I've just spent the day in Edinburgh at the 11th annual Connect Investment Conference, a fantastic event for technology startups and investors run by Connect Scotland. The structure of the event was great, with a technology showcase where a lot of companies were set up with stands were you could meet them, see their demos, pick up brochures, etc. Through the morning a total of ten companies each gave a ten-minute pitch in front of the assembled audience of about 120 people, and in the afternoon there was a series of speeches by various industry luminaries talking about their experiences in creating business success from technology innovation. In between the sessions there was plenty of time at breaks and at lunch for visiting the technology showcase and networking with the investors and innovation support organisations that were there.
The companies were from a range of different technology areas including biotech and renewable energy (the offshore oil industry in Scotland has a lot of expertise in design and construction for the rough North Sea conditions, and some of that knowledge is now being recycled into wave and tidal power technologies) but there was a healthy number of software-based solutions, everything from compiler enhancements to mobile gaming. The thing that struck me overall was not just the high quality of the companies on show, but that most of them not only had some very interesting, high-quality IP and great entrepreneurial and business focus. A lot of these companies are looking for second round funding, so they are not very early stage. Even so, I was quite impressed.
Some of the companies that I spoke to through the day were:
Caspian Learning
Caspian provide development tools and execution engine for 3D interactive learning solutions, part of the "serious gaming" market. They showed a cool demo for training oil platform workers, taking them through the scenario of a helicopter crash and going through the fire and evacuation drills in a model of a real oil platform. Caspian's key feature is the ease by which these training environments can be built and modified.
Codeplay Software Ltd
Anyone who has tried to write code for parallel execution knows that this is not trivial. Codeplay have a tool makes it (relatively) easy to take existing single-threaded C++ code and enable it to benefit from a level of parallel execution on multicore CPUs and other parallel processing architectures. Their primary market is software development for embedded systems and mobile devices.
Factonomy Ltd
Building complex, interactive web sites in a fraction of the time it takes with traditional tools sounds like it could be useful, and apparently Declarative XML is the way to do it. I didn't have a lot of time to talk to these guys but they're doing an Office LiveMeeting demo for me on Friday and I'm quite interested in this since improving developer productivity is always a hot topic.
Helixion Ltd
Helixion is taking advantage of the emergence of memory cards with built-in smartcard technology to deliver end-to-end security for mobile device applications. Like all people at Microsoft I have a security card that is also a smartcard which with my PIN gives me full VPN access to our corporate network from my laptop. The Helixion solution could enable the same level of security from a PDA or smartphone, and actually provides a third authentication factor by integrating with the SIM.
KeyPoint Technologies (UK) Ltd
Have you ever been frustrated by typing text on your mobile? The answer is very likely yes, unless u r a gr8 txtr. The founder of Keypoint started thinking about how to simplify text input after his brother lost an arm in an accident and they worked together on designing a keyboard that would enable him to type more quickly and easily. The software product that eventually emerged from this work, Adaptxt, takes a major step forward from the T9 predictive input that most of us probably use on our mobiles today.
Skyscanner.net
The guy from Skyscanner wasn't actually presenting but I chatted to him over a cup of tea and they have a very neat take on the online flight booking market. They basically aggregate data from about 150 airlines (including the web-only budget airlines) and enable some very interesting search scenarios, enabling you to more easily find the cheapest and most convenient flight.
Sutherlands Edinburgh Ltd
Credit ratings agencies have found themselves in a middle of a bit of controversy recently in relation to the credit crunch that has been affecting the financial markets over the last couple of months. Sutherlands has been set up by a combination of finance sector veterans and top-notch mathematicians to take a new approach to credit rating. Essentially they use a variety of data sources and sophisticated algorithms to provide an on-line rating service which they say is both more timely and impartial than you get from other ratings agencies.
Traak Systems Ltd
RFID is one of those technologies that has, for several years, been due to break through any moment now. Things haven't perhaps moved as quickly as initially expected, but gradually the key components are both coming down in price and going up in scalability and usability, and the potential range of applications is of course vast. Traak is focusing on the issue of how to handle the very large volumes of events that will be generated by some potential RFID applications, such as tracking the location of all the luggage in an airport. Using sophisticated algorithms for filtering and aggregating this data close to the point of collection, the Traak appliance reduces the load on the network and back-end systems.
There were a number of companies that I didn't get a chance to talk to, including the mobile games developers Dot Red Games Ltd and Tag Games Ltd. I did speak to ITI Techmedia, who run an R&D programme funded by the Scottish Government, and currently support several developments relating to games development. The IP from this R&D will be licensed to commercial partners, and I'm looking forward to seeing what interesting companies come out of that initiative. Clearly games development is another area where there is a lot of innovation going on in Scotland!
