Mobile money

These days I’m spending I good portion of my time looking at the world of Mobile payments and Mobile Money. The amount of change, players and technologies gives it the feel of the wild west or the dot.com boom.  This time last year we had a session with a client and discussed 9 different offerings, which included iZettle, Square, the Google Wallet and Apps from Monitise.   At the time iZettle with its innovative plugin for the iphone that can take chip and pin won out. 

Well a year is a long time and whilst it’s great to see iZettle banners on such high profile sites as BBC world and being accepted for taxi’s in Frankfurt, Monitise seem to be winning out.  After a successful £24m share placing just three months ago the company is in talks with a number of investors over a £100m fundraising. A excellent validation of our partnership at CGI.

My challenge is that as the mobile money market hots up will Jack Dorsey and the Square team come in and disrupt the ecosystem. 

Operating on a different level

I’m bigging up the Economist again. Just got in from an insightful and inspiring evening to recognise global innovation champions at this year’s Economist Innovation awards Over the past ten years the awards have gone to some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs, thinkers, creators, scientists and innovators. Previous winners include Hernando De Soto, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, no slouches in there then.

I liked the innovative slant on this year’s awards as they called out the idea that formed the groundbreaking transformation or product or service we know today. We learnt that Garmin can be traced back to a conversation about the not yet completed satellite navigation constellation and consumer product. The whole lithium ion batteries phenomenon came from one man’s thinking in the shower but the winner for me was Elon Musk’s thinking about extending life beyond Earth when he was 19.

The event was blessed with some the brightest people on the planet but Elon winning the no boundaries category, but with his Space X, Tesla Solar panels and something called Hyperloop was on, another level. Hyperloop a cross between concord and rail gun so you can travel from LA to San Francisco in 30 mins. I’d certainly travel on it but it was great to hear how innovations and thinking in one world is cross pollinated to another. 

Innovation before breakfast

The Economist is renowned for its insightful views of the ever changing world of Technology. The newspaper has an upcoming ‘Information Technology’ special report and the regular Technology Quarterly special report. 

Last week I had the opportunity to have sneak preview of their Technology Quarterly when @TomStandage Online and Digital Editor presented his view on the Top Ten Technologies to watch. Some are very much in sync with our thinking others are a little wacky and will take more time, all will have profound change on the way we and our clients live their lives.

Ten Technologies To Watch:

1 - Mobile Payments

2 - 3d printing

3 - Driver-less cars

4 - Nano pod sequencing

5 - Phase-change memory

6 - Wireless charging

7 - Drones

8 - Flexible solar lights

9 - Augmented Reality

10 - Private space travel

Do you agree? What got missed out? There were various discussions on desalination and wave technology on the day.  I'm looking at the whole mobile payments and 3d printing areas. 

Open Innovation credentials called out

As part of our partnership with The Big Innovation Centre (BIC) a research centre within The Work Foundation, I took part and contributed to a report that looks into our practices of Open Innovation, the benefits we are realising and the barriers we are experiencing. Co-authored by leading Innovation Academics, the research focuses on developing insight and advice for business leaders on the practical realities of adopting a more open approach to innovation.

Covering the diverse range of BIC partners made up of the Sponsor Group and organisations from the wider innovation community the research high-lights that we are not the best, yet equally not the worst. Our GIVP and Aspire vehicles are called out as a commendable ways forward.

Here be dragons

One of the many ways I keep the Innovation Ecosystem fresh is to proactively involve ourselves in the Information Technology community and trade associations. I recently was a dragon at the Intellect Innovation Den –Harnessing web 2.0 for the public sector event.

The format followed very closely to the BBC Dragon Den concept with each SME presenting for a strict 10 minutes followed by 10 minutes Q&A with the panel. The presentations came from a diverse range of innovative SMEs that included a company that has software has developed an innovative and unique solution which enables an organisation to deliver any windows application or desktop to any device via a compatible web browser with no need to alter the original application or install any client-side software to a ‘universal hub’ that enables any organisation to streamline and automate all inbound information streams.

The event is a great way to meet a concentrated number of partners whilst being constructive and supportive to the technology industry. 

