation herself, Din offers no quick-
fixes for reaching Gen Z, or tips on what
could be ‘the next Instagram’. In a world
where it is considered normal to jump
ship from one social platform to the next
– and where content from real friends,
online friends and brands are presented
as one and the same – it is hard to speak
in certainties.
Din (left) says this has given the
generation a highly tuned sense of
authenticity which is hard to replicate.
“I’m involved with client meetings at
Facebook from the off, and help them
with my insight to create something
which will be more successful because
there’s an actual young person in the
room,” she tells BusinessCloud.
“The insight that I can provide could
completely change the direction of the
campaign and it has done in the past
while I’ve been at Facebook.” And when
social media platforms or marketing
bosses are too slow to seize new
opportunities or ways of
thinking, Gen Z will create
it for themselves. “Gen Z
realise they can use their
own resources to create
things by themselves. We
can build our own networks
within our communities
and create things and be
innovators,” says Din.
Greg Preece (below), founder of
YouTube channel Start Starting Up, has
an audience of 26,500 of these young
entrepreneurially minded subscribers.
Through his YouTube Money Making
Academy, he helps Gen Z video creators
to tease out the value of their own
creations and make money from their
content.
“Anything disingenuous or non-value
providing will be quickly criticised and
shot down by a Gen Z,” he advises. “The
open access to information through the
internet has opened people’s minds to
the sleazy tactics of the past and people
won’t accept it anymore.”
Preece goes on to explain Gen Z’s sixth
sense for insincerity, the first component
of which is an untypically entrepreneurial
mind-set. “Popular business icons
are sharing their ‘pro-entrepreneur’
message with Generation Z all over
social media sites like YouTube,
Facebook and Instagram.
“This allows them to reconsider the
typical 9-5 career route through life
that was the standard for previous
generations.”
The second is that the quality of the
online content they consume is often on
a par with that which they create. This
explains why influencer marketing – the
sweet spot between authenticity and
audience reach – has blossomed.
For creators on YouTube, this is where
Preece and his business comes in.
“YouTube used to be an online space
where short and entertaining viral clips
largely dominated,” he says. “Now over
half of the videos watched on YouTube
are educational.”
And for creators and influencers, the
platform is becoming increasingly
big business. The average price of a
sponsored YouTube video has increased
from $420 in 2014 to $6,700 in 2019,
according to a report from marketing
firm Izea published in November 2019.
A SIXTH
SENSE
REPORT
52
It suggests that influencer-sponsored
posts across social networks grew by
150 per cent in the last year, with the use
of the hashtag #ad – now a minimum
requirement for sponsored posts – more
than doubling.
“In addition to the entertainers that have
always been on the platform, YouTubers
are now seen as teachers and thought
leaders within their communities and
their level of influence over their viewers is
higher than ever,” says Preece.
“People who would not have thought to
start a business in the past because of the
amount of resources it required are going
ahead and making start-ups.”
Preece says that short of bringing Gen Z
creators onboard to create content and
advertising for their own generation, the
next best step is to constantly monitor
competition from all walks of the online
space. “History has shown that when
businesses fail to adopt and accept new
technologies, they typically fail,” he says.
Hank Green (above) is a pioneer in
YouTube content. Alongside his brother
John, now a notable New York Times
best-selling author, the pair rose to fame
in 2007 with a shared video channel
‘vlogbrothers’, which they used as their
only source of communication with one
another.
The channel, which the brothers still
upload to every week, now has 3.28m
subscribers. “He makes a video every
Tuesday and I make one every Friday and,
honestly, it’s the best part of my week,”
explains Hank. “I’m so glad we never gave
it up.”
The brothers also founded online video
conference VidCon in 2010, which is held
in Los Angeles every year. It is now the
staple conference of YouTube’s most
famous stars, with its second ‘VidCon
London’ set to be held in February 2020.
Hank says the young video creators and
fans it caters for are “being under-served
by traditional media in the UK”.
















