Traditionally August is a rather quiet time in business, with a lot of contacts away on annual holidays. Business discussions and projects tend to get kicked down the road into September.  However, this week has been rather busy.  So what have we been up to?

5G in the United Kingdom

Recently, our Co-founder Paul Moss joined the UK5G Connected Places Working Group.  The Group held their inaugural meeting this week.  So what is UK5G, and what is the purpose of the Connected Places Working Group?

UK5G is the national innovation network dedicated to the promotion of research, collaboration and the commercial application of 5G in the UK.  The organisation was founded by the UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). If the adoption of 5G technologies by the UK is to be accelerated, and the social and economic opportunities are to be fully realised, a key area of focus is on places.  The Working Group has been established to support Local Authorities to work with their partners in communications, infrastructure, investment, public service and business to secure digital infrastructure for their regions and encourage its use.   Paul looks forward to working on this exciting initiative.

Marketing Technology

Over the past several months we’ve been in close discussion with a UK south coast based digital marketing agency that helps companies to increase their inbound sales leads, turn these leads into sales and retain customers over the long-term.  The firm typically works with medium-sized B2B enterprises in the technology, engineering and manufacturing sectors that have strong growth ambitions. These guys are deploying best in class web sites and a combination of third-party and in-house marketing automation tools to great effect.

Business Process Automation

On Wednesday this week, we had a chat with the CEO of a business that specialises in helping firms to automate business processes.  The firm helps businesses to gain a holistic understanding of all the processes used in the company.  These processes might include paper-based activities that are hard to keep track of, or ones that live in email or shared files and are prone to data damage or loss, or it might include tasks that management assigns that are then ignored or forgotten about, and processes that each sit in their own IT system that don’t talk to other systems.

Because many repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone tasks can be automated (and trusted) to run 24/7, businesses can focus more on tasks that add more value to the bottom-line.  We’re already talking with a couple of our enterprise clients to explore how this vendor can help.