Black Ties and Innovation Award Winners

I recently dugout my black tie and dinner jacket for an awards evening. Scarily, after more than 10 years I was able to find it, get into to it and it not be too out of date. A bit tight mind, but I impressed myself that it even partially fitted.

The main reason for having to explore the depths of the wardrobe was to attend the Frost & Sullivan European Industry Best-in-Class Performers banquet.  We were receiving recognition for our “Internet of things” work or Machine tom Machine Platform.

A total of twenty nine awards were presented with recipients honoured for showcasing leading ideas and innovation across a variety of sectors including healthcare, energy and power supplies, environment and building technologies, chemicals, materials and foods and information communication technologies.

Some very interesting award categories, which I’m not sure would make it to  Oscar night but some incredible stuff happening out there and a great opportunity for people to come together to call it out. 

Innovators of the future

I recently had an incredibly interesting and intellectually challenging morning as a judge at the Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards. We sponsored this year’s Information Technology category.  The awards are established as Europe’s most important awards for science and engineering undergraduates and are open to all students who at the time of entry, are studying for an undergraduate degree at a university located within Europe.

This year’s winner came from Philip Kingsley, University of Bristol for his haptic elastic table for 3D multi-touch interactions, which effectively takes the Kinect concept to 3D multi touch with incredible visualisations that could enable surgeons to model and explore the human brain.

If the calibre of the finalists is anything to go by Europe’s innovation future is in safe hands, although what struck me was the limited insight on the value of IP and the challenges involved in its commercialisation. Is there not a case to include some entrepreneurial and innovation management options?

For all those following our Global Innovation Venture Partner Programme we are getting close to the final. We are delighted to announce our shortlist for 2012 made up of NeutrinoBI, 360Globalnet, miiCard, Dexter Intelligence, X88 Software Limited and Worksoft.

The team received a total of 53 nominations and the judges had a hard time choosing the shortlist. The companies were chosen for their innovation and capability to partner with Logica and bring innovation to our clients. The judging day is on Thursday, 23 August. The winner will be announced at the end of August.  More stuff on each company. 

Neutrino BI

Designed in 2007, NeutrinoBI has been developed to deliver the breakthrough Business Intelligence search and discovery capability for business professionals. NeutrinoBI for Desktop and Server environments take you from raw data to discovery in minutes. With its freeform search tool, it offers easy-to – use functionality and with an exceptional look and feel.

360 Globalnet

With 360Globalnet’s LinkUp you can hoover up every bit of data and text in the organisation, apply rules and algorithms, and display the results in any way you like.  This Business Intelligence solution provides sophisticated data matching, mining and visualisation in one tool. All data structured and real unstructured data in any format can be digested analysed and linked to provide a true holistic view of the enterprises information.

miiCard

miiCard's real-time online identity verification service allows a consumer to prove their real identity, to Anti-Money Laundering standards, without the need for a physical ID checks. Owned and managed by the individual having a miiCard allows people to track, monitor and thus take control of their online identity. For businesses selling online to consumers, miiCard improves conversion rates, cuts operational cost and fights internet fraud.

Dexter Intelligence

Founded in 2012 and identified during Logica’s Aspire Programme Dexter Intelligence offer data discovery services to businesses and government.

With a doctoral research DNA of intelligent information and social information seeking they can discover information in the mass of structured and unstructured data that companies and organisations hold. . They gather, index, theme and present data using their, unique and scalable tools for discovery.

X88 Software Limited

X88’s Pandora is a powerful data analysis and manipulation tool that can acquire, analyse, transform and export data and can produce data quality reports and transformation specifications. Pandora uses a database that allows it to ingest very large quantities of data and to manipulate this on screen almost instantaneously. The product is a self-contained, high-performance, multi-user application that can reduce the risk and timescales of your data-related projects by 80%

Worksoft

Tackling the complex and costly challenge of testing business technology applications Worksoft can help with their automated tested solution.  With their alternative object-based design the Worksoft Certify suite of Test products can quickly and easily get to work. With error rates dropping by as much as 80%, getting technology to do the bulk of the work this will save money whilst giving providing confidence and assurance your business processes are meeting your needs.   

