Sirius Winners - First Edition

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UKTI Global Graduate Entrepreneurs Programme

Sirius ProgrammeWinners

UK Trade & Investment’s Sirius Programme is helping some of the world’s most exciting young entrepreneurs realise their dreams and build global businesses from the UK.

Driven by the objectives outlined in the 2012 Autumn Statement, Sirius aims to attract talented international graduates with new ideas to the UK, helping them to set up successful companies and bring innovation to the British economy. Recent research has highlighted the widespread economic benefits that can be generated by attracting global entrepreneurs to the UK.

During the first Sirius competition, over 1,500 gifted and ambitious individuals from 93 countries applied to the programme. Of these, 150 winners were selected, the majority of which have already relocated to cities around the UK, taking advantage of the country’s world-class business ecosystem. Through Sirius’s comprehensive package of support, which includes funding and a place on a leading UK accelerator, they have embarked on the first steps of a very exciting journey.

This brochure contains details of the teams who have started the programme to date; a few more are due to land in the next months. Please visit www.siriusprogramme.com for further information.

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UKTI Global Graduate Entrepreneurs Programme

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Adverdosewww.adverdose.co.uk

Reinventing digital advertising Adverdose is a user-generated content (UGC) platform, built on a mobile app and a website, which gathers video advertising contests issued by different brands.

The idea behind Adverdose is to make online advertising engaging by involving people in the brand communication. To do so, the company’s team designs and promotes creative competitions to which everyone can participate by making short videos with the Adverdose mobile app.

On Adverdose, the users select the winner by voting for their favourite contents and get branded rewards for all their actions (voting/uploading), giving them a new and unique advertising experience.

The Team

Paolo la Paglia Mario Dughi

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Audazzlewww.audazzle.com

The Team

Marie Lloyd Selwyn Lloyd Barbara Verardo Anarika Didigova

Developing innovative gaming solutions

AUDAZZLE creates specialised gaming solutions for visually impaired (VI) and blind individuals, that are appealing for the sighted population as well. Most of the existing electronic games for VI people are audio-only and do not allow interaction between VI and non-VI gamers.

AUDAZZLE uses novel 3D audio/video technologies, currently underutilised in the video-gaming industry, to create a level playing field, allowing sighted and VI/blind gamers to play together and compete on an equal footing.

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bio-beanwww.bio-bean.com

The Team

Arthur KayEleanor JeffreyEmily Norris Benjamin Harriman

Turning coffee into biofuel bio-bean is an award-winning green energy company that collects waste coffee grounds from in and around London, and converts them into carbon-neutral advanced biofuels.

London’s coffee shops and instant coffee factories produce over 200,000 tonnes of coffee waste every year. Typically, this waste is incinerated, sent to anaerobic digestion plants or disposed of in landfill, releasing harmful greenhouse gases and contributing to the UK’s waste crisis.

bio-bean uses a sophisticated coffee waste recycling infrastructure to collect this waste, transport it to the company’s local processing plant and then, by using an innovative, patented technique, process it into two advanced biofuel products, namely biomass pellets and biodiesel. Once this is done, bio-bean sells the 100 per cent carbon-neutral biofuels to London’s businesses, where they are used for powering buildings and transport.

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Bliivewww.bliive.com

Exchanging time for money Believing that everyone has a talent, skill or knowledge to share, Bliive is using these assets to create a unique online collaborative economy that uses time as currency.

If you speak Spanish, for example, you could offer an hour of Spanish classes and receive a monetary credit in return. This can then be spent on any other experience available on the Bliive platform, such as cookery lessons or having someone to walk your dog.

Thanks to Bliive, anyone with a little time to spare can experience new things, meet people and make their dreams come true – regardless of how much money they have in their bank account.

The Team

Lorrana Scarpioni Murilo Mafra Jose Henrique Fernandes (ineligible) Ana Beatriz Schwanck Fernandes

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Blushr/welove.blushr.co/

Helping teenagers date with confidence

Blushr is the only smartphone app that helps teenagers discover if their high-school crush also has a crush on them. It aims to tackle the age-old problem experienced by youth around the world: the fear of rejection when wanting to ask someone you really like out on a date.

Blushr is a perfect solution for shy teens who can anonymously find out if they have a chance of going out with their crush without having to expose themselves to possible awkward moments. With more and more relationships and friendships set to be formed online in the near future than ever before, Blushr aims to become one of the most important startups contributing to this change.