“It was never truer that you just need
the will to create and an iPhone to be a
full-time creator,” he adds. However the
39-year-old video personality does not
use the word ‘influencer’ to describe
himself or the conference’s stars and says
he will continue his fight against the word,
calling it a “marketing word for marketing
people”.
“Influence is what creators do for brands,
but our first responsibility is to our
audience. We make things people like to
watch. To me, we will always be creators
first,” he explains.
VIDCON
REPORT
53
Like Green, Brian McBride (right) is
not a member of Gen Z. However
as former chairman of ASOS and
MD at Amazon.co.uk Marketplace,
he has helped steer two mammoth
brands into developing and retaining a
relationship with the next generation of
shoppers.
To McBride, top level success with
Gen Z is simpler. “It’s all about the
smartphone,” he explains. “Eighty per
cent of traffic is coming out of mobile
devices.
“Gen Z are the game-changers. From
the second they wake they check their
phone and check their apps. They will
have several hundred interactions a day
with their mobile phone, so why would
you not tap into this space?”
McBride said Gen Z typically have 30
apps on their device, and fighting for
space on these smartphones should
be first priority. “If you’ve got an app, or
at least a mobile-first strategy, that is
a really valuable piece of real estate to
land yourself in. Once you have that, it
creates opportunity with a huge pool of
potential customers.”
Short of immersing yourself into the
world of Gen Z, apps such as those
created by Amazon and ASOS are a
valuable way to better understand
changing customer behaviour. “The
pace of disruption is speeding up and
if you don’t get that by now then you’re
probably not going to be around in
three years’ time,” says McBride.
He warns: “Last year was the first year
that more than half of global traffic on
the internet came from mobile, so if
you haven’t got your mobile strategy
in place, you’re toast.”
McBride says Gen Z customers are
increasingly aware of their ability
to try somewhere else if products,
services and experiences are not up
to standard. Successful competition
in this fiercely competitive space could
come down to offering one-hour
delivery slots. “Customers are much
more demanding today and if you don’t
give them what they want, they go
somewhere else,” he says.
“This is what Generation Z expect –
making returns easier, and getting the
refund for the return back.”
MOBILE
FIRST
REPORT
Silent
Generation
born 1945
and before
Baby
Boomers
born
1946-1964
Generation
X
born
1965-1980
Millennials
(Gen Y)
born
1981-1995
Gen
Z
born
1996-
THE GENERATION GAME
54
Drive Conversions
This Peak Season
Give your business the gift of uptime this season
with the new Load Testing tool from UKFast.
For a free, no obligation trial or to find out more
go to ukfast.co.uk/peakseason
55
UKFast CTO
Neil Lathwood
explains
the hosting
provider’s
approach to
eCommerce
event planning
– and how Black
Friday led to an
innovative new
product
Managing the
peaks and
troughs of retail
INSIGHT
There are several events in
the year where eCommerce
companies experience
unusually high demand on
their websites.
As a hosting provider we find that
Valentine’s Day, Black Friday and the
Christmas period are peaks in the
calendar which we need to be fully
prepared for.
When Black Friday first became truly
popular in the UK, we were a smaller
business than we are today. We didn’t
have previous years’ experience of
knowing what it would look like and
the level of planning that we do now.
Today, we map the significant events
in the eCommerce world out across
the year and analyse previous years’
data with regards to how many tickets we get in and calls
leading up to those events. From that we can judge what
sort of support we need and plan for client requests.
People generally gear up for Black Friday well in
advance. But some clients may give us two days’ notice
and we have to set things up ready to go for them.
Many of our clients will know their customer base
inside-out – but others may just be getting to know these
customers and be heading into Black Friday for the first
time. So can we offer some advice? Help coach them
through that period of time? Let them know what we’re
doing to prep for it – and how that fits in with them?
We ourselves will buy extra stock of memory, CPUs and
hard drives in anticipation. In addition we’ll work closely
with our technical teams to ensure our cloud platforms
have got enough spare capacity for a real big burst over
and above the typical capacity that we provide for.
It is also important to liaise with our sales and account
management teams to discuss how we can best help
clients who wish to upgrade on our infrastructure or have
us build new solutions.
For example, we had a product born out of one of the
Black Friday years which has since become a bit of a de
facto standard across the industry.
If you’ve got a full eCommerce site, and you know that
at scale you can deal with 1,000 concurrent users, if you
hit 1,500 then the service degrades for everybody – and
everybody has a bad experience. So instead of selling to
50 per cent of those thousand, you’re now going to sell to
10 per cent of the 1,500.
We had fairly large eCommerce customers come to us
at the last minute and say, ‘I don’t think my site’s going
to cope with this. I don’t particularly want to spend any
more money to bolster it just for a short period of time.
What can you do?’
Being the techies that we are, rather than just say
‘it’s either upgrade or die’, we implemented holding
technology to allow them to introduce however many
customers they wanted at a time – say, 1,000 – while
those in the queue remained on a holding page.
What that system allows you to do is heavily cache it so
that the users above that thousand will turn up on that
one page. And the resource usage of that single page is
so minimal that you could probably deal with 50,000 or
even 100,000 people turning up.
They all end up in a queue and they can’t go anywhere,
but they don’t get error messages; they don’t get
slowdowns; they don’t get timeouts. And the people that
are currently being serviced don’t suffer any slowdown.
The page refreshes and refreshes and eventually they get
on and can go and place their order. Their experience
remains as it would have done before Black Friday.
laf.io/
@neillathwood

56
As the security threat facing businesses ramps up,
penetration testing can be essential in highlighting
vulnerabilities. We speak with the experts
Words: Jonathan Symcox
THE EXPLAINER
THE
CYBERATTACK
YOU NEED
57
What is
penetration
testing?

All companies which hold customer
data should have a system of threat
monitoring in place. Pentesting
moves this on to the next level by
commissioning a third party to
execute a ‘mock attack’ and highlight
weaknesses which can then be fixed.
“Different things can be pentested –
apps, infrastructure, network,” explains
Holly Williams, technical director at
Secarma, which conducts both general
vulnerability scans and pentesting.
“They can be assessed in different
ways, so we ask our clients: what are we
testing? To what degree are we testing
it? And what is the expected outcome?
“I summarise it as a scope-restricted
time-limited human-led security test of
a system.”
Zain Javed, CTO at Xyone Cyber
Security, agrees. “When you are going
through a proposal with a client, you
should have a clear definition of the
service they’re signing up for. And on
that basis, the consultant that you
assigned to that project needs to be
clear on what the method is and what
the budget constraints are – because
the scope is not just unlimited.”
Jay Hariss, founder at Digital
Interruption, adds: “A pentest should
be defined as an attack simulation. At
the moment it is known as plain security
testing, in the same way that you have
internal teams to test performance or
usability. But if third parties are invited
in, pentesting becomes its own thing.”
Who should
consider
a pentest?

