TechNation200 Almanac 2015/16
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See the full profile interviews at www.techcityinsider.net<br />
Leo Cubbin<br />
Managing director<br />
Ripstone<br />
“We find some stuff that's risky and edgy and we have other stuff like our Pure brand – Pure<br />
Chess, Pure Pool, Pure Hold’em – which is more mainstream. We try to be fair with our<br />
deals and empower the people we work with. We look for people who are passionate about<br />
what they’re doing and we support them. They haven't just got a game idea – they want to<br />
make a game that tells a story they are really passionate about. Liverpool is a fun city and the<br />
type of people who make games want to have interesting lives as well. We’re not that far from<br />
the Lake District, the Wirral or Wales so the good outdoor life is available. And it’s also a very<br />
vibrant city. It's just a great place to be.”<br />
Games publisher Ripstone is one of the second generation of gaming businesses to have emerged from the<br />
legacy of Sony’s presence in the city. In six years as a fi erce independent, it has built a reputation as the ‘Stiff<br />
records of gaming’. @RipstoneGames<br />
Martin Kenwright<br />
Founder<br />
Starship Group<br />
“After 20 years of successes, I decided to ‘retire’ from the<br />
industry. But, after a couple of years, I got a whole new<br />
outlook. I was in a unique position with time, energy, money<br />
and resource to go back and have one more play. I was very<br />
excited about the advent of new technologies. Also, I saw what<br />
was going on in the city. When I left the industry, Liverpool was<br />
at the top, with some of the best games development studios<br />
on the planet. To see they’d all left the area was sad. I thought<br />
I could offer something that was more than just a games<br />
development studio – something with a broader vision about<br />
where tech could go, how we could fund it, how we could make<br />
it and how we could develop it.”<br />
Kenwright is one of the UK’s most senior video game developers. At<br />
Starship Group, he’s applying gaming technology to wider uses like<br />
food and health and in <strong>2015</strong> launched new virtual-reality social network<br />
technology vTime. @Starship_Group<br />
Carl Wong<br />
Co-founder and chief<br />
executive<br />
LivingLens<br />
“The world of market<br />
insight creates an<br />
incredible amount<br />
of video content every<br />
year. A typical large<br />
multinational brand will<br />
create thousands of hours<br />
of video content through its<br />
market research projects.<br />
LivingLens is Google for<br />
your organisation’s video<br />
content – we enable you to<br />
search specifically and for<br />
exact meaningful moments.<br />
You search for a word or a<br />
phrase, you navigate to that<br />
exact mention within video<br />
content and we give you the<br />
power to grab clips, merge<br />
those clips together and<br />
then share those clips with<br />
others. We turn video into<br />
something searchable. We’re<br />
turning video into data. We<br />
are at the start of a journey<br />
with that. It’s not just exciting<br />
times for us; there’s a new<br />
technology emerging that’s<br />
going to make video more<br />
accessible and more useful<br />
and valuable for everybody.”<br />
LivingLens helps its market<br />
research and brand customers to<br />
extract data and insights from the<br />
world’s fastest-growing medium –<br />
video. After emerging from London<br />
madtech accelerator Collider, in<br />
<strong>2015</strong> LivingLens closed a £1m<br />
funding round.@Livinglenstv<br />
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