The app works in a very clever and simple way. Firstly, you connect with Facebook and all your friends appear on the screen. You then select your crush anonymously. If the person you have chosen also selects you as his/her crush, you both get a message stating that you like each other. You can then chat and the rest is up to you!

The Team

Sebastian Maraloiu Luana Lavinia Sandache Manuel Dimitri Boca

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Bracibraci.co

Alerting consumers to useful sounds Braci has developed a wireless and unique application that can recognise multiple sounds from our daily lives, showing a picture of the sound on either your smartphone or smartwatch, or alternatively vibrating or flashing. The app is able to identify sounds such as fire alarms, doorbells, phones, car horns and crying babies, giving consumers an efficient and fast way of being notified of a range of potentially urgent situations.

The Team

Anwar Almorjarkesh Amr Mohmad Wanly Juma El-Awaisi

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BrandProxbrandprox.com

Providing state-of-the-art advertising solutions

It provides brands with a solution to incorporate their logo at the heart of users’ social-media presence – their profile pictures – converting their loyal fans to brand ambassadors. In return, users are given attractive rewards by the brands they admire. A user-friendly campaign setup and real-time monitoring makes BrandProx an easy-to-use platform for marketing professionals as well as small and medium-sized businesses, delivering valuable insights about their customers to their brand.

The Team

Poya Jahan Khah Alexander Meyer-Scharenberg Talha Rehman Alok Matta

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CADBEAMwww.cadbeam.com

Bringing innovative technologies to the construction industry

CADBEAM is a cutting-edge web and mobile application for construction management, designed to improve on-site collaboration and performance. Accessible everywhere thanks to tablets and smartphones, CADBEAM allows construction staff to view in real time what is going on in their building site in order to bring on-site co-ordination to a new level.

On construction sites, trades such as electricity, plumbing, HVAC and structure are dependent on each other. If a company is late, then it impacts all the others in a domino effect. This can lead to severe delays and penalties.

With CADBEAM, contractors and subcontractors are now able to process huge amounts of data directly on their mobile devices, reducing rework, costs and delays. They can share information about their work – such as technical documents, encountered obstacles, holes and task progression – by adding it directly onto the floor plans. CADBEAM enables contractors to measure their performance accurately, identify obstacles quickly and reduce paperwork significantly.

The Team

Laurent Biancardini Alexandre Spieser

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Carbon Analyticswww.co2analytics.com

Simplifying carbon management Carbon Analytics provides an online platform that makes it simple for businesses to measure their carbon footprint and find ways to reduce it throughout their supply chain.

By analysing basic financial data, it produces a map of a company’s supply chain that shows them where their carbon footprint is coming from. The analysis of basic financial data. The Carbon Analytics system then facilitates the collection of more detailed information from a firm’s suppliers, and recommends the most cost-effective initiatives for reducing their carbon footprint.

This allows companies to minimise their exposure to fluctuating energy prices and increasing carbon legislation, prove their green credentials to their customers and create quick wins for the climate.

The Team

Colin MacLaughlin Greg FitzGerald Michael Thornton James Tilbury

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Caribuwww.caribuapp.com

Bringing families together through technology

Caribu is an innovative new iPad app that allows families to read a bedtime story together, even when they’re apart. By integrating picture books into a simple, child-friendly video calling platform, Caribu creates long-lasting and rich communication experiences for families who need to spend time apart, with customers including grandparents, working parents, expats and soldiers.

As a result of divorce, travel and longer working hours, families are increasingly spending less time together. Caribu’s free app brings families together through innovation and allows them to share important moments in their days, like bedtime stories – wherever they are in the world.

The Team

Ben Mallet Philip Linneman Alvaro Sabido Saayuj Dhanak

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ChiJen Brush Spa

Cleaning up cosmetics The Chijen Brush Spa is an automated make-up brush cleaner which provides a time-saving way to clean, dry and disinfect professional and non-professional make-up brushes.

Make-up brushes should be cleaned on a weekly basis as they harbour bacteria and can cause irritation and spots, but the manual cleaning process is lengthy. The ChiJen Brush Spa provides an automated solution to this problem and aims to revolutionise the work of professional make-up artists and everyday consumers alike, transforming the standards of hygiene in their cosmetics bags.

