Member Article

Greater Manchester tech projects share £700k funding pot

Ten companies from Greater Manchester’s creative and digital sector are to receive a cash injection totalling £700,000 to help fund key projects.

The firms, all start-ups and SMEs, will share the funding after being named winners of the Creative and Digital Launchpad.

The programme is run by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, and the Business Growth Hub.

Its aim is to stimulate the development of the sector, and the board felt that all the projects had potential for growth within the sector and have landed themselves varying levels of funding.

In June, the companies will pitch for further investment at a Launchpad Investment Showcase event at MediaCityUK’s The Landing.

Richard Jeffery, Director of the Business Growth Hub, said: “We recognize and congratulate these ten companies whose innovation and ideas have been justly rewarded.

“We will now go on to work with the winning companies to help them develop their ideas and to prepare for further investment.

“Just as importantly, we will also be continuing to work with all of the companies that entered this competition, to make sure that they are able to access the funding and specialist support services that will support and drive their future growth.”

The winners will have up to 60 per cent of their product or service development project funded by the Launchpad programme and will continue to work with the Business Growth Hub.

The ten winning companies – and their projects – are:

Digital Bridge by Shortbite Ltd from Salford - developing an automated process to convert pictures and video into digital models for applications using augmented and virtual reality.

Interactive Projected Displays ROI by Hardy & Ellis Inventions Ltd - technology that can effectively transform any surface in a room into a computer interface, alleviating the reliance on mobile devices for the use of applications.

EventBeat SaaS by EventBeat Ltd from Stockport - Social Signage technology that broadcasts audience social media comments and pictures direct to screens displayed at live events in order to create interaction, build engagement and generate additional revenue through broadcasting advertising.

Automating Knowledge in the Cloud by Empiricom Technologies Limited from Manchester - a knowledge acquisition interview tool, which helps organisations uncover human knowledge and manage decisions by providing a structured interview technique & exhaustively documenting an individual’s entire expertise on any subject.

Impact by Reason Digital from Manchester - helps customers gauge a company’s ethics using an online software-as-a-service to consistently record corporate social responsibility, participation in company-wide programmes and individual contributions, to visually monitor social impact.

User generated meta-data (POC) by Movobi Ltd from Stockport - The Movobi platform currently has the ability to capture data about on-screen information and present it to users via clickable screen shots. The delivery is used for companies looking to obtain more intelligent information about on screen items, such as products, that have not only been purposefully placed on websites but also provides a new approach for gathering information about online user interaction with these products.

Tick by Tickvantage Limited from Manchester - solving one of the biggest issues with online security, Tick is evolving the process of authentication beyond the tradition of supplying a username and password which is no longer good enough. Instead,Tick solves this problem by creating a stronger authentication procedure by using any mobile phone (not just smartphones) to deliver multiple channels of authentication of an individual, organization and even products.

Moneystream by Play Creative Limited (trading as Play) from MediaCityUK - a digital finance product that combines personal financial activity with multiple external data sources of information to provide both a meaningful analysis of past behaviour, and guidance on future decision making.

Retrofit design and assessment tool by the Society for the Reduction of Carbon Ltd (trading as Carbon Co-op) from Chorlton - a partnership of creative digital design companies developing a house retrofit design and assessment web tool that supports the implementation of large scale home energy efficiency refits.

Social Hosted TV by iBurbia Studios Manchester Ltd from MediaCityUK - this project looks at creating a service which delivers innovative web and social media services – such as recommendations, clip sharing and storage services - into TV set top boxes and internet connected ‘Smart’ TV screens.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Malia .