TechNation200 Almanac 2015/16
234crey
234crey
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
<strong>TechNation200</strong> <strong>Almanac</strong> <strong>2015</strong>/<strong>16</strong> | North East<br />
Jo York<br />
Co-founder<br />
Reframed.tv<br />
With more than 30,000 tech jobs, England’s<br />
North East – including the cities of Newcastle<br />
and Sunderland – is now clearly one of the<br />
UK’s leading technology business clusters.<br />
The North East, once so proud of its shipyards and coal<br />
mines, is now seeking to redefi ne itself as one of the UK’s<br />
fastest-rising technology clusters.<br />
More than 30,000 people are employed in the tech sector<br />
across the North East today – with another 1,500 jobs added<br />
each year. The region has moved fast from coal to data mining.<br />
The existence of world-leading academic institutions – one,<br />
Northumbria University, produced iPhone inventor Jonathan<br />
Ive – is pivotal. A strong and vibrant academic base, with more<br />
than 40,000 students and specialisms in medicine and life<br />
sciences, is generating hundreds of new tech-savvy graduates<br />
every year.<br />
The North East also has a strong native technology business<br />
sector. The sector’s biggest employer is accounting software<br />
giant Sage, which employs 2,500 people across the region and<br />
13,000 worldwide. It remains Europe’s only FTSE 100-listed<br />
software company.<br />
Sage is accompanied by big public sector players, none<br />
bigger than government tax agency HMRC, which feeds<br />
the region’s technology ecosystem by outsourcing work to<br />
medium-sized local software providers.<br />
New not-for-profi t Dynamo is helping to amplify a tech<br />
community that hitherto had no collective voice. It brings the<br />
big players together with the medium-sized businesses and the<br />
startups so they can gel and start to work together.<br />
At the heart of the startup scene is Ignite, Newcastle’s<br />
leading tech startup accelerator, incubator and events space.<br />
Ignite grew from a one-off 14-week programme, tapping into<br />
Newcastle’s strong native tech scene and broadening its work<br />
to become an ongoing incubator and events space.<br />
Among Ignite’s alumni are adtech business Adludio, sports<br />
social platform MatchChat and sound specialist EarSoft.<br />
Launched in 2014, the 10,000 square-foot, Kickstarterfunded<br />
Campus North offers space to 150 startup founders, as<br />
well as a free meetup and events venue.<br />
Startup investment is available through local VC Northstar<br />
Ventures, which has more than £80m under its management.<br />
A £125m pot of fi nance for business in the North East also<br />
comes from the EU’s JEREMIE fund, providing debt and equity<br />
fi nance from £1,000 to £1.25m for fi rms based in or relocating<br />
to the region.<br />
Newcastle City Council is now working with BT on new<br />
superfast broadband technology, with a target of 97% coverage.<br />
TechCityinsider’s TechCities ambassador for the North East is Tristan<br />
Watson of Ignite (www.ignite.io).<br />
“Reframed allows you to<br />
comment, discuss and<br />
share moments of video.<br />
We’ve been described as<br />
‘SoundCloud for video’. Rather<br />
than just allowing people to<br />
comment outside of the video,<br />
we time-stamp comments<br />
from the moment you start<br />
typing, then display it as a<br />
graph over the timeline so you<br />
can skip to the interesting bits<br />
that everyone is talking about.<br />
We display comments next to the video at the moment that<br />
they’re relevant. Reframed is being used during conferences<br />
with live streams. It allows organisers to pull in tweets from<br />
the audience and bring them together. It gives them an<br />
archive of the reactions. Once we’ve got all that data, we can<br />
run things like sentiment analysis. It seems like a really easy<br />
idea but it turns out it’s quite hard.”<br />
Reframed.tv makes video more social by enabling users to make timespecifi<br />
c comments on YouTube, Vimeo and self-hosted video. Its mission<br />
is to be the glue between social media and video. @Reframedtv<br />
Si Brown<br />
Co-founder and chief marketing officer<br />
Skignz<br />
“<br />
Four out of fi ve people can't read maps, and that is the key<br />
idea behind Skignz. People also get lost quite often at large<br />
events or in strange places. We've developed an augmentedreality<br />
platform that pretty much covers the whole globe. Our<br />
product and platform can be used almost by anybody personally<br />
or professionally. We use geolocation. People sign up for a free<br />
account and get three free Skignz. They can place one above the<br />
tent at a festival, they can place one above the car when they've<br />
parked in a fi eld somewhere and they can have one above their<br />
heads so their friends can fi nd them<br />
in<br />
a crowd. We want to become the<br />
browser of choice for augmented<br />
reality content in the sky – so not<br />
digital recognition but geolocated<br />
o ed<br />
information.”<br />
Augmented reality platform Skignz<br />
helps people fi nd their way around<br />
unfamiliar places, using geolocation o to<br />
allow people and brands to add a ‘skign’<br />
– a sign in the sky – above any location,<br />
or person, anywhere. Skignz won<br />
best startup at Thinking<br />
Digital <strong>2015</strong>. @skignz<br />
70
Change language