2017 - where did it go?

Long time no blog - life took over!

Things have moved on in business and on the home front.Home front we have moved house finally after 12 months of renovation of the new property 'The Villa' we are now in and up and running. I have my Ohana (office) and Advisory workshop (garage) initiatives in progress.

Work front has been full on. Majority of the year was spent working on a project for Thales, which I think is now under control and can be moved on to the next phase in the New Year. This has been great for consolidating the business and given a bit of 'thinking' time to what needs to be focused on and where funding is going to come from. And its not the following, one thing 2017 has shown us is that.....start of RANT.....

getting funding for innovation projects in the UK is a complete nightmare - so much so that we have given up trying on our own as a small business. Catapult, runs is own consulting arm - why - I have no idea - seems a little conflicted to me - so now we won't bid because we've had ideas 're-cycled'. Also why on earth would you go to one of their events to brainstorm ideas for innovation. Well we went to one but that was it. Then there are other Innovate UK initiatives i.e. KTP - where's your business case and partners - and by the way can you fund 50% of the work. Its not as bad as that, I'm sure if we put enough bids in we would get something in the spray of money coming out. The issue here is the amount of time it takes to put a submission together - i.e. to fill out all the forms (while working full time on projects and making sure your business is still functioning). I'm sure its just a means of keeping box ticking checkers employed. May as well just fund 100% of the research yourself as you could have the work done in the time it takes to do all this - and keep the IPR.

.....end of RANT.

We did waste a lot of time and energy on these things. Suppose its fine if you are a large outfit with spare capacity to service the submissions but we don't have that luxury. better to just get on with development. So that's what we did.

We have been building upon out review of big data and its application in the railway sector in particular. These have included;

• building a strategic relationship with AIT the Austrian Institute of Technology to resell their product range.
• building partnerships on projects with Universities such as Lancaster and Manchester - both working out brilliantly for us.
• setting up an office in Atlanta to build links with Georgia State University and to kickstart our US business.
• developing an NLP tool for analysing risk logs - see a previous blog on this one - I got so excited I blogged - conference coming up in 2018 to present the results.
• keynote speaking at events such as the IMechE annual conference - scary.

So, in all, 2017 has been a year of consolidation and positioning, we now need to push through on some of  the product development ideas.....onwards and upwards in 2018.

Cheers.....Gary