Technology

Posted on October 22, 2018 by staff

UK Business Tech Awards: Data Pioneer of the Year

Technology

BusinessCloud’s inaugural UK Business Tech Awards are set for November and will recognise the individuals and businesses who are making the biggest impact in the world of technology.

Each day for a fortnight we are highlighting a different category ahead of a glitzy ceremony at London’s Montcalm Marble Arch on November 20.

There will be 18 gongs up for grabs and Data Pioneer of the Year is the first to fall under the spotlight, with six companies shortlisted by our stellar line-up of judges: Citi Logik, Fanfinders Ltd, GeoSpock, GlowMetrics, Peak and The Lead Agency (TLA).

We profile each of them below. Tickets are available at the Business Tech Awards website while sponsors confirmed so far include Jumpstart and Touchscreen Rentals.

Anyone interested in sponsorship opportunities should contact [email protected].

The judging panel includes David Hardman, MBE, managing director of Innovation Birmingham; Louize Clarke, co-founder, ConnectTVT, Elizabeth Clark, CEO, Dream Agility; former director of Tech North Richard Gregory; Tom Cheesewright, founder of Applied Futurism Practice; former Vodafone exec Rob Mukherjee, director of Greater Sport; Chris Dymond, director, Sheffield Digital; and Scott Henderson, managing director of Jumpstart, among others.

DATA PIONEER OF THE YEAR SHORTLIST

Citi Logik

Citi Logik was established in 2011 to understand movement by vehicle, on foot and by public transport. Now an SME achieving £1.5m turnover, it is based in the Future Cities Catapult at the Urban Innovation Centre in London and recently opened offices in Leeds.

Recognized by Innovate UK as having high growth potential, it is the first company to achieve long-term funding from the newly established Innovate UK loan scheme.

The firm secured three Innovate R&D projects in 2017: First of a Kind winner to development real time predictive analytics for UK cities, which is now deployed in a Northern city; real time monitoring of passenger loading on the rail network, without the need for physical infrastructure; and pollution monitoring of cities linked to the real-time monitoring of road congestion.

The company has travelled extensively on UK Trade missions to Scandinavia, Ireland, Kuwait, Singapore and Australia.

Fanfinders Ltd

Fanfinders connects consumers in the UK and US with relevant brands via its Your Baby Club, currently the UK’s fastest growing mums community, and Your Beauty Club.

The company values members’ privacy highly: it requires first-party consent for all connections and refuses to sell data. People choose who they want to speak with in exchange for value offered to them by brands.

Your Baby Club is accumulating 45,000 new members in the US per month after launching this year and has won UK awards for Your Beauty Club.

The Fanfinders platform offers an end-to-end service to big clients including Asda, Danone and L’Oreal – from concept through to implementation to analytics.

GeoSpock

GeoSpock seeks to democratise access to Big Data and become the de-facto processing engine at the heart of next-generation smart infrastructure.

Deriving meaningful insights from data is a vital part of any business but working with extreme amounts of geospatial and temporal data is difficult to manage – which is why GeoSpock developed its Location Intelligence as a Service (LIaaS) showcase.

This gives clients the opportunity to experience analytics in terms of real-world examples such as audience profiling around supermarket store locations. Approximately 40 companies have been accepted to use the showcase to date.

GeoSpock has raised more than £9m in funding.

GlowMetrics

GlowMetrics is an award-winning digital analytics agency which specialises in helping businesses use data to inform and optimise performance.

Operating from offices in Belfast and Dublin – to support clients on both sides of the Irish border amid the uncertainty over Brexit – GlowMetrics offers a range of digital analytics services including web analytics, tag management and reporting.

It helped nijobfinder, Northern Ireland’s leading job website, increase its applications by 20 per cent year-on-year while offering it a full 360 holistic view of all user behaviour from viewing a job listing through to the completed submission.

The firm is growing through constant upskilling, training, accreditation and adapting to change in the industry. In the last year it achieved a 71 per cent uplift in sales and 3.5x higher net profit.

Peak

Peak is on a mission to enable businesses to ‘do great things with data’ and artificial intelligence.

Its Artificial Intelligence System is disrupting the data industry’s status quo by moving away from the traditional consultancy business model, allowing businesses to bring AI capability into the heart of their operations quickly and effectively.

Over the past four years the firm has scaled from a team of three to 57, with plans to take that to 100 in the next 12 months as it plans to build up its presence in the US market.

It has raised £5 million investment to date, and in the first five months of 2018, monthly recurring revenues doubled, breaking through the £100k mark. It now counts the likes of Footasylum, Speedy and ASOS amongst its customer base.

The Lead Agency (TLA)

The Lead Agency is a technology business that helps companies acquire new customers using proprietary lead technology, owned-digital assets and a growing network of premium publishers.

It has operated in the automotive sector for more than 16 years, supporting the likes of BMW, VW Group and Mercedes-Benz, and expanded into property in 2017. Its work on GDPR compliance saw it acquire Ford as a customer.

TLA was named as one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the north, the UK and Europe after inclusion in Tech Nation’s Northern Tech 100, The Sunday Times’ Tech Track 100 and Financial Times’ FT1000 lists.

It has £8m turnover and employs around 100 people.