The Team

Jennifer Chizua

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City Air

Enhancing urban air quality City Air is an air quality monitoring solution aimed at cities, which offers higher geographical coverage and sampling frequency.

Air pollution in urban areas is increasing and represents a global concern, affecting the quality of life and health. According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is the world’s biggest health risk, with links to allergies, premature births, lung cancer, asthma attacks, inflammation, myocardial infarctions and bronchial hyper-reactivity. It generates hundreds of billions of euros in extra health costs for the EU alone every year.

Air quality monitoring can help to address this. Existing solutions consist in having a few static stations that offer only an approximate picture of air pollution in a large area such as a city. By mounting mobile air quality sensors on public transport vehicles, City Air’s system is able to show the status of air pollutants at the street level, and to collect and display this data close to real time.

EU regulations demand strict air quality standards. Current static monitoring stations that are used for compliance have poor geographical coverage and are expensive. The locations for these stations are chosen following a screening process using diffusion tubes which can only offer a monthly average, at a handful of specific locations. The screening data presented to city officials is not shown in a human digestible way and there is a significant time delay between capturing the air quality data and making it available.

City Air’s proposed solution uses a number of mobile sensors to obtain the desired spatio-temporal resolution and is based on state-of-the-art research. The company is also focusing on improving the ways the data is analysed and visualised.

The Team

Alexandra Ionita Ion Emillan Radoi Cosmin Dumitrache

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Deal Globewww.dealglobe.com

Building business relationships DealGlobe is an online private company database and business matchmaking platform offering investment and partnership opportunities for private firms and investors. The platform provides its members with exclusive access to live deal opportunities uploaded by other users and identifies unsolicited deal leads based on complex data analyses. Members are entitled to view comprehensive business information and market intelligence reports provided by third-party data partners or generated by the users. Members are only introduced to each other when there is a deal match.

The application aggregates data from a variety of sources using different structures, all combined in one easy-to-use and high-performing interface.

The Team

Lin Feng Zhouze Wu Cindy Ma Qing Yao

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EduKitwww.edukit.org.uk

Raising the attainment of disadvantaged students

EduKit is an innovative service seeking to change the lives of thousands of disadvantaged students in the UK through an online platform that matches young people with programmes run by charities and social enterprises that offer specialist educational and personal development.

Tens of thousands of these programmes exist in the UK, but there is currently no platform that links schools and students with the vast array of services available, meaning that many young people are missing out. EduKit will act as the missing link in this system, enabling teachers to quickly and easily find quality programmes that will best meet their students’ varied and complex needs. This will serve to improve the lives of young people from low-income backgrounds, helping them to achieve their academic and career potential.

The Team

Nathalie Richards Richard Blissett Christian Shaw Zhendan Wang

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FinGeniuswww.fingenius.com

Supplying artificial intelligence to the finance industry

FinGenius offers a bank-grade platform that combines artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural-language processing and human-like reasoning to simplify interaction with complex data for banks and insurance companies. This technology enables financial organisations to answer millions of questions from customers and employees instantly, without employing help desks or call centres.

The FinGenius system is designed to understand natural-language questions and deliver natural-language answers based on any information which is stored in an organisation. The company, which is currently working with the 12 largest banks in the world, envisions that every employee, no matter what their level of expertise, can ask any question in plain, conversational language and get the right information delivered to them, regardless of its complexity.

The Team

Dmitry Aksenov Mahyar Bordbar Timur Bekenov

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Footy for Foodwww.footyforfood.com

Using sport to alleviate hunger Footy for Food is a new model for philanthropy, using sport as a vehicle for social change to tackle hunger by raising food, funds and awareness for local food banks.

It hosts flashmob-style sporting events where people are able to participate by making a donation to a local food bank. The initiative has already enjoyed success in Canada, where hockey games have raised 532,000lbs of food over the past three years.

The Team

Richard Loat

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Fresh4cast.comwww.fresh4cast.com

Facilitating fruit trading Fresh4cast.com is a next-generation market data service designed to help international traders of fresh fruits improve their market and promotion planning.

Fresh fruits are perishable, prices volatile and international shipments take weeks to arrive. Fresh4cast.com provides growers and distributors with a short-term forecast of the aggregate supply and demand by destination.

Today, growers and distributors only have access to a limited number of reports, most of which are fragmented and incomplete. Fresh4cast.com makes their decision-making faster and more reliable, by providing aggregate supply-and-demand forecasts in different markets.

