Tech Scout Challenge Finalists’ Descriptions:
Morning: British challengers
2K Manufacturing Ltd
2K is a pioneering, venture capital-backed manufacturing company that has developed and industrialised a new technology to allow it to convert low-grade waste plastic into products. The company is now mass-producing EcoSheet – a sustainable replacement to plywood made from 100% low-grade waste – which is now being used by many major contruction companies.
DADapp
DADapp brings in two major innovations for two large opportunity markets. The introduction of three-dimension private sharing with a life catalogue, used for both consumers and the small and medium-sized enterprise market. The technical innovations are based upon 20 years military internet experience – the founder Julian Ranger, built a military internet business which he sold to Lockheed Martin, and is also behind start-up SocialSafe. Three of DADapp’s principals come from this business. Gordon Bell, the noted senior Microsoft researcher, stated in Oct 2011: "He [Ranger] is definitely on the right track with his vision AND service AND several years ahead of where our company needs to be."
DCisions
DCisions puts data at the customer’s fingertips. The combination of the high quality data with advanced benchmarking capabilities enables customers to make smarter investments with confidence in a simple and accessible way. Having compiled a database of more than one million current UK investors, DCisions indexes consumer portfolios to uncover what level of returns are being produced by different risk strategies – as a matter of fact rather than opinion. Regardless of the consumer’s knowledge, DCisions’ data should be the first port-of-call for the industry and all investors.
Flooved
Flooved is a fast-growth, globally scalable electronic publishing technology business with very low customer acquisition costs. Flooved is the world’s first online-only textbook platform providing university students with access to their entire academic content for a monthly subscription. Flooved is built and is being tested in-house and has has 12 publishers signed up so far, including Bloomsbury.
HipSnip
HipSnip is a personal shopping application that gets shoppers product advice from experts. Shoppers ask a question on a HipSnip-powered site, which is sent to the best people to give advice from the expert community. The unique sales point: HipSnip is a federated application that can be embedded into any website (i.e. embedded as easily as a blog). Key clients are retailers and publishers. Retailers’ staff can give online advice directly to consumers. Publishers gain a social shopping channel for their readers, with inbuilt monetisation via affiliate revenue. HipSnip is a free consumer-facing product with business-to-business revenues.
Mesaplexx
Mesaplexx, an innovative start-up company specialising in developing products and intellectual property in electromagnetic engineering and high performance filters, launched its xCube technology at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. This revolutionary radio filter technology has the capability to radically improve the performance of active antennas (AASs), enabling increases in network capacity of up to 65%. AASs are capable of significantly increasing base station site efficiency and performance. XCube delivers 50% more power output for the same input.
SocialSafe
SocialSafe is your aggregated social timeline – for when today becomes yesterday. SocialSafe is an application for PC/Mac that downloads all of your social network data (Facebook including Facebook Pages, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Instagram and others coming soon) and allows you to view the aggregated sum through a calendar interface, and provides full search, export and other viewing capabilities. SocialSafe works for consumers and also for businesses who have a more regulatory and analytics focus. The founder, Julian Ranger, built a military internet business which he sold to Lockheed Martin and has also founded start-up DADapp.
UVuu.Me
UVuu.Me has developed the first video-capture and editing service to produce professionally finished films from footage captured using Smartphones. The sophisticated Smartphone App allows multiple attendees of an event to capture and automatically upload time-synchronised footage to our servers for subsequent processing into professionally edited finished products. The application can be used to capture video and photo footage at any type of event, involving multiple locations where desired. UVuu.Me creates lasting memories of special times for people to share and enjoy and does it quickly.
Ventive
Ventive is a new approach to ventilation that recovers the heat from outgoing stale air to the incoming fresh air. The device works by capturing the wind and through the principle of natural buoyancy is totally passive – it has no moving parts to breakdown and requires no energy to run. It is also designed to be retrofitted to buildings, which gives a large immediate market. Ventive combines the simplicity of the passive stack with the heat recovery performance of a powered mechanical device without the cost, maintenance and energy penalty. The device is manufactured using high volume techniques.
Afternoon: international challengers:
Agincourt Solutions
Agincourt Solutions is a small business that provides cutting-edge technology and tailored analysis to governments and large multinational corporations. Our multilingual analytic toolset allows users to crawl the internet or other large data sets and harvest information in more than 250 languages. Agincourt’s technology affords users the ability to perform for cross-lingual search and data management. Our solutions employ advanced mathematics to discover new entities, shifting meanings, and trending topics.
