BusinessCloud’s inaugural UK Business Tech Awards are set for November and will recognise the individuals and businesses who are making the most impact in the world of technology.
Every day 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 including Tech Company of the Year (small), with eight finalists shortlisted by our stellar line-up of judges.
We profile them below. Tickets are available at the Business Tech Awards website.
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The judging panel included 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.
TECH COMPANY OF THE YEAR – SMALL SHORTLIST
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.
An all-in-one environmental monitoring system which allows clients to monitor, store and analyse their business-critical environmental data with cloud-based software from anywhere in the world.
The Hark Platform allows users to access information on their labs, supermarkets, factories, production or storage facilities in real-time. Customers are able to manage and organise sensors across multiple facilities and regions with a central, streamlined interface with global connectivity.
The Hark Platform has the potential to make a huge impact in a variety of ways, from bringing down operational and utility costs to streamlining processes and ultimately lowering the carbon footprint of any company. Bringing numerous industries into the smart era and introducing IoT to various sectors will completely revolutionise how business critical information is stored and analysed.
The machine learning element of the Hark offering proactively indicates any future failures with any system to which it is connected, meaning companies can fix potential issues before they happen.
Housekeep is disrupting the fragmented £4 billion home cleaning market with an online marketplace that connects consumers with cleaners. It makes it easier for consumers to find a great cleaner in their area and enables cleaners to be more productive and increase their earnings.
Starting with a handful of customers and one cleaner, it has since scaled to more than 40,000 customers and over 1,000 cleaners (or Housekeepers) on the platform. It is now the UK’s leading home cleaning service, with over 90,000 5* customer reviews and an average rating of 4.8.
Its ‘mobile-first’ approach helps Housekeepers do everything they need within their apps to manage their schedules and jobs.
Now employing more than 30 people, the firm’s projected turnover for 2018 is £13-14m. It now plans to expand geographically beyond its core London market.
ISAAC creates digital workplaces that manage everything from processes to people. Its human-centric applications are customised to suit clients’ businesses, workflows and processes.
ISAAC has brought the process automation and collaborative features of Microsoft SharePoint to a far wider audience, combining the might of the Microsoft cloud with the innovation and dynamism of a smaller company to enable its customers to create consistent, repeatable and infinitely scalable workflows.
ISAAC was retained by Champions (UK) Plc to drive its digital transformation and helped the digital and brand agency to rationalise its PR department’s monthly client coverage reports from a collation and prep time approaching 5-7 days in some cases to a process that now takes around 30 minutes. All coverage – social, print, radio, TV etc – is recorded in the Champions Oxygen CRM; when a coverage report is required, a workflow is triggered and 30 minutes later the report is complete and ready to send to or print for the customer.
ISAAC Intelligence mixes technology and innovation to simplify and engage people and businesses.
Paperplanes combines the latest digital marketing technology with one of the UK’s largest industrial printers to deliver Programmatic Direct Mail, helping businesses increase conversions and reduce customer churn.
It has developed an entirely new channel for brands to communicate with their audiences, blending the best elements of digital marketing and offline marketing.
Programmatic Direct Mail from Paperplanes enables businesses to engage with their audience in a timely, relevant and personalised form – the kind of direct mail businesses want to send and customers want to receive.
The firm has doubled conversion rates for clients, successfully launched into other markets outside of UK and received endorsement from Royal Mail Market Reach.
rradar is a specialist litigation and commercial law firm that uses digital tools and legal expertise to proactively manage, advise and provide businesses with solutions to reduce the legal risks they face.
rradar’s main goal is to change the way that people see lawyers and believes that it is time to put technology at centre stage in the legal sector as that is where its clients operate.
To do that, it is developing products based on the very latest technology including AI, podcasts, webinars and video presentations, using social media, emails and online information portals so that no matter who the client or the sector in which they work, they can access first-class legal services whenever they want, wherever they are.
In just five years, rradar has grown from a one-person start-up business to a tech-enhanced law company with over 100 staff based over three UK locations. Today it helps thousands of businesses, cultivates close working relationships with business partners and delivers legal services that are accessible, affordable and go further than conventional and traditional expectations.
Leeds-based The Technology Group is a managed communications provider which helps businesses and organisations to better communicate with their customers and teams by embracing Voice Over IP, video, chat and collaboration technologies.
Its has delivered and installed its systems in 20 countries around the world – including Australia, China, Holland, Singapore and South Africa – has more than 400 clients throughout the UK and overseas and currently manages two million minutes of voice traffic per month.
Over the last 12 months, it has grown in turnover by 40 per cent from £2.5m to £3.5m, with net profit also growing substantially by 75 per cent from £306k to £530k.
Having successfully completed and integrated its first business acquisition in October 2017, it has grown employee numbers from 18 in July of last year to 31 now as it expands.
YellowDog’s objective is to create a world where media, entertainment and financial companies do, create and explore more, unleashed from limited computing power.
The average enterprise server utilisation is between five and 15 per cent, with 30 per cent of servers deployed into data centres, turned on then never used. However customers tell YellowDog that they cannot keep up with the compute demands that are required from batch processing.
YellowDog’s unique technology allows customers to securely access the underutilised power that already exists in their organisation whilst also delivering burst capability to public cloud providers through strategic partnerships that include Oracle, AWS, OVH and Rackspace.
The Bristol-based firm has more than 1,300 customers in more than 35 countries, including some of the world’s leading animation and visual effects companies creating content for Disney, Nickelodeon, BBC and ITV. Having already revolutionised the CGI rendering industry, YellowDog – which has built a team of 20 people in just three years – is next looking to transform how FinTech operates.