The Team

Francisco Teixera Mihai Ciobanu

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Funrydewww.funryde.com

Revolutionising ridesharing Funryde’s mobile platform seeks to modernise car-pooling, matching up, on demand and in real time, ad-hoc riders who want to go somewhere, with everyday drivers who are willing to pick them up along their way. Once a match is made, the riders can sit and watch as their pickups approach on the screen. Upon reaching their destination, they pay through the app and the transaction is concluded.

Funryde fills an important gap in transport options, offering everyday drivers the potential to offset their vehicle costs, while offering riders affordability and an interesting social experience. It is more affordable than taxis and minicabs, and much more comfortable and faster than trains and buses. Furthermore, Funryde’s technology allows it to cater for short-distance rides, previously uncovered by traditional ridesharing services. Rigorous safety checks via third-party ID verification ensure the safety of the service, while built-in social functionality allows the public to rate their journeys and pair up with fellow travellers of similar interests.

The environmental benefits of car-sharing are well understood, utilising unused vehicle space to reduce carbon emissions while simultaneously taking the strain off public transport networks. Funryde’s model is based on offering greater flexibility and security on the go to make these benefits a reality.

The Team

Ammar Halabi Bassem Barake Astrid de Dampierre

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iGBLwww.igbl.co.uk

Improving the business education experience

iGBL has developed an interactive game-based learning platform which helps teachers and lecturers of business-related subjects engage with their students and thus boost learning outcomes.

Through the platform, business instructors can obtain useful tools to carry out interactive in-class experiments and simulations to vividly illustrate abstract concepts and ideas which can often be hard for students to grasp by merely listening to lectures or reading books. The tools and games can be quickly set up to enable instructors to bring their lessons to life, and gather learning analytics which can aid the understanding of progress in real time.

The Team

Shubham Anand Charlton Mak Victor Repetsky

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Innotech Summitwww.innotechsummit.com

Supporting technology growth Innotech Summit is the only event to bridge the gap between entrepreneurs, investors and policy-makers in order to stimulate the growth of tech clusters around the world. It attracts the brightest industry leaders, showcases the very best in tech innovation, inspires change and encourages investment.

The Team

Jennifer Arcuri Ghandi El Chamaa

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MAD Foundrywww.madfoundry.com

Supporting the next generation of creative professionals

MAD Foundry is a student-powered creative agency which aims to help young graduates develop their employability skills for work in the creative industries. It supports emerging brands that need cost-effective access to creative talent, as well as established brands that need help intuitively marketing to young, 21st-century consumers.

The Team

Jamal MonDésir Adam Holcroft

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Oxiway Limitedwww.oxiway.com

Revolutionising recruitment MeVitae is a smart personalised recruitment system, focused on saving millions of pounds wasted globally due to bad hiring. The current recruitment industry is a goldmine of inefficiency as a result of the exponentially increasing volumes of digital applications; leaving the recruiter with just 6 seconds to analyse a candidate application. This everyday compounding problem requires an extraordinary solution – a sixth sense!

MeVitae is a recruiter’s sixth sense that uses a niche of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition to powerfully automate the candidate short-listing process and learn recruitment patterns to foster intelligent decision-making in candidate hiring.

Three Oxford graduates are behind MeVitae with strong advisory board members from the University of Oxford and Microsoft UK HQ. The team is a proud Micrsoft BizSpark Company, recent graduate of Isis Innovation, University of Oxford, and is the first ever UK AppCampus winner.

The Team

Riham Satti Vivek Doraiswamy Anu Mahajan

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PhotoPitchwww.photopitch.me

Revolutionising photo-buying PhotoPitch enables photo-buyers to receive tailored images from talented photographers around the world.

Photo-buyers waste vast resources trawling photo stocks to find the image they require for social-media content and advertising campaigns. As hiring a photographer is often outside the budget, this tends to result in compromising on an insufficient image. PhotoPitch aims to rectify this by eliminating the need for a buyer to search; instead, the bespoke photo is brought directly to them.

Through PhotoPitch’s intuitive online platform, photo-buyers describe the image they need and registered photographers then meet the brief with existing images in their archives or by shooting a matching photo. The buyer then selects their favourite and the winning photographer is rewarded. In this way, buyers can essentially design their own photo and be sure of meeting their budget and deadline.