We received an interesting mix of entrants from different parts of the world.  We are going to have an exciting day with the various next generation Big Data offerings. I didn't see as many Mobile and Business Platform entrants as I had hoped. That remains the challenge who will be the big winners when we are all mobile and bringing our own devices?

An Italian Job

As this year’s 100 Hottest European Start-ups from Wired showed there’s still a healthy Technology sector growth across the continent. They featured the Tech powerhouse cities of Berlin and London as well as some up and coming hubs in Barcelona and Amsterdam. Recently, I would have said that “one city that wouldn’t come to mind as a hotbed of innovation was Turin”. Well the Think Up Agency and partners at I3P and the Institute Mario Boella changed this. They have created a vibrant ecosystem of start-ups and focused research that are feeding off each to produce tangible technology capabilities and competencies.

If you are looking for design flair and technology backed up with delivery capability I would recommend the trip to investigate the city.  Here are some hot prospects in original home of the economic cluster model.

Founded in 1999, by a group of language technology researchers with the aim to address the growing market in language engineering, Celi is a provider of software solutions in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in mono-, multi-, and cross-language perspective.  When you add in the whole semantic analysis for business with parts the big data challenges we will to continue to face a very interesting offering.

Experientia is an experience design consultancy that practices user research-based and people-centred design. They operate at the front end of the process and help folks come up with their answers, through a qualitative understanding of people, their mental models and their behaviours.

BMooble is the vision of Guido Colombo who back in the day foresaw the concept of Apps as we know them today. bMooble provides a  solution specifically designed to access any Information Data Source from multi-platform mobile phone devices. Impressively, they seem to have all platform including you old Nokia (not so smart) phone covered.  With increasing mobility desires and the build once deploy many they are in for interesting times.

At first glance Synesthesia would be your typical mobile apps design team which springing up around the world. When you get under the covers you’ll find a decade long heritage in cutting edge design and mobile user experience expertise. Having developed the 2012 Olympics App which as an actual user I can say they have a ‘right to play’. They set a good benchmark for sports based Apps and I see the likes of Sky showing an interest.

The brainchild of a physics graduate with a history of Design Support Systems based on multidimensional engines Hicare Research was founded in 1996. The business intelligence software company have built a built their product Lilith. With its impressive functionality set, they look well placed to take advantage of the Big Data and Analytics challenges companies around the world are facing.

Founded in 2003, with 15 employees Seaco2 are a little bit like Layar with their mobile augmented-reality platform. They bring the deep heritage of Italian design credentials together with state of the art augmented reality software and real-time render raytracing to produce incredible interactive solutions. With their patents and copyrights as well as working for folks like UPS and Benetton they are one to watch.

Reply Concept is your more traditional business technology service company or systems integrator. Founded in 1996 and listed on the Italian Star in 2000 they provide consulting, systems integration and Apps Management.  They have neat stuff in the whole digital, mobile retail area with their HI Shop.

With an eight year history and over 20 years experience, Irion operate in the data quality and enterprise data management systems market. Their IrionDQ, which allows you to treat all your corporate data as if it were contained in a single, large virtual database maybe of interest to the Financial services industry as Regulators are setting new standards for Basle 3 and Solvency 2..  

Mediaki.it’s interesting formation can be traced back to the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin.  They are well placed to take advantage of the wave of new portals or business platforms as Internet users become savvier and businesses realise the need to offer and increasing encaging social experience.  

Keeping it fresh

A key part of my role is bringing our clients ideas to life and help answer the question “is there a better way?” Essentially I do this by working with Logica’s great people, our Innovation Ecosystem or a combination both.

When I say our Innovation Ecosystem, I mean our phenomenal collection of over 300 partners that ranges from universities who are looking at some whacky research to our global alliance partners at the other end with their incredible products and services. The majority fall in the middle and are mainly SMEs who have some cutting edge cool stuff. 

One of the ingredients we use to keep the ecosystem vibrant and fresh is our GIVP programme.  We’ll be announcing this year’s global winner in September so look out for that.