The first criteria to consider is the value
of the data which your company holds,
argues James Pearson, a solicitor at
Brabners. “If you’re a construction
company you probably don’t need
pentesting. However, if you are a
recruitment business and you’ve got
five million records of people with their
employment history, CV and salary data,
you need to be looking at this in a really
serious way.
“That bank of data could be extremely
valuable, and can also put you at
enormous risk. It’s about credibility: the
commercial driver and risk to reputation.
Can you imagine the impact of a breach
on that recruitment company if it
featured on the front of the business
pages?”
Any company which holds particularly
sensitive data should be looking
to incorporate pentesting into its
processes, says Javed.
Xyone works with the NHS
to test the security of its
health apps. “They have
a requirement that you
have to get a source code
level assessment done,
which is really expensive,
before they allow that app
to go on the digital health
library. Companies holding
health data and financial
organisations seem like a
natural fit for pentesting.”
Bernadette Kelly, media director at
agency ActiveWin, says the huge
volume of fast-growing FinTech
businesses in the UK makes them a
target for cybercriminals. “They’re
generally small teams but may have a lot
of turnover and probably don’t think that
they’re susceptible. Any industry which
is financial-related will be like moths to
a flame for cybercrime. A lot of times,
developers are almost nonchalant: it is
human nature to think that you know
best. But you’d be forgiven if you fess up
and say ‘you know what, maybe I should
get a third party to check just to be on
the safe side’. Because more and more
cyberattacks are happening on smaller
businesses.”
Williams says that the number of
employees in a business is irrelevant
to the decision of whether to pentest:
“When Instagram sold to Facebook for
a billion dollars, they had 13 employees.
So the value of a company’s data
isn’t tied in any way to the number of
employees.”
Larger organisations are more aware of
the options than smaller firms, argues
Helen Pyne, cyber security and risk
consultant at KPMG. “We work with
small companies with a few employees
up to multi-million-pound companies.
You typically find that the larger
organisations know what they’re asking
for while smaller ones will generally have
more of an open discussion about what
they’re trying to achieve with it and what
they’re most worried about.”
“A lot of times, developers
are almost nonchalant: it
is human nature to think
that you know best. But
you’d be forgiven if you
fess up and say ‘you know
what, maybe I should get a
third party to check just to
be on the safe side’.”
THE EXPLAINER
58
What are the legal
considerations?

At Brabners, Pearson advises businesses
on legal compliance for privacy and
cybersecurity. He says pentesting
forms part of the broader requirements
for this. “Companies must appreciate
what they’ve got and why it needs to
be protected. They must put in place
appropriate organisational and technical
measures to ensure that that data is
sufficiently protected.”
Williams adds: “The question of the
nature of the data that you hold and why
you are trying to protect it is very often
raised by third parties, which – either
through compliance or the demands of
another company which it is looking to
work with – insists upon a pentest.”
Redteaming v
pentesting

“You can ask 10 different pentesters
what the difference is and get 10
different answers!” says Hariss. “To my
mind, a redteam is more open scope,
so it’s up to the tester to decide how to
approach the test as they learn more
about the company’s systems. It’s also
driven by a specific goal rather than a
brief to find all vulnerabilities: the goal
might be to access a certain piece of
data or send an email from the CEO.”
Williams explains the concept further:
“I may decide I can best target a
database by using an exploit of a known
vulnerability. Or I can target the guy who
administers the database and get his
password.
“It is a test of the response by the
organisation. So you’re essentially
testing the ‘blue team’ – or the defensive
company – on its ability to react to a
threat. But you can’t necessarily have
two primary ends: you can either try to
hack in really deep or you can try to not
be detected, for example.”
Javed adds: “Generally people believe
that pentesting doesn’t involve the
physical side [of an infiltration] whereas
redteaming does. It could include
technical, physical and social attacks.”
What are the key
techniques used?

Social engineering is when pentesters
seek to access a physical location such
as a company’s headquarters. “At the
reconnaissance stage, you might find
that the company’s database is on the
internet and is easy to access – or there
could be a firewall in place so we need
to have someone on the inside,” says
Hariss. “The next step would be to try
and get into the building and deploy
some kind of machine on the network
which we can then connect to and
access remotely.
“It is led by the third-party consultants:
it’s their job to figure out the best
approaches to reach their goal without
getting caught.”
Where does the
responsibility
lie?

Kelly says one problem is that
responsibility for security can sit in
various departments such as technical,
compliance and development. “I don’t
think anybody jumps up and down to say
‘that’s us’ because you’re almost putting
the onus on your department to be the
one that captures any potential flaws.
Once a business decides that they want
to take it seriously, they really do have to
dictate who’s going to be responsible for
which different area if they’re going to do
it properly.”
Pearson adds: “Pentests are typically
with the IT team because that’s the
natural home for it. But there are wider
security and privacy implications. I know
a business which isn’t data-led but
has an awful lot of data as part of their
business. The board isn’t worried about
the granular detail. But they do need to
know what happens if there’s a failure
or risk to the business – and their view
is that it’s taken care of because it’s
outsourced. Actually, that’s not good
enough.
“Does penetration testing extend
naturally to the knowledge of what
happens if a vulnerability is exposed?
And then the next steps from that? Does
it go through to the people who need to
know or is it just a case of a report going
through to the IT team?”
What happens after
a pentest?

It is important to produce a report in
clear language which can be understood
at board level, says Javed. “There are
probably two or three key audiences
that you will prepare the report for.
One should be really non-technical and
just sum up what you did. You can then
produce a separate report revealing the
full technical breakdown of exactly what
you found, how you found it, the proof
of concept and clear recommendations
for action.
“That action plan could be for the board,
a third-party managed service provider
or an application development team.
In terms of the action plan, we try to
say to them ‘this is how you can fix it,
given your environment. If this doesn’t
work, for whatever reasons, then this is
another approach that is also common,
but has these disadvantages’. We do try
to give several ways of fixing things.”
Williams adds: “Remediation isn’t always
obvious. We might be able to help them
address a problem without fixing the
root cause. A really simple example
would be ‘this server is missing this
patch so you should install the patch’ –
but perhaps the patching policy itself is
broken.”
Pyne leads KPMG’s pentesting capability
outside of London and says it is pointless
to commission a pentest if you don’t
follow it up. “People assume that
having a test is reducing risk, but it’s
just a process of identification and not
reducing risk in itself – unless you act
upon it.”
Javed warns against using the same
provider for testing and fixing the issues:
“You can’t mark your own work.”