The Team

Jens Axel So Linisha Palm Mikkel Lønow

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RealTag

Tackling brand counterfeiting RealTag is a new trend in anti-counterfeiting technologies and brand protection, giving consumers the power through their smartphone to check if a product is real.

Counterfeiting of branded products is a huge worldwide problem for brand owners. Counterfeiters are driven by quick profits and don’t care if their fake products meet safety standards or quality controls. The International Chamber of Commerce estimates that counterfeiting costs the world in the region of $600 billion per year.

Using the power of the mobile phone as a verification tool, RealTag provides brands with an unbreakable encryption process to instantly verify whether a branded good is genuine. The RealTag can be applied to the brand’s packaging or even onto the branded product itself. By raising the barriers of entry to counterfeiters, RealTag disrupts the fake market while helping to protect the brand.

An additional benefit that is once the consumer has checked the RealTag the brand owner can receive real-time information on when and where the product was sold – invaluable data analytics for marketing and sales departments.

The Team

David McGee Amit Pate Vu Thien Phong Volha Paulovich

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Rentez-Vouswww.rentez-vous.fr/en

Making women’s fashion more accessible

Rentez-Vous is the first peer-to-peer and designers’ fashion rental marketplace that allows women to rent clothes from one another, but also rent designer creations for a short period and for a fraction of the price.

The concept is driven by the understanding that women don’t always have enough spare income to buy into all trends, but are always looking for alternative ways to access fashion easily.

Following successful Rentez-Vous events in both London and Paris, the company is now scaling the concept through an online and mobile marketplace.

The Team

Fiona Disegni Lesley Zhang Anis Bouraba

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RingCaptchawww.ringcaptcha.com

Revolutionising mobile phone verification

RingCaptcha is a plug and play, hassle-free phone verification service for companies developing web and mobile apps.

With the steady increase in online activities on mobile devices, and mobile numbers becoming used as a unique ID, there is a growing need for internet services to provide security and trust for both users and the services that they consume by limiting the potential for fraud. However, until RingCaptcha came along, no easy-to-use phone verification service existed for mobile app and web developers.

Now companies only have to add a few lines of code to their site or program and RingCaptcha automatically integrates phone verification security into their product. The service contacts customers who try to create new accounts or sign in from unfamiliar locations by phone and, by providing them with specific verification codes, confirms that a user’s phone number is both real and their own. This helps to keep out spambots or any fake accounts that people create for illegal or questionable means, providing added security.

The Team

Mariano Fernandez Nico Messina Martin Cocaro

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SaveSquaredwww.savesquared.com

Bringing power to the people SaveSquared is a new portable mobile phone battery-sharing service which aims to ensure people never run out of power.

It was borne out of the current crisis in smartphone battery performance – with many models unable to provide a full 12-hour charge when apps are in constant use.

While portable charging stations already exist in shopping centres and airports, their static nature means users have to stay in the charger’s vicinity.

SaveSquared is the first portable power network that allows users to continue with their day-to-day activities. Users in need of a last-minute charge can, for a small fee, rent a battery from a registered store (whose locations can be searched for through an app), and return it to a location of their convenience.

The Team

Carlo De Micheli Stefano Caso Edwin Openda Pier Costa

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Sliidewww.sliideapp.com

Enhancing mobile marketing Sliide is a smartphone application that allows users to get paid for doing something they do everyday – unlocking their smartphone. Sliide can do this because it distributes brands’ content relevant to its users, and shares the advertising value with them.

Tired of endless advertising they didn’t care about, and seeing the rise of the smartphone, the Sliide team has set out to resolve the fundamental problems currently facing the mobile marketing industry: irrelevant content, ugly in-app banner ads and interrupted user experiences.

The application asks you to complete a basic profile. Sliide then uses the whole lock screen to provide users with striking content and gives them the choice to either unlock their phone as normal or find out more.

Sliide aims to be a win-win solution to mobile marketing; with users being financially rewarded to be informed about things they love, and brands reaching the people that care about their product.

The Team

Frankie Kearney Corbyn Munnik

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Smash-a-Ballwww.smashaball.com

Helping visually impaired children improve their lives

Smash-a-Ball develops and creates interactive toys for young children and teenagers that are visually impaired. As well as providing entertainment, these toys help to enhance skills such as memory, body and spatial knowledge and reaction speed that will enable such youngsters to build their self-esteem, become more independent and enjoy a better quality of life.

