Gadgetory

hi i'm jason jenkins the editor at cnet UK and welcome to the British are coming a quick look at what our little island has to offer the world of tech at CES now I've got three fascinating guests in the British tech companies coming up but before we meet them I made a little film that explains it all let's take a look here I MLS Vegas a few days before the show starts outside a typical British home now I've been coming here for over a decade to report on the latest trends at CES but one country I never see very much report on it's the UK but why is that I thought I'd go out in the street and ask a few people around them what comes to mind when they think of the UK dank skies and dismal days drinking wake up very early in the morning and have a spot of tea um I have to say rich yeah you have nice cars Sid Vicious Johnny Rotten I'll cook all those guys um we're very very nice and my son just got back from London and he said it was the best curry he's ever had in his life he's Britain a high-tech country ah Britain's he's pretty low-tech country to me I'm chime assuming it would be you have a video camera that's pretty high-tech I think that pretty neatly answers the question about why we don't read too much about British tech at CES but it's a shame because historically Britain's been involved in lots and lots of inventions the hard questions are British invention beer I'll say ale have you heard of any British technologies oh no have you heard of any British invention oh no to that either British technologies ah no the fingerprint let me think here Big Ben um how about the Louvre so are all of Britain's tech giants in the distant past have we lost our tech magic I've gathered together people from Britain's gadget makers entrepreneurs and inventors to hear what their take is and what nawet Lyman has to offer world today let's head inside and see what they have to say shall we well those are the views of some random people I found in Vegas let's see what the people here have to say let's start by introducing someone representing Britain's gadget makers I've got Colin Colin Crawford's open pure and a Buick wireless music and internet radio system supplies digital radios across Europe and Australia and you're launching a Wi-Fi speaker to rival sauna at CES don't a little bit about it it's it's a very affordable multi-room audio system Jason called the jongo family this is the sort of baby speaker in the range if you like so it's a battery-powered main time battery powered surround sound bluetooth and Wi-Fi across the range as well the key thing really is is the multi room side of things so it's being able to control and stream your music from your smartphone or your tablet which you know so many people want to do these days so it's getting the convenience of that and then delivering it really beautifully so lovely audio from your speakers perfectly synchronized in one room or in multiple rooms around your house um so I guess as a British company how hard is it to build a globally recognized brand that people people we saw on the video might recognize yes British invention something like a telephone or you know or a TV if anyone had mentioned any of that but that would have been nice but we didn't mend those not me but someone over there I did it's pretty hard but you know it's hard for anyone to build a global brand that's Britain tends to be really good at technology we we are actually real technology boffins with lots of very very clever people they're developing clever stuff but what we haven't been very good at certainly over the last little while is is actually coming up with consumer brands which make it globally I mean I was trying to think before we came on over of a global British brand the one that came to mind was Dyson actually and with our guys you know what else is the right there some brands that people might think we're British something like Philips that's a Dutch brand there aren't enough Global British brands and it comes down to yeah i think is it there's something in us that really likes to get down to the nitty ready light likes to invent stuff but then we give it away then we give it away to two other people are we are we license it to other people there's plenty of British technology in things which don't have British brands on them and you know we'll talk to here in a moment and you know and ourselves our parent company actually licenses technology which is in lots and lots of devices out there but yeah unfortunately the vast majority of the the brands that those are in they aren't British brands and your parent companies imagination technologies which shares revenues about two hundred million dollars a year and then you better is that you can see you around with that so why why that idea what my kind of diversify if you're doing ok by inventing mix well the imaginations imagination want pure effectively to to keep them honest we say you know to what they really want is a link a real solid link to the consumer and you can get a little bit isolated as a technology as an intellectual property company being a bit too far away for the consumer and certainly our CEO very very much wants to have that hard link to a company who have to struggle through the difficulties of making you know kit that has to be sold through retail and dealing with all of that it helps us understand that whole that whole chain if you like and yeah and keeps us keeps us very much in tune with what's happening with consumers okay I think this partnership bringing in a soil representing Britain's ideas industry and that's the injury you're the EVP of marketing and business development at arm now arm is probably Britain's biggest tech success story your technologies in everything from phones to washing machines fella earlier but you don't actually make anything so why is that how do you actually go about making money so I'm started 22 years ago when the pc industry everybody was making their own cpu chips so we designed the BBC microcomputer which most of the people of a certain age in the UK will remember being their first programmable machine at that stay screen yeah at that stage you'll see lots of CPU companies doing reasonably well but nobody making any money and the Apple came along and Newton's apple said we'd like to license your design for the CPU and have it made somewhere so we started a cpu IP com company and we named it armed acorn risc machines 22 years ago and Apple being one of our first partners then all of a sudden this IP industry took off people wanted low power and the phone industry when digital went from analog to digital and