THE EXPLAINER
How often should
you pentest?

“I would usually recommend twice
a year or when there are significant
changes,” says Hariss. “The best
thing to do is to try and develop
everything securely and then
introduce a pentest after a set
period or significant change takes
place.”
Williams says: “Or when lots of
little changes become significant
– you see this with the agile way of
working. A start-up I worked with
was making more than five small
changes to their public website a
day, but at some point many small
changes become significant. So
you do a baseline test, say annually,
and then every six weeks find out
what they have changed and focus
the testing there. So you can kind
of push pentesting towards a more
agile approach.”
Javed adds: “We kind of work on ad
hoc basis. So if they want say 40-50
days of pentesting every year, the
testing team are there at their
disposal to use as required. I think
that down the line automation
is going to play a big part due to
affordability of testing time.”
The experts
Jay Hariss,
founder,
Digital Interruption
James Pearson,
solicitor, Brabners
Zain Javed,
CTO, Xyone
Cyber Security
Helen Pyne,
cyber security and risk
consultant, KPMG
Holly Williams,
technical director,
Secarma
Bernadette Kelly,
media director,
ActiveWin
Digital advertising has long promised
that precise analytics could allow
marketers to spend with pinpoint
accuracy. Actual results have varied –
often impressive, but still far short of
the dream.
Could 2020 be the year when, as an
industry, we start to reassess and
have hard conversations about how
we measure campaign success?
Lots of brands still look at
impressions, clicks and completed
views as the absolute measures of
effectiveness. And as indicators,
they’re serviceable and solid.
But nobody buys advertising because
they want an 80 per cent video
completion rate; they do so to build
their brand, engage customers and
sell products.
If you’ve been subjected to a noisy,
unskippable ad experience then yes,
it’ll show a high complete rate and
viewability; but you don’t think well
of the advertiser. If you rely on stats
like video-completion to measure
success, it’s entirely possible for a
brand to waste money on a channel
that’s ineffective, or worse, damaging.
There are increasing numbers of
feedback channels which allow
advertisers to close the loop and see
the causal links between advertising
and brand value. These include
increased tracking, but also fast
feedback tools like real-time surveys.
At the sci-fi end, several companies
are experimenting with mood-
measurement from lightweight
brainwave scanning devices, to solve
the accuracy gap that David Ogilvy
nailed: “People don’t think what they
feel, don’t say what they think, and
don’t do what they say.”
The marketing
analytics
conundrum
Good-Loop CTO Daniel Winterstein
says businesses must look beyond
video completion rate when
assessing the effectiveness of an
ad campaign
North West-based tech firm Viddyoze is the world’s
first and only 100 per cent automated video animation
service and is taking the business world by storm
Video
IS THE THING
INTERVIEW
Words: Chris Maguire
61
Imagine launching a product with
minimal marketing and generating
half-a-million dollars in revenue in
just four days. Eight months later
you launch the second iteration of the
product in another 96-hour window and
sales hit $650,000.
Fast forward a few months and you
then decide to launch a completely new
product in another four-day slot and
sales top $600k. That’s $1.75m in 12
days – and the beauty is very few people
in the UK have ever heard of you.
Welcome to the world of Viddyoze,
the world’s first and only 100 per cent
automated video animation service.
Viddyoze’s success is predicated on
the fact that nine out of 10 people
now consume video content and their
technology allows individuals and
businesses to create and use their own
video animation in three simple clicks.
The Preston-based company is
predicting revenue will reach $12.9m this
year and $32m by 2022 as businesses
recognise that video content is a more
effective engagement tool and improves
conversion rates compared with
traditional methods.
“Video isn’t the next big thing,” says co-
founder David Chamberlain, “it is THE
thing.” Chamberlain founded Viddyoze
in 2015 with his business partners
Jamie Garside and Joey Xoto after the
trio recognised that video content was
only accessible to
companies with big
budgets.
“We wanted to
make it simple and
cheaper,” explains
Chamberlain. “We
wanted to open up
the opportunity
for smaller companies to use video
marketing.”
FRUSTRATED ENTREPRENEUR

Chamberlain had been working as a
trainee accountant with Lancashire-
based Moore & Smalley when he realised
he was a frustrated entrepreneur. “I
decided I wanted to be on the other side
of the table,” he recalls. “I wanted to be
the business rather than the guy doing
the accounts. I enjoyed being inside the
business and felt I could give advice.
“One day I Googled ‘make money online’
because I wanted to make extra money.
I started doing affiliate marketing in my
spare time and within seven months I
was earning more from that than my day
job. At the age of 21 I decided to go out
on my own.”
Six years ago he was attending a
marketing event in the US when he met
future business partner Garside. “He was
based in Manchester and I was in Preston
so we used to have regular meetings
in Bolton,” he says. “We launched our
own business called Flexx Mobile after
recognising that a lot of eCommerce
was being done on mobile but a lot of
websites weren’t mobile optimised.
“Then we realised if we built our own
technology we could transition from
being an agency to a SaaS-based model
as businesses could build their own
website for a monthly subscription.”
The pair then had a conversation
with London-based acquaintance
Xoto which changed all their lives,
says Chamberlain.
“Joey messaged Jamie on Facebook,
of all things, and said ‘you guys make
software and I’ve got an idea. Let’s chat’.
We set up a Skype call and Joey said he
wanted to animate a logo without
using Adobe After Effects. If
you use Adobe you pay for it
and you have to understand
how to do it because it’s quite
a technical thing. We wanted to
simplify the whole process and that’s
where the idea for Viddyoze came from.
“The problem we saw was that the
videos were kept for the businesses that
had the budget for them. A lot of firms
didn’t think they could afford to make
videos.”
BIG IMPACT
Viddyoze’s first spectacular launch
was on September 29th 2015 with 30
templates. Viddyoze is hosted in the
cloud, so there’s no software to install.
INTERVIEW