Visual impairment is a significant global problem. More than 45 million people around the world are completely blind and almost half a million children are either born, or become, blind each year. By providing specially designed educational and therapeutic toys and games, Smash-a-Ball aims to widen their options to have fun and play – whilst at the same time improving their cognitive abilities.

The Team

Brayan Villalobos Hernandez Pedro Bori Nadhia Guevara Reyes

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Spadia Engineeringwww.spadia-eng.com

Helping physically challenged individuals adapt to their environment

Spadia Engineering develops innovative and low-cost hand prostheses that are controlled via muscle activity using non-invasive technology.

Nowadays, prostheses and health gadgets in the third world and developing countries are virtually inaccessible. Over-priced products and long wait periods are some of the problems that each patient has to face in order to receive the aid they need.

Seeking to address this problem, Spadia Engineering has developed an algorithm to detect muscle activity through the analysis of electromiographic signals. This algorithm is capable of running in low-cost microcontrollers and adapts to each particular patient and muscle. Together with additive manufacturing, such as 3D-printing, Spadia Engineering then creates affordable, elegant and sophisticated myoelectric prostheses that can be delivered to the patient in a short period of time.

The Team

Adrian Gil Eduardo Lopez Arce Vivas

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SunEoswww.suneos.co.uk

Transforming the event experience SunEos is a revolutionary new system for managing student events and social nights. Using a contactless technology similar to London’s Oyster and Hong Kong’s Octopus transport cards, SunEos incorporates a touch-pay system into pre-programmed wristbands for use at events. The result is a safe, fast payment system for everything from food and drink to merchandise, and the elimination of the need for lengthy queues – meaning that the consumer can relax and just concentrate on having a great time.

Afterwards, organisers are able to use data collected by the wristbands to analyse overall sales and consumption at the event, informing them about purchasing habits and enabling them to tailor their offer for the future. The technology makes running events much more efficient, limiting the numbers of staff needed, cutting out queues which can lead to loss of sales and removing the inefficiencies that stem from handling cash.

The Team

Henry de Bennetot Alexis Garavel

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Technobratzwww.technobratz.com

Supporting the medical community Technobratz develops multi-purpose mobile applications which can be used by medical professionals and students alike. The cost-effective applications help users make fast calculations, suggest courses of treatment, maintain their records and enhance their overall proficiency and reliability.

The Team

Sanjyot Singh Yash Mavlankar Devendra Jain

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Teech.iowww.teech.io

Supporting the development of educational technology

Teech.io is an innovative service which helps companies build educational applications for web and mobile – an increasingly lucrative sector. It offers a set of tools that lets software developers and providers reduce the costs and set up of maintaining a structure for their apps and shorten the time-to-market of their products.

In the next two to three years, the Teech.io team aims to power at least 100,000 educational apps within mobile app stores, as well as having a small number of bit enterprise companies using its platform.

The Team

Lorenzo Bruno Giuseppe Labanca Paolo Santoro

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Three Over Seven www.3over7.com

Improving the comfort of sports shoes

Three Over Seven is an activewear company that aims to create comfortable, custom-fit shoes for the ‘everyday athlete’.

Through its development of a proprietary fabric called Fitwool, Three Over Seven has manufactured the world’s first-ever woollen performance running shoe – the Wool Runner. This is a truly unique trainer specifically designed for sockless wear with no internal seams, providing an unparalleled level of comfort and performance, as well as no odour. The idea behind Wool Runners is that they are as comfortable with a pair of jeans as they are in the gym – something which is hard to find in today’s market.

Three Over Seven’s next product is a custom-fit shoe with a 3D-printed sole that uses a mobile app for the sizing.

The Team

Tim Brown Jonathon Spanos Nicholas Couch Earl Stewart

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TipTappedwww.tiptapped.com

Analysing sports predictions TipTapped identifies and analyses sports predictions made online, offering novel insights in real time to individuals and corporate clients.

It takes the huge volume of unstructured chatter about sports on social-media channels, and extracts meaningful information about what the ‘crowd’ thinks about upcoming events, making these insights available through both a public-facing web interface, and a data stream for business customers. It minimises noise by amplifying the voice of individuals with stronger track records.

TipTapped’s likely target market is individuals looking for betting tips and live social-media powered entertainment around sporting matches, as well as larger clients such as online bookmakers seeking to target individuals with live, tailored betting odds or offers.

