Collider Announces Brand Partners

Digital companies in the North West are being called on to apply for funding and mentoring through a startup accelerator programme. Collider, launched by Pembridge Partnership and Creative England and backed by the government's Regional Growth Fund, aims to partner fledgling companies with established brands. Brands taking part include Bauer Media, BBC Worldwide, CBS Outdoor, Unilever and William Hill. The programme provides startups with £100,000 funding in a mix of loan and equity, plus access to mentoring for a year, office space and technology testing facilities.

Jim Farmery, Creative England’s director of  investment, said: "Creative England is delighted to launch Collider and I'm looking forward again to seeing what fascinating technologies and products we see from the teams that take part this year.

"We are leveraging significant private sector investment of £600,000 against our Regional Growth Fund investment of £400,000, and we also looking to create and safeguard almost 70 jobs."

Businesses interested in Collider can attend an event at TechHub Manchester from 6.30pm on 31 October 2013 or apply on F6S.

Moment.Us Teams Up with 7digital to Deliver a Unique Music Experience

7digital provides Moment . Us, a new streaming radio and music discovery app, with over 25 million tracks. The Moment.Us app allows users to discover music using emotions, environments, and experiences to tailor playlists.

7digital, the leading open digital music platform, today announced a partnership with Moment.Us Ltd., making its library of 25 million tracks available via Moment.Us’ streaming radio and music discovery app. The Moment.Us app allows users to discover music in a new way by using emotions, environments and experiences to tailor playlists. Unlike other streaming radio services that only use musicology, the app learns from contextual data such as pictures, locations and weather to personalise music.

“We wanted our app to be as simple as turning on the radio, but smart enough to deliver music that is personalised to what you want to hear, exactly at that moment”, says Andrew Ko, CEO of Moment.Us.  “The Moment.Us app offers a different kind of music discovery experience. The app can visualise how each song has touched the user’s life by capturing their most significant moments with music.  Our aim is to bring playlists to life!”

Ben Drury, CEO of 7digital comments, “We want to work with companies like Moment.Us that concentrate on delivering the best music experience in a creative way. The history of music and radio demonstrates that targeted services for music fans have an important place in the market. The Moment.Us app will offer a new music experience and we are excited that our API and streaming platform is behind this.”

7digital’s feature rich API allows partners a legally licensed offering to choose between a number of software methods and a global catalogue of over 25 million songs from all the major and independent music label distributors and aggregators. The 7digital API already provides digital music services to hundreds of partners globally including Samsung, BlackBerry, Microsoft, HTC, Sonos and now, Moment.Us.

The Moment.Us application is available to download free from the UK iTunes App Store.

Read the press release here. 

Locomizer, a Collider Startup, Featured in the Startups 100 List

Startups.co.uk has today revealed the UK’s 100 most exciting and innovative new businesses that make up the 2013 Startups 100. Launched in 2008, Startups 100 was the first index of its kind – a celebration of the best in new British businesses. Now in its fourth year, the list is Startups.co.uk’s biggest and most popular annual feature, counting down the top 100 start-ups to have launched in the last three years. Entrants are judged by the Startups team against a host of criteria, but primarily for innovation, impressive financials and growth potential.

Included in this list is Locomizer, a Collider12 startup.  Alex Polykov, a co-founder of Locomizer, said that "We are very excited to be part of this year's 100 startup list. There was a rigorous selection process and the fact that we have made the list serves as a perfect validation for locomizer's product vision. There is still some room for improvement and we are determined to move up the ranks next year."

After more than 10 years of scientific research on cell behaviour in nature and humans, Polyakov and Poliakov came up with an idea to invent a new method of audience discovery. Locomizer and the nature-based algorithm behind it is the final product of that idea. Using its specialised algorithm, the company enables businesses to better understand their customer profiles by providing them with accurate user interest profiles generated by the places and surroundings where they spend their time. The concept behind it being that our real-life interests and preferences are a ‘product of our local footprint’. Launched only recently with £150,000 of seed capital from business angels, the company has already signed five major clients to its service and has a series of growth plans in place. Over the next year it’s looking to expand its engineering team which in turn will help develop the scale-up of its commercial infrastructure. It also has strategies in place to execute full-scale launches of its personal location data service with select commercial partners.

Learn more about Locomizer here and read more about Startups 100 here.

Investor Breakfast at Warner Yard

We recently held an Investor Breakfast at Warner Yard, where startups and investor chatted informally while sipping coffee and snacking on bacon sarnies. We were pleased to be able to introduce Beem and Miappi to Russell Buckley from Ball Park Ventures/ UKTI, Federico Pirzio-Biroli from Playfaircapital and Pamir Gelenbe from Hummingbird Ventures. The investors got to try out the technology for themselves, ask the founders any questions, and offer hard-earned advice. One particular theme which came up a few times was the question regarding whether your startup is a vitamin or a painkiller. There has been quite a few articles written around this subject (you can find one here) but it's also good to question your own startup. Are you solving a real problem to a large pain (a painkiller), or are you simply providing a short-term solution (a vitamin)?

We love holding events where we can introduce our tech startups to our wide network of investors. If you want to become a Collider startup and join our accelerator, apply here.

Avocarrot crowned as The Next Big Thing!

This week saw our competition at ad:tech come to a dramatic end where the final 8 startups pitched to a panel of impressive brands. It was a great two days where the startups also had stands which allowed them to chat to the thousands of visitors,  and show off their tech creations. We're also pleased to announce that the judges selected Avocarrot, a Collider12 startup, as the winner! Yep, Avocarrot has now been officially named The Next Big Thing by  Chris Sponiar (Principal at Unilever Ventures), Max Benitz (Principle at Ingenious Ventures), Conrad Poulson (Head of Startup Business at Orange France Telecom) and Anu Shah (Director of Ventures at BBH Global).

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Judges Feedback

All 8 startups were commended for their creative visions of a tech future. Locomizer and MarcaMe both promised interesting things in the mobile space, but questions rose about their ability to get customers to opt-in, while Miappi, LBM and Tamoco all bought visions of the future, questions were raised by the judges how soon they'll be able to succeed in their goals. This left Evrything, PlayCaptcha, and Avocarrot as the final 3.

Evrything is a great idea, especially as the digital-physical space is really hot right now and will most likely be in the future.  However, perhaps more focus is needed which could be controlled by working through some use-cases. Play Captcha have a good concept with real potential to grow past the initial stage offering with a concept that delivers a win for brand and consumer, as well as having an impressive team.  However, they need to keep a close eye on their major US competitor and stay close to developments in the hackerspace who may be able to crack the security on offer.

And finally Avocarot, who were ultimately chosen due to their excellent concept which holds a lot of promise in being able to customise ads towards the app-user. The team are impressive and well-placed to achieve what they have set out to do: revolutionise mobile advertising.  In being crowned ad:tech's Next Big Thing, they have won the opportunity to pilot their technology with Unilever and pitch for investment from Ingenious Ventures and leading creative advertising agency BBH.