62
“The templates were typically 6-30
seconds long and customers could
embed their logo and message into the
animation in three clicks. With videos
you can create a GIF so you can put
the animation straight into the
email,” explains Chamberlain.
“The intention of the launch
was to open the product, get
some users and then stop further people
buying it while we worked on the
product with the existing user base
and got our team of animators
to increase the number of
templates available.”
By the time they launched Viddyoze
2.0 they had 200 templates and again
sales were huge and immediate. Because
the company had used US affiliate
marketers to drive interest, 85 per cent
of their sales came from America.
High-profile customers include Tesla,
Sony and PwC but Chamberlain says the
potential is limitless.
“We can integrate our technology with
a client’s data to create personalised
content to scale,” he explains. “For
example an insurance company
traditionally sends out email reminders
at the end of a policy. Our technology
can send out animated content which
has resulted in a 15 per cent increase in
renewal rates.
“A GIF will play when you open the email.
It can go directly into an email or a SMS.
Video is proven to increase conversion
rates. They’re engaging. More people
are willing to buy a product after they’ve
watched a video.
“Small businesses need to use videos
because that’s what customers want to
watch. It’s about making content that is
informative and engaging. Videos make
marketing work.
“It doesn’t matter what size your
business is, if you’re not using video
effectively, you’re losing money.”
Users can either buy individual
animations or choose a discounted
monthly payment model. Other packages
include Viddyoze Business, which is
aimed at agencies and businesses that
create large amounts of video content,
and Viddyoze Academy, which provides
hundreds of professional video tutorials
showing people how to become an expert
videographer.
KLIPPYO

Working out of their colourful new offices
in Lancashire, all of Viddyoze’s growth
to date has been self-funded. Yet early
this year Chamberlain and his co-founder
launched a second business called
Klippyo. “The idea for that came from the
fact that our user base was taking a lot of
our content and stringing together a lot
of clips to create one complete video. We
decided to give them the option of doing
that but with our product.
“We set about building a product that
integrates with Viddyoze and could also
take content from Shutterstock and
other areas so the user can create their
own video.”
Klippyo describes itself as the ‘ultimate
video creator’ and allows users to create
and design professional and engaging
videos from their mobile device without
shooting a single frame.
Klippyo launched to another incredible
reception, with follow-on revenues
reaching $60,000 a month. “Just like
Viddyoze, we only opened Klippyo up for
four days so we could carry on working
with our user base and improve the
product,” says Chamberlain.
Now both brands are ready for the next
stage of their growth as they aim for
revenue of $32m in the next three years.
They’ve identified the car and house
sales sectors as being particularly ripe for
their disruptive technology and with only
five per cent of their customers coming
from the UK, they predict the best is yet
to come.
Revenue generated
in just four days
Spectacular
launches
Viddyoze in
numbers
INTERVIEW
Viddyoze
$500,000
Viddyoze 2.0
$650,000
Klippyo
$600,000
Total
$1.75m
Templates
1,500
Customers
75,000
Subscribers
6,000
Global workforce
27
63
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64
UK start-ups suffer from
restrictions on their ambition.
Often this is considered to be a
lack of founder talent or vision.
We disagree and believe it’s
a more niche (and fixable)
challenge: a lack of tech
company scaling experience
in the capital providers
and support mechanisms
surrounding start-ups that can
encourage founders to be as
ambitious as they dare to be.
In fact, there are extremely
talented operators,
entrepreneurs and start-
up investors throughout
the country. When these
individuals ‘pay it forward’
we’ve seen incredible results:
the Edinburgh example
demonstrates the impact of
capital and skill redistribution
following the exits of
Skyscanner, FreeAgent and
FanDuel.
Now the same needs to happen elsewhere, with
smarter collaboration from local government
which can empower and facilitate the abundance
of talented start-up operators to be more
involved in the ecosystem. Tech Nation’s Upscale
programme has demonstrated this is possible and
can produce terrific results.
When local authorities try to shape ecosystems
to their agenda it creates problems. It always
works best bottoms-up and we believe face-to-
face interaction is the best place to start. After
an event we ran in Manchester last year, one of
the audience members – Martin Bryant – decided
to launch a podcast to educate founders on the
typical VC business model. A great bottoms-up
reaction.
I recently helped judge the BusinessCloud North
West Tech 50 ranking and a lot of the companies
shortlisted have great future scaling potential.
This competition will be a useful spotlight on
them, which I hope could lead to investments,
partnerships, sales and maybe some hiring. The
right kind of initiative, in other words.
Everyone is acutely aware of the gap in VC
investment in and outside of London. We believe
that can be addressed by enabling increased
connection between founders and strong investors
wherever they are located, but also increased
support from experienced entrepreneurs and
operators for local start-ups.
We’ve seen signs of improvement on the
investment front. For example the growing
angel community in the North West, with some
institutional-type capital, but it’s quite fragmented:
and there are little pockets and silos. But I’m
confident it’s coming together as the ecosystem
there matures and we’d love to be part of that.
ADV is unique in terms of approach and
investment. Traditional VC funds have a fixed-
term life as the fund has to be returned to the
investors after 10 years. You have to largely sell
the businesses you’ve invested in, which means
generally selling them off when they are medium-
sized to usually Asian or US corporates.
They often get swallowed up and disappear into
those corporates. At ADV, we want to open up a
pathway that allows companies to transcend that
traditional exit point. We back companies with
long-term ambition and that needs long-term
backing to deliver.
It can take 10-20 years to build what we call a
‘Scalebig’ company. But when it is done right,
that can feed the local area – and boost the tech
ecosystem as a whole.
In our ‘On the
Money’ column,
ADV co-founder
Andy Sloane calls
on UK regions to
back ambitious
founders locally
through a
combination of
qualified support
and risk capital
INSIGHT
Bottoms-up backing
leads to ecosystem
growth
Email jonathan.symcox@businesscloud.co.uk to
contribute to our ‘On the Money’ Insights section
@AcceleratedDV
THE PILLARS YOU NEED TO
SUPPORT YOUR BUSINESS
Tech Manchester is a non-profit
organisation that works with hundreds
of local tech startups to deliver support
across four pillars:
Education: Attend our business skills
workshop series #techclassmcr
Support: Access a 12-month community-led
structured mentoring programme
Workspace: Apply for space at UKFast’s new
FastForward co-working incubator
Events: Attend ‘Meet the Mentor’ speed
dating, mentor training and workshops
Visit techmanchester.co.uk/events for
details, including #techclassmcr speaker
line-up and topics.
@tecmcr
0161 215 3787
techmanchester.co.uk
Co-work space UKFast Campus
Register your interest
techmanchester.co.uk/register
INCUBATOR
FASTFORWARD TECH
Dedicated to answering
challenges that keep
entrepreneurs awake at night
OPENING 2020
PODCAST
TM
TM