The Italian Job

I also proactively scout for potential additions to the ecosystem and it always amazes me where you find incredible hotspots of innovation. For an interesting view checkout Wired’s latest European hot 100. An example of this was a recent visit to Turin in Italy. I had always thought of Turin, as the home of Fiat with all its industrial connotations, but what I found with the help of the Think Up Agency was a vibrant hidden gem of innovation activity. 

I discovered a user-experience design agency with a different take on things, the Olympic 2012 mobile app designers, a natural language processing company that does the whole cross-language semantic piece.

Freshness takes work

The freshness and vibrancy of our Innovation Ecosystem really makes a difference to all, but you have to work at it and gems can be found in unexpected places.

GIVP - be in it to win it!

We are doing it again. We have just launched this year’s Global Innovation Venture Partner (GIVP). Our goal is to find and showcase the innovative technologies of small and medium sized enterprises. These can support us in solving our client’s business challenges and bringing their visions to life.
Sound farfetched?
If you are reading this and you are from a small company with what you believe is a neat technology and having trouble breaking into and showcasing your concept to some of the largest European organizations this may sound too good to be true.  It certainly isn’t. Much of my days are spent working with clients in our Spark Centers to enable them to see, explore and discuss how we can take them to a better place with some of the incredible new technologies available.
We are aiming to surpass last year’s GIVP successes where we had two very different winners with Embarcadero’ Appwave product and Sophia Search with their incredibly powerful context aware search technology. For both, we developed and won some fabulous opportunities.
How do I get involved?
Joining the competition is easy. Fill in our Participation Form and you are potentially on the road to transforming your business. So what are you waiting for? If you think you have something that complements our view of tomorrow and adds value to one of propositions we’d love to hear from you.

A trip to the Mecca of Technology

I was recently invited to the annual sales kickoff of our GIVP winner Embarcadero in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.  I saw this. Truly awesome, I think the quote was "catch him whilst he's around".

Embarcadero won the 2011 GIVP award for Appwave .  Appwave is an incredibly innovative offering for a business application store which is very much of the moment.  Tapping into the whole consumerist ion of IT, mobility and socialisation themes this is very much something that is going to happen for businesses it's just a question of how and when.

Old ones are the best ones

Switching tack slightly, one of amazing insights I took from the event was that with their Rad xe2 Studio product they are generating over 50% year on year growth.  That is unprecedented in the software world when I tell you that the original source code is over 17 years old.  If any knows of products that have had similar experiences and metrics both inside and outside the technology world I would love to hear from you.

Lastly one of big learnings of the event was about something called FireMonkey. I'm getting a little off my technology comfort zone but an innovative complier that enables you to use the same source code for windows and IOs. Two for the price of one. Not bad, in this austere times. That is something well worth checking out.

Business App Stores - the way forward

Consumerisation of IT is impacting our business and that of our clients. It feels like a seismic shift. Initiatives like 100% mobility and BYOT – Bring Your Own Technology change the way we experience technology. The development of Enterprise Application Stores (EAS) is a new challenge. Business’s move to providing their software applications in a way that is similar to the iPhone App store or Google’s Android market.

Can that help to drive productivity?

I recently was involved in a roundtable discussion with our GIVP winner Embarcadero and Ovum . Enterprise app store are vital in moving organisations to a self service model that reduces complexity. It also helps to avoid delays in getting applications to end users.

Listen to this podcast in your own time but here is what we explored during the discussion. Enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity and speed-to-value benefits for PC users and IT departments alike.

The debate kicked the tyres on steps businesses can take to build and develop their own enterprise app stores for mainstream use as well as examining what rapid and easy access to self-service apps on PCs and notebook computers through such app stores is doing for businesses.

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are very popular and have energised users on one hand. On the other hand, it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.

21 century at home, 1995 at work?

App stores for me are part of the equation going forward. Why? The answers they can bring in ease of use and cost savings are high. Getting there tackles our mismatch between what people experience with their smart technology at home and what they find at work. To quote a good friend: “people come to work in the 21st century when they start work the majority step back to 1995.” Is this you and how long can you go on living in another century?