Nokia said we'd like a very low power device and Nokia phone started growing and arm was very very important in that companies like TI and Qualcomm started in that era and so for us we started in the phone industry and then branched out so ninety-five percent of all phones now have chips in there designed by armed same for tablets d TVs and set-top boxes were in seventy plus percent of them so armed partnership billions and billions of units a year we're very much into designing the IP we make no hardware we sell that IP and we get a royalty back and I think where Britain really comes into this is taking that engineering knowledge and creating new business models we're not very good at the branding side and I think the British culture and technology of being fairly low-key also doesn't help us there as well but I think this whole technology industry is very vibrant in the UK although a bit more of an undercurrent rather than at the leading edge do you want to expand a bit on on the kind of Cambridge site because you're yes where your headquarters is and it's a center of excellence with technology in the UK key describing all the cultures like what are the businesses like I there what's going on that that maybe we should know about what we don't want exciting I'm Cambridge or silicon fen as we like to call it just north of London really the high tech center of the UK there's hundreds of companies there that do IP companies that you may have heard of like autonomy we've just been bought by HP very lot very large there for us that whole culture of angel investment really comes into Cambridge ethos there's lots of technology angels there and lots of people starting small content companies or IP companies spin-offs from universities spin-offs from other other companies in Cambridge that really hasn't expanded outside of the outside of Cambridge very much but there is a culture there are small companies that grow into slightly larger companies and then being bought by American companies or bought by European companies as we grow so there's very much a culture of inward investment via angel funding can you think of I mean are there any companies you can think of from the past that maybe should have been bigger than they were if they if the story it's been different maybe then bought out just the only kind of cusp of becoming great on their own right or something there's two its csr great company that I did very well in the Bluetooth radio space companies along those axis that could have gone a lot more into the radio area and grown there we see other companies bought out for 20 million dollars that you think if they were in America they would have more and more investment and will become really big silicon companies of their own so for us I think we're very good at that small start-up that tends to get bought up by big multinational rather than developing our own multi-billion dollar consumer electronics company the real company that grew huge was autonomy but she's been bought for seven and a half billion by HP but that's really a unique situation most most get to at 10 10 to 20 million dollars and then get sold two big American companies okay let's bring in my last guess is moment you're representing the young startup kind of culture in Britain rich tomato you're the founder and CEO Blippar and Blippar provides augmented reality to advertisers so if you install the app and point your point your phone at like a bottle of ketchup or something it does something really cool on the screen now you've got around two million users worldwide you've worked with companies I naik dominoes Sony and more but it will start to get big for you at last year's CES when you want a free place at the show from the UK government can you can you tell us what that meant for your company of course I mean the body called UK trade investment in Britain and they try and encourage businesses inside Britain to glow global so we entered a best startup competition in Britain last year and we won the first prize and the prize was an explosion and international exposure to an event like CES where you get to see a whole large global audience of businesses and consumers and it's a it's a brilliant stage to showcase your technology and the price was a team coming to us everything paid for which is brilliant for a start-up because it's it's pretty unaffordable for for a young company like us at least you're back and since then we got tremendous traction in us i would say CS was the single reason behind us opening our offices in us this summer and we've already worked with brands like L'Oreal and budweiser and more on a pretty blonde annual scale on a national scale in in US which is very cool so I would say that there are policies and there are opportunities in Britain which is encouraging towards young startups like us to at least showcase our technology and at least have a global dream about our business and you you actually went to the US originally to get funding before settling on the UK for your headquarters can you tell us a bit about the the differences you notice in the business culture and kind of your thoughts on that and maybe if you speak up a little bit am i helping it yeah there are significant difference of in fact from our funding point of view and from a startup culture point of view most important in the in the VC community the us-based visas are less risk-averse and they're willing to actually gamble on the next big thing they try on an idea pretty much in its infancy and and understand it how much can this business really scale globally is this really a global opportunity to create the next big thing and we saw that mindset really reflected from in US investment culture which wasn't present in UK in most of the UK vc's we met year one revenues are always the first question where you're trying to set up a business and you're trying to build attraction of large consumer base revenues or something which is not immediate priority for us or a business like ours so that's one big difference we saw another difference is generally able to support I mean there's a better culture of mentorship so what we noticed in us that actually the VCS or other current CEOs of large businesses or small businesses they really help younger business is to build something stable and give a lot of life feedback and a lot of forums to actually help each other out and and that culture lacks in UK definitely we're actually existing entrepreneurs do not support young companies as much or there isn't enough forums where people go and informally talk to each other and help each other out to understand