66
Giving journalists direct access to the world’s most
famous personalities in sport, music and politics is a
privacy minefield – but Caley Wilson believes he has the
answer in Blinder. The start-up founded by the former
New Zealand rugby league press officer is now working
with some of the world’s top sports teams
Words: Jonathan Symcox
PLAYING
A BLINDER
INTERVIEW
67
INTERVIEW
It’s fair to say that New Zealand
rugby union star Sonny Bill
Williams is a larger-than-life
personality.
At 6’4” and tipping 17 stone, he strikes
fear into opposing defences and has
won two World Cups at the heart
of the All Blacks midfield (England
recently put paid to his chances of a
third). He is also a true crossover star,
having boxed in seven professional
fights and represented the New
Zealand rugby league team – the sport
in which the former labourer began his
career.
The insatiable media appetite to
cover Williams’ story caused Caley
Wilson such a headache that he
was inspired to take the plunge as a
tech entrepreneur. “The seeds for
Blinder came from my experience
as the communications manager of
New Zealand Rugby League working
alongside athletes like Sonny Bill
Williams,” Wilson tells BusinessCloud.
“If you live in New Zealand, you’re
used to arranging remote access for
interviews, because you’re a fairly
remote country. I also had the extra
challenge of most of the players
playing in Australia while I was based
in New Zealand. We also had some
players based over in Wigan in the UK.
I needed to provide media access to
those players throughout the year.”
The difficulties came to a head during
the 2013 Rugby League World Cup,
which was partly held in England and
Wales and lasted
seven weeks. “I
wanted to provide
great access to
them during that
tournament – but
I didn’t know how
to do that while
also respecting
the privacy of the
athletes,” Wilson
explains.
When he sought help, Wilson was
advised to simply hand out the
personal phone numbers of the
athletes and ask the journalists
to respect their privacy once the
interview was finished. “I didn’t think
that was a very professional way to
provide access to athletes, especially
when I was dealing with people of the
profile of Sonny Bill Williams,” he says.
“I did every phone
interview on
my own phone
for that team. If
you wanted to
speak with the
coach or one of
the players, that
was me standing
outside a hotel
room handing
a phone over. It
wiped me out.
And it made
me a big
bottleneck for my organisation.
“I came back from that
tournament and said ‘this is
ridiculous… I don’t think it needs
to be this hard’. I was immensely
frustrated and determined to do
something about it.”
He teamed up with Ross McConnell
(right) to launch communications
platform Blinder, which enables
athletes to receive a call on their
personal phones without handing
out any details or having to log in to
specialist software. The pre-approved
calls can be audio or video and are
automatically recorded to help with
transparency and accuracy of content
produced from the interview. It is
refreshing to interview Wilson, who
is currently based in New Zealand but
is over in the UK talking to potential
partners - including Manchester
City - using the video tech – if only to
see his face when I crack a joke about
England’s success in the Cricket World
Cup final this summer (our interview
took place before the infamous rugby
semi-final clash). Indeed the web-
based technology is backed by former
New Zealand cricket captain Stephen
Fleming and fellow Black Caps Scott
Styris and Simon Doull, as well as
US sports technology group Stadia
Ventures.
It is already being used by Olympic
champions, the cutting-edge Formula
E series and teams from leagues as
diverse as the NCAA US college sports
system and the Premier
League: Cardiff City
68
treated their supporters to spoof
video ‘Better Call Sol’, featuring
cult defender Sol Bamba.
“I come from a journalistic
background so I’m incredibly keen
to be respectful to journalists
and work with them to see the
stories of the team told,” says
Wilson (below). “We can record the
conversation when an 18-year-
old who’s just about to make
their debut breaks the news to
their parents; or keep US college
athletes tightly connected with
the local papers and radio and TV
stations in the areas where they’ve
come from all around the world.
“I also find that athletes
who are striving to
improve their athletic
performance would
also like to give better
interviews. We can give
them feedback on
how they’ve done
and the confidence
to open up and do a
great job of telling
those fascinating
stories.”
Blinder, which
employs fewer
than 10 staff, also boasts two
recent World Cup winners among
its clients in US Women’s Soccer
and New Zealand Netball’s Silver
Ferns. However there is a wider
market for the technology, as
evidenced by the recent signing of
Warner Music.
“In the past I’ve workedwith
sports teams that included
teenage girls and giving out their
personal contact details just did
not feel a professional way to
operate,” says Wilson. “Blinder
does a lot of work in music, where
similar challenges exist. We’re also
looking at providing access to [big
personalities in] politics as well as
medicine and the legal field.
“New Zealand and Australia was
a great testing ground but it’s
not a big enough market for us
to be doing the things we wish to
achieve. North America is huge
for us because of the sheer size of
the market, but one of the lovely
things we’ve found in Europe is
that people there understand the
magnitude of the organisations
we’re working with… there’s an
understanding, for example, that
New Zealand Rugby Union is a big
deal.”
INTERVIEW
CLIENTS DESCRIBE THE
EXPERIENCE OF USING BLINDER
Will Genia, Australia rugby union star
“Your number’s not being passed around to
journos or radio stations who can then call you
up asking for favours out of the blue. It’s a really
professional way of doing it.”
Mark Denham, head of communications at
Cardiff City
“Saves you hours of time a month, with
complete peace of mind.”
Andrea Cimbrico of Italy rugby’s media team
“A small revolution in media relations
management – and a great tool for media
coaching.”
Kerry Manders of Netball New Zealand’s media
team
“Quick, easy, safe and keeps a record of
everything.”
switched on!
so you can switch off
hj-advert-final.indd 1
21/08/2019 15
71
Is screen-sharing
start-up the next
Skype?
TOGEE TECHNOLOGIES BELIEVES IT WILL DRIVE THE
NEXT EVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATION WITH ITS
INNOVATIVE SCREEN-SHARING TECH – AND IT HAS
BIG PLANS FOR THE UK