AirPatrol
AirPatrol is the first and only security company whose technology can continuously monitor any mobile device on cellular and Wi-Fi channels in an enterprise, determine compliance with security policy, enforce the appropriate policy on the device in real time and dynamically empower the device’s capabilities for the situation regardless of who the user might be. AirPatrol offers a comprehensive suite of location-based management solutions that enable clients in the government, financial sectors and others to keep pace with the expanding security requirements of an increasingly mobile world.
CarryQuote
CarryQuote has been providing high-end, private label mobile applications to the financial services and market data industry since 2007. The company pioneered the concept of on-demand real-time global market quotes and was the first to offer custom branded mobile apps for secure research and multimedia content delivery. CarryQuote mobile solutions can integrate proprietary content with CNBC news, low-cost real-time market data, analytics and charting. CarryQuote’s unique SaaS-based technology is compatible with all major mobile platforms, ensuring access to critical financial information.
HyLighter
HyLighter provides software for collaboration involving documents. It offers the first-in-class distributed sensemaking system for deeply engaging groups of almost any size with a single document or large collections to help generate new knowledge, enhance decision making, accelerate learning, and provide an accumulating source of rich analytics. HyLighter makes the thinking of users that is ordinarily hidden, become transparent and easily accessible as a layer of annotation distributed across multiple documents and stored in a continuously updated relational database.
RedOwl Analytics
RedOwl Analytics is a software company focused on big data analytics in commercial markets. The core approach is to combine cutting edge inferential statistical techniques and powerful visualizations with open source, big data frameworks to create a powerful relational event analysis tool. RedOwl’s key targeted markets include financial services, legal, compliance, consulting, and business operations.
Unveillance
Unveillance has developed the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) botnet intelligence platform. Leveraging completely passive monitoring, without the use of any on premises hardware, software or agent install, Unveillance’s platform is able to assess whether an organization, country and/or government’s network is actively compromised by malware and thus participating in a botnet infrastructure at a 100% zero false positive rate. The intelligence platform is able to provide alerting and metrics on severity, frequency and scope of infection as well as display successful remediation efforts.
Biographies of Speakers:
Bruce Beckloff, Head of Corporate Business Development, ARM Holdings PLC
Bruce is responsible for corporate strategy development, mergers and acquisitions, and investments activities. Bruce manages ARM’s investment portfolio which today consists of approximately 15 companies and over $40M of investment. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor and a Masters in materials science and holds a Masters in Business administration from the Southern Methodist University.
Jerry Ennis, Strategic Adviser to venture capital unit, UK Trade & Investment (UKTI)
Since the start of the year, Jerry has been working with a new team in UKTI to explore what can be done to support overseas venture capital investment into the UK’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and recently took part in the Clean & Cool Mission to San Francisco. Prior to this, Jerry spent nine years as a partner at venture capital firm Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures after being a director at InterConnect Communications and head of advanced research and developments at Mitel Telecom.
Neil Foster, Partner, Baker Botts
Neil is a corporate partner at leading law firm Baker Botts. He joined Baker Botts in December 2011. He was previously at a large European law firm, where he was a partner and head of venture capital and private equity. Prior to that, Neil was a founding member of the UK corporate practice in London of a large Californian law firm. He is on the editorial board of Global Corporate Venturing magazine and has advised on several corporate venturing deals. Neil’s practice in the London office of Baker Botts covers mergers and acquisitions, venture capital and private equity and corporate finance. His principal sector specialisations are technology and telecommunications, media and entertainment, life sciences and healthcare. As well as advising UK companies, venture funds and intermediaries, Neil represents many large US, Middle Eastern, South African and Asian corporations and institutions on their UK and European deals.