problems because there is a lot of knowledge to be shared i mean today in a year and a half you've learned enough through running a business in US and UK where I could help out a lot of entrepreneurs in UK and explain them the challenges and opportunities to set up a global business so I mean that's something that we've all of us have such numbers we're in the prep city when we move speaking backstage that some Britain kind of lacks that is it is it is it an entrepreneur it was spirit or something I what's the answer do you wanna say something Colin I don't think we lack an entrepreneurial I think they're there are plenty of yeah plenty of great ideas in Britain but it's it's the it's the vision to really take that and make it global and I do think we are we are lacking in that in Britain it's certainly not I don't think it's something that's particularly encouraged in Britain it's not something which is part of our culture I don't think it's necessarily something that they may be the you know the government the whole sort of environment encourages in Britain but you know it's to build a brand to build a big global business it involves more than technologies it's not just clever guys in a room you know you've you've really got to have you've got of money you've got a marketing nice you've got to have a lot more business noise and maybe that side of that entrepreneurial stuff yeah we just don't have enough at we don't like we aren't encouraging enough people in that area I agree with you but I also think the government could do an awful lot more to create a culture that really allows big technology brands to grow I think we do very well on the engineering and investment in R&D side but I think that how do you go promote worldwide brands in the UK the government tried to do certain things but I think you either have to go big and help companies go and create brands worldwide or create a culture where it's okay to try and do this and I think we need the correct entrepreneurial spirit the really starts growing this culture of brands in the UK not just the engineering talent as well were brilliant engineering I University push out some brilliant engineers in this and that's why all three companies have done very well I think this brand site needs to be worked on and how you create that culture of a big achievement in the yo you want but how do you actually go about doing it like I think its investment I think its support I think when people stand up and go this is what technology is all about we need to be able to go and show showcase everything that we've done very interesting that video people going didn't remember the TV was invented in the UK didn't remember the phone was invented but you look at all of that technology people sit in this table designed a lot of that technology we can go and create those companies that really enable big consumer brands to happen why can't we do it ourselves I think a lot of it is to do with us pushing that cultural differences forward yeah I mean we do have what we are creating all the engineers as in says we've got huge university system and Britain pump site fantastic engineers one part of our issue is that we met we were great exporting them so yeah you'll find lots of British engineers in this whole they're working for US companies they're working for Japanese companies are working for for non British companies because there isn't enough there's just aren't enough those big British companies actually there for the to take the engineers for us certainly in our case we we can't get enough engineers you know in terms of imagination technologies r.i.p side of the business we just can't get enough guys into the business it's it's it's there's a there's a dearth of I'm sure it's the same allotting British engineers back into the UK that have been to UK companies been to UK universities exported around the world we're bringing them back because that's how good they are this comp this whole CS is driven a lot by UK talent we need to make sure that we grow the brand's around that as well and it brings down to the whole issue of funding again the reason we've lost so many engineers abroad is due to funding opportunity that many people have started businesses in Britain and really scaled in America because an investor in us believed in the wider vision of the business and that is something which is slowly changing I mean we're already seeing some big-name Silicon Valley investors opening their shops in in Britain and and driving the change in investment culture and today I mean there are 5,000 plus startups in London alone and there is a significant change in terms of entrepreneurs wanting to do more and wanting to drive investment and scale but challenges are a twofold one is the mindset of investors and other government policies to some extent because sometimes the government vision about the whole tech entrepreneurship can be quite narrow and trying to define a geography it's pretty much a tick box so there are there is something called the silicon roundabout in London which is considered Britain's answer to Silicon Valley but it's it's me it's like Google and it has all the American companies out there right so which has had the effect of pushing rents up for people like you and so so he's come hasn't worked wise ever you think it was it was meant to attract startups like us and make it easier and have more easy and lower office rental and good idea infrastructure in place but it's actually become a attractive point for high-value startups and really big global conglomerates like Google and Facebook to open their offices there which is this course driving the rents up so there are policies in place but they're not being there not being exercised in the right way but i would say few things like the basic paperwork stuff what things like entrepreneurs relief and R&D tax relief there are a few things there which is quite encouraging for a start-up where you end up paying less in terms of taxes but that will not fundamentally change the vision or the whole future of Britain and I also think we need heroes Britain lacks heroes in txt space that the culture about exits as well you know people tend to exit very quickly hence we lack brands we've got a lot of companies which are amazing components but we don't own the whole brand okay that's great I've really enjoyed this tube I'm afraid we're that that's our time over so I hope that's given bet people are watching they're a bit of an idea of what bridge take the British takes like thanks very much for all the people I panel Bridget carries up next with our TV experts so stay tuned