WORDS: JONATHAN SYMCOX
Wherever you are right now,
take a look around: how many
people are gazing intently at
their smartphone?
The must-have gadget of the 21st Century
has revolutionised how we communicate
and remain connected with our friends –
yet it has also led to an epidemic of social
isolation as people become absorbed in the
virtual world at the expense of the reality
around them.
Start-up Togee Technologies believes its
innovative screen-sharing technology can
help bridge that gap. “We’re calling it the
counter [to social isolation] – it is a social
plugin to anything you are doing on your
phone,” explains CEO Daniel Diegelmann.
“Instead of consuming alone, sitting along
with your screen and scrolling endlessly,
we think that it should be possible to share
that experience.”
The average person’s mobile consumption
is now almost five hours a day, says
Diegelmann, which makes ‘screen time’
the most common activity worldwide. “We
definitely don’t want to increase screen
time, but to make it more qualitative,” he
insists. “We think this is a very efficient way
of communication. Hopefully we can even
bring down the screen time overall.”
Togee works by hovering a button over
the top of any app you are inside, be it
YouTube, Facebook, a web browser or a
mere calendar. When you wish to show
something to a friend you can use this to
invite them to share your experience.
Your friends pop up as video feeds at the
bottom of the screen and everyone can
watch the shared screen, talk about it
together and even doodle over the
top to highlight items of interest.
Think WhatsApp, but with video
and audio in real-time.
“If we’re standing next to each
other right now, I could bring
out my phone and say ‘look at
this’. It could be any visual, any
content, any application,” says CMO
Peter Andersson. “We want
to replicate that moment
with the next-best thing
to a physical meeting. We
can consume this content
together and enrich the
conversation by adding a
visual and interactive layer of
communication.”
INTERVIEW
72
Available on Android, the video renders
in 720p for now but could scale to 4K
resolution when 5G technology becomes
widely available, says Diegelmann
(above). “The magic within Togee is that
we are streaming the screen, your face,
your voice and the doodling all at once.
It’s the full experience.”
Users can also record experiences
and send them to friends. “It feels like
it’s something that should be in every
pocket and on every smartphone,” adds
Diegelmann.
Togee’s tech allows for up to 50 people
to share a live session, a feature which it
is considering offering to businesses. For
now it is limiting its consumer product to
four people in a session to ensure a high-
quality experience on mobile screens.
The VIP beta version of Togee was
released on October 24th on the
App Store and Google Play. Based in
Stockholm with 20 staff, it has big plans
for the UK after a recent trade visit to
London Tech Week.
“We were selected as one of Sweden’s
top 10 start-ups,” says Andersson
(right). “We pitched at Google and also
met potential partners like Manchester
City; the telco Three; and MediaCity. We
are looking at how we can integrate our
solution into their media verticals.
“There are also other football clubs
and big eCommerce companies in
Manchester as well… the UK is definitely
a very important market for us.”
Cultivating partnerships and tapping into
the influencer market will be key if Togee
is to meet a target of a million users by
early 2020. “Imagine going to the website
of a fashion brand and together picking
the clothes you are planning to wear.
You can even record this experience and
post it on Instagram,” says Diegelmann.
“Influencers can also create this very
personal content where they review
material or digital content and post it
online.”
Andersson describes the Swedish tech
ecosystem as “really great with good
interest from international VC venture
capital”. After early angel investment of
almost $1 million, Togee is now closing
a second seed investment of $1.5m and
plans to raise a Series A round next year.
“Fifteen years ago you had Skype –
and we believe we will be the next
comparable and game-changing
solution,” Andersson says.
Diegelmann agrees. “The biggest reason
that we have such huge potential is we
create so many win-win scenarios on
top of other applications and potential
collaborations,” he says. “It only requires
one other contact to have value,
compared with Facebook and Instagram
where you need a lot of people before
your content brings much value.
“We believe that Togee will be the next
step in daily communication.”
SWEDEN’S BIG
TECH NAMES

