A record 167 UK tech companies are flying the flag for Britain this week at the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in a bid to attract global business partners, helped by Government support.
They join firms from over 200 countries at the largest ever gathering of over 100,000 tech professionals, entrepreneurs and investors from global tech giants like Samsung and Huawei to new start-ups. With one of the largest national presences the UK, through DIT, is helping small firms across the country showcase their ideas abroad.
Of the bumper delegation travelling to Barcelona from across the UK, 16 companies who secured Government financial support are from the Cambridge area.
Speaking at the event, International Trade Minister Greg Hands said: “The world continues to see the UK as a leading technology destination of choice, with global tech companies such as Facebook, Apple and Google leading the charge to invest in Silicon UK.
“We have some of the most innovative tech talent and entrepreneurs in the world, and I want to encourage other investors to take notice and take advantage of our expertise and ideas. Global industry shows, like Mobile World Congress, are a huge opportunity for small businesses, and my department is here helping more UK companies than ever build the connections they need to revolutionise the world and go global.”
The UK’s tech sector attracts more international inward investment than the rest of Europe combined with 25 percent of all overseas inward investment into Europe coming to the UK. Over 348,000 people work in UK telecomms and related software development.
DIT is working with 75 UK firms at Mobile World Congress to showcase their products and ideas and match them with potential partners and investors through meetings at the conference. This follows the continued commitment of global brands to the UK, with Snapchat choosing the UK for its new international HQ, and Google and Facebook both increasing their staff here.
With worldwide mobile data traffic expected to increase a hundredfold in the next five years, as more people get online, the government is helping UK firms seize an increasing global market. Companies DIT is supporting include Speechmatics, the Cambridge-based start-up that provides automatic speech recognition technologies, who will be hoping to attract attention to its new real-time demo product from the wider consumer electronics industry.
Says the company’s CEO, Benedikt von Thuengen: “We’re looking to gain more exposure for the company and MWC should be a big platform for us. Last year at MWC, lots of customers said they wanted us to have a real-time capability, so we built it.” The company has initially been focused on the enterprise market, delivering speech recognition capabilities to call compliance and call analytics, as well as subtitles for broadcasters.
With the technology now fully embeddable, Speechmatics is starting to build traction in the OEM market. The technology is speaker independent and can turn the speech to text continuously that is accurate, easily deployable and available in any language. “This is a paradigm shift as other technologies either rely on cloud servers or are highly optimised towards short sentences for voice control for example, in the use cases of Siri and Alexa,” explains Benedikt.
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