Last week I attended a Show and Tell session, featuring three innovative, venture-backed startup companies at our office in London’s West End, and must admit that I came away with the distinct feeling that any economic recovery in the UK, and elsewhere, will likely be fueled by relentless innovation and entrepreneurship from startups like these. The three companies, all portfolio clients of Ariadne Capital, gave a lightening talk and overview of their innovative products, services and customer propositions; after which they faced a nerve-wracking barrage of questions from the small internal audience of Capgemini consultants, (including UK CTO, David Pepperell), not unlike TV’s The Apprentice. The startups that presented include:
- Near Global – This company has created a platform that can be used to build “high fidelity 3D replicas of real cities”, and co-founder Alex Wrottesley, demonstrated how this could have a great many applications in such fields as: retail, civil engineering, games, real estate and
- YuuGuu – This is a “SaaS based company that enables secure instant collaboration in real-time”, and which aims to become "the salesforce.com of web conferencing". Based on, unified communication and the ability to offer ubiquitous connectivity to anyone, anytime, anywhere and on any device, YuuGuu has something to offer most enterprises
- Bview – This company claims to have a “Multi-award winning service that is creating the world’s most effective local advertising network”. Their key value proposition: a localised cross-platform (i.e. web / Mobile) advertising platform with great benefits for publishers, advertisers and consumers.
Overall, I thought this was a most interesting and informative session, with great potential to become a regular recurring event or theme, particularly now that startups / investors / established companies (and even consultancies like Capgemini), would be wise to explore new ways in which to engage an increasingly dynamic and innovative “post-crises” ecosystem. With that in mind, it’s probably fair to say that economic recovery is already well under way for the bold. However, this is not a wake up call; the startup innovations race, possibly fueled by a glut in highly skilled but out-of-work talent, means that any organisation which recognises and engages early enough with such innovative startups will stand to reap rewards, during another surge in lucrative IPOs (but hopefully without the “irrational exuberance” of the recent past). Jude Umeh is a senior consultant and enterprise architect, and you can follow him on Twitter or connect via LinkedIn