music streaming service
global tech bank
telecoms giant

caller ID and call-blocking app
mobile app and card reader
direct-to-consumer fashion brand
personal finance app
games developer behind
Candy Crush
INTERVIEW
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74
TECH COUNSEL
WHERE SHOULD YOU BE SPENDING YOUR
MARKETING BUDGET – AND WHAT ARE
THE OPTIONS FOR DRIVING CUSTOMER
ACQUISITION USING TECH?
Simon Wilkinson, CEO, Mobica
“Always try and punch above your weight. Take all your annual spend and put it at the most
important event, rather than diluting it. Be in the best place you can afford to be at that moment
in time and show your market that you’re a trusted partner – go big.”
Sylvia Carrasco, CEO, Goldex
“Optimal balance for marketing spend should ideally be one-third acquisition, two-thirds brand-
building for longer-term uplift in sales. In terms of paid versus organic, we see a 65/35 split with
articles in reputable publications playing an important role in organic traffic.”
Daniel Winterstein, CTO, Good-Loop
“Always track campaign performance and adjust strategy accordingly, but prioritise emotion:
how did your marketing make people feel? Views and clicks are important, but the best
marketing combines those metrics with brand uplift and customer behaviour surveys.”
Chris Baldwin, VP marketing, Zoovu
“A huge amount of marketing budget is allocated to acquiring traffic, but research shows that
71 per cent of shoppers abandon a website purchase in favour of a competitor that makes the
search experience easier. Brands need to focus on simplifying decision-making.”
Candice Arnold, CMO, Eggplant
“Knowing your customer is key. Predicting customer behaviour accurately is not easy when
dealing with unpredictable circumstances, which is why the key to maximising marketing spend
lies in being able to blend AI-driven data volume and human insight.”
74
MAXIMISE your
marketing spend
75
TECH COUNSEL
Roland Bryan, CEO, Wowcher
“Don’t try and do too many things. Where people go a bit wrong is they might have a marketing
budget of 10 or 20 grand and they try and do 10 two-grand campaigns – it will never work, you’ve
got to give yourself enough money to test and learn.”
Rebecca McGoff, founder, Buump Active
“Marketing is hugely important and I have assembled a crack team of communications gurus to
help me spread the message about Buump Active. Currently, most of my budget goes into social
media – a mix of paid-for and organic – and this is supported by digital and traditional PR.”
Adam Pritchard, CEO, Shopit
“Our biggest challenge is marketing the business. Social media advertising is wonderfully cost
effective; however it’s not going to be the converter. Direct sales, telesales, direct emailing and
meetings are still the best way to do business.”
David Duke, COO, Visualsoft
“You need to understand your education model and how to grow new visitors all the way through
the funnel. Some retailers restrict their growth by adhering to a strict direct cost of sale when they
should loosen the purse-strings a little bit more to go quicker.”
Laura Beattie, co-founder, Careaux
“All our marketing has been organic and generated by the amazing and generous support of
others. Meeting people at events and speaking to other businesses is definitely the most powerful
form of marketing. Find opportunities for word-of-mouth and social media recommendations.”
Bernadette Kelly, director, ActiveWin
“With regards to the paid channels which generate the best ROI for your business, we’ve seen
remarkable acquisition results from targeted campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, which can
be run on much smaller budgets than you might think.”
Joey Xoto, co-founder, Viddyoze
“Advertising is unpredictable so we use affiliate partners to drive traffic, which doesn’t cost us
anything – we just split the profit. We focus all the money on direct response marketing and
making sure that the page is going to convert because that’s something we can control easily.”
75
76
Believe it or not, Christmas is nearly
here again – and it’s time to start
thinking about presents for that
special someone. Hopefully the
following list will give you a little
inspiration…
1. GOOGLE NEST HUB MAX
The Google Nest Hub Max is a must-
have for any smart home. I use this
device to Skype relatives, give me
step-by-step recipes for cooking,
stream videos and control my smart
home.
2. TILE PRO TRACKER
If you’re forever misplacing your keys
then this is the gadget for you. The
Tile Pro Tracker is a small and handy
gizmo that will help you find anything
you attach to it – so long as your
phone is within Bluetooth range.
3. POLAROID ONESTEP BLUETOOTH
INSTANT CAMERA
Even in the modern world, Polaroid instant cameras
remain a great gift idea: there is just something about
having a physical photo in your hand. This year there is a
Bluetooth twist, allowing you to possess both a physical
image and a nice picture to upload to Instagram.
4. BOSE BLUETOOTH AUDIO SUNGLASSES
These neat Bose sunglasses connect to Bluetooth and
play music near your ears without anyone else hearing
that sneaky Taylor Swift album...
5. BANG & OLUFSEN BEOPLAY A9
This Bang & Olufsen speaker has a bonkers yet beautiful
design with interchangeable skins allowing it to resemble
a piece of modern art in your home. Its sound quality
is absolutely out of this world – and it even has Google
Assistant built-in so you can control your home with it.
6. ELECTRIC HYDROFOIL SURFBOARD
If you have a spare £10k and a surfer in the family then
the Electric Hydrofoil Surfboard is the gadget for you.
This electric surfboard allows you to surf over any body
of water, even if there are no waves!
7. FINGERPRINT PADLOCK
This neat little device from Deep Dream uses biometric
technology to open or close the padlock. No more losing
that annoying little key in a jeans pocket on holiday...
8. 3D CHOCOLATE PRINTER
Finally, the 3D printer we’ve all been waiting for (my
partner definitely has anyway…) This product from Choc
Edge Ltd allows users to print amazing 3D pieces of
edible art.
Self-confessed
geek Gavin
Wheeldon looks
at the tech
gadgets you
should consider
giving to your
loved ones this
Christmas
Everyone’s Christmas
technology wish-list
INSIGHT
GADGET GAVIN
@gavinwheeldon
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