William Gaches, Director of Strategy, Northrop Grumman
In March, Bill accepted the position at Northrop Grumman as director of strategy for the Essex Business Unit and the Agile SIGINT Enterprise Mission Area. He had previously worked in the US Intelligence Community for more than 31 years, holding progressively senior appointments at the National Security Agency (NSA), the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) and the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC). During his time at NSA, Bill was the chief of the Counterterrorism Office before, during and for nearly two years after the attacks of September 11, 2001. He was subsequently selected to help build the Presidentially-directed TTIC and the Director of National Intelligence’s NCTC, serving as the director of intelligence in both organizations. In 2006, Bill volunteered to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and was appointed the director of intelligence at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). After establishing TSA’s Office of Global Strategies, he left government service in November 2008 and worked first at Detica, BAE and then Arete Associates in Washington, DC, before joining Northrop Grumman.
Jerneja Joncar, Investment Manager, GM Ventures
Jerneja Loncar leads the European efforts of car maker General Motors’ corporate venturing unit out of London. GM Ventures invests in automotive cleantech, smart materials, infotainment and business model innovations. Jerneja joined GM in 2008 and worked on corporate transformation initiatives. Her background is in business development and strategy in automotive industry and financial services. She has worked in Europe, USA and Asia and received her MBA from NYU, Stern School of Business and Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Tim Lafferty, Managing Director, Global Corporate Venturing
Tim has worked in senior sales and marketing roles for international media companies for 20 years, on brands including BusinessWeek and Readers’ Digest. Until February 2010 he was the Director of Product Sales and Marketing at Dow Jones in Europe, overseeing the circulation sales and marketing activities of The Wall Street Journal Europe, Financial News, Private Equity News and Wealth Bulletin. He left Dow Jones to pursue his interest in writing, and founded Write Brain, a marketing copywriting and consulting agency (http://write-brain.co.uk). James Mawson founded Global Corporate Venturing in early 2010 and Tim joined the company as Managing Director in March 2011.
Roger London, Chairman, American Security Challenge
Over the past 20 years Roger has been a principal and adviser to almost $1bn in transactions and awards through his experiences as venture capitalist, successful entrepreneur, merchant banker, security incubator manager, and defense/intelligence community technology scout. While currently heading up the American Security Challenge and licensing the TechMATCH submission, screening and search platform, he is also an angel investor with the Baltimore Angels and the Dingman Center Angels. Previously, he was a principal for Nokia’s Innovent Ventures unit, and innovation program director for the Chesapeake Crescent Initiative, a regional technology commercialization task force established by/for Maryland Governor O’Malley, Virginia Governor Kaine and Mayor Fenty of Washington DC.
James Mawson, Founder and Editor, Global Corporate Venturing
James was editor of Private Equity News, part of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal in London, for nearly four years until May 2010 when he launched Global Corporate Venturing as an independent title from his own publishing company.
Previously, James had freelanced for a host of national and trade media titles, including the BBC, Financial Times, Economist, Independent on Sunday, Sunday Express and Dow Jones Newswires; provided research for Nick Davies’s book, Flat Earth News; was a foreign correspondent in central and eastern Europe; and was international editor for FT Business.
He is also a director of the London Press Club and has acted as a pro bono editor for the European Venture Philanthropy Association’s monthly newsletter.
Maria Molland, Strategic Adviser to venture capital unit, UK Trade & Investment (UKTI)
Since the start of the year, Maria has been developing the profile of the UK as an attractive destination for venture capital investment among key decision makers in the international community on behalf of the UKTI.
She is also executive vice-president of international at Fab.com, a venture partner at DN Capital and managing director at M Squared Digital Consulting.
Previously, Maria spent nearly two years as managing director at Thomson Reuters’ Lipper division, where she created the Digital Ventures group, and led a cross functional team responsible for advancing an innovation agenda by building new consumer digital media businesses. This had followed two years as global head of strategy and business development at the company’s Reuters Media unit. Her earlier career was overseeing business development and strategy roles at media companies Dow Jones, yahoo and Walt Disney after two years as an analyst at investemtn bank Volpe Brown Whelan & Company.
Erik Sebusch, Partner, CMEA Capital
Erik joined CMEA in 2010 and has no doubts about who’s at the top of the food chain in the world of venture capital – the limited partner. During his long career at UPS, which he calls a "left-brained organization," Erik encouraged them to use "right brain thinking" to develop new products while in New Product Concepts. This innovation continued while in UPS’s venture arm, UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund. Erik was involved in assisting and strategizing with early-stage startups to get their message and technology exposed to UPS and out to the world.His board seats include CEO Ventures, American Security Challenge, SouthEast Emergency Response Network and a stealth retail start-up.