The Team

James Harwood Thomas Grujic

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Towoglowww.towoglo.com

Supporting the freelancing revolution Towoglo is an online work platform with the mission of bringing the best pool of international talents and consultative skills straight to the doors of UK small and medium-sized businesses and start-ups, but with a clear long-term vision of going global.

It is driven by the boom in the so-called ‘freelance economy’, with fundamental leaps in technology, demographics and economics driving a powerful shift in how, when, where and why we work. Towoglo believes that by 2025 half the working population of the major Western economies will be self-employed.

The innovative Towoglo platform will put British SMEs and global freelancers in touch with each other, creating a unique online talent marketplace.

The Team

Domenico Cirillo Mohsin Ali Shreyas Joshi Shivaraman Aiyer

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V1 Avionicswww.v1avionics.com

Exploring new concepts in avionics engineering

V1 Avionics design and develops safety-critical hardware and software for avionics and aerospace electronics. It also offers avionics systems engineering services for flight simulation and avionics maintenance companies.

The Team

Javier Perez-Mato Himar Alonso-Díaz

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Wallet Circlewww.walletcircle.com

Helping retailers connect with customers

Wallet Circle provides marketing and intelligent tools which enable retailers to engage smartly with their customers, thus improving their competitiveness.

It has developed a unique technology which it can integrate with any Point Of Sale (POS) software and connect it to the cloud servers. This enables Wallet Circle to provide various omni-channel commerce features to retailers not provided by their current POS.

Using Wallet Circle’s products, retailers can offer a seamless experience to their customers across online and offline channels, as well as gain in-depth customer insights to facilitate decision-making.

The Team

Neetesh Gupta Neha Jainve Manas Abichandani

41

Whichitwww.getwhichit.com

Supporting consumers in their purchasing decisions

Whichit is a mobile social voting and polling app that allows users to share their options with friends via social networks and to quickly get their input and opinions, helping consumers source everything from buying a pair of shoes to deciding which hairstyle to have.

The way people decide what to buy is changing, depending more and more on social sharing and recommendations from people whose taste they trust, and less on conventional advertising. This means that consumers and buyers have the ability to personalise the online and mobile experience, and they are increasingly doing so.

Capitalising on this trend, the Whichit app enables a consumer to quickly and easily create up to four snapshots of possible purchases. They can then share these with the online community, send them to social networks, or even ask friends and contacts privately, asking for their opinion on each item.

On the business side, Whichit is working on its special and unique platform for advertising and retail companies, providing business access to their potential clients at the decision point – after they have received their friends’ opinion on future purchases. Upon request, users can get customised and timely proposals from relevant sellers/businesses, while marketers can gain powerful insights to drive social engagement and conversion rates.

The Team

Jonathan Gan Galit Gan Oded Klein Yarden Jacobseon

42

Wibbuwww.wibbu.com

Helping Spanish speakers learn English

Wibbu is an English language-learning application for smartphones and tablets that is specifically designed for native Spanish speakers in Spain and Latin America. At the heart of the app, which is full of interactive game-like exercises, is a focus on the common mistakes that Spanish speakers make and the difficulties they face when learning English.

The problem which drives Wibbu’s uniqueness is the fact that non-native speakers all speak English totally differently and make different mistakes when doing so because of the variations between the structures of their mother tongues. The problem is that no language courses ever address this issue; they simply provide a standardised generic way of teaching English.

Wibbu’s solution is to create something far more accessible and engaging that confronts and solves the problems that Spanish speakers uniquely face. Focusing on listening skills to ensure users don’t have to just laugh and smile when being spoken to, Wibbu is the perfect language-learning app.

The Team

Benjamin Romero Santama Dean Jacobs Liam McGinley Jonay Saurez

43

Zipcubewww.zipcube.com

Venue-booking made easy Zipcube is an online marketplace for meeting rooms, work spaces and event venues.

In order to maximise their productivity, companies need the best space in which to work or meet and don’t want to spend hours searching for somewhere that is available. Zipcube offers a simple website and booking process whereby users select a location, choose the space that best meets their needs, schedule a date and time and then hit ‘reserve’.

An idea born in the US, where this type of venue-booking system has proven highly successful, Zipcube is the first site of its kind to target the European business market.

The Team

David Hellard Guillaume Santacruz Hekla Goodman