Cambridge has been recognised as an important cluster
for technology start-ups since the publication of the Cambridge
Phenomenon Report in 1985.The
areanow hosts 1,400 such firms within a
25-mile radius of the city, employing 43,000 out of a total working
population of 360,000.
While the recession has slowed the amount of funding available
for new businesses, particularly from venture capitalists, the
angel network is still strong. Support infrastructure, ranging from
incubators to professional services firms, is readily available and
experienced entrepreneurs on their third or fourth venture
abound.
Although traditionally the region has been associated with life
sciences and electronics companies, the region has more recently
diversified into everything from medical devices to clean
technology, software in its various forms and gaming.
Many of the ideas behind such ventures come from research
projects undertaken at Cambridge
University, with its traditional focus on scientific
disciplines such as physics. But one of the key themes appears to
be taking commodity products and applying them in new ways. That
can mean taking standard equipment and using it in a fresh context,
or employing open source software and/or cloud services to keep
costs down.
Cambridge start-ups
Here are three examples of the Cambridge start-up scene.:
Cambridge Temperature Concepts - ovulation monitoring
system
Cambridge
Temperature Concepts (CTC) uses a combination of open source
software and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud to provide a
cost-effective back-end infrastructure that can support its
ovulation monitoring system.
The system, which is called DuoFertility, comprises a stick-on
under-arm patch, which includes a low-power microprocessor to
automatically and regularly collect women's basal temperature
readings while they sleep. The data is then sent wirelessly to a
small handheld reader that can be placed on a bedside table for
statistical analysis purposes.
The aim of the system is to non-invasively chart temperature
rises over the course of months to ascertain when ovulation is most
likely to occur, and therefore when a woman is most fertile. It is
possible for both users and GPs to view this information in
graphical form on a PC as the reader also includes a USB port.
When plugged into the PC, the device simultaneously uploads the
user's statistics anonymously to a CTC database running on Linux
servers in an Amazon datacentre. As a result, the various features
of a woman's ovulation cycle, such as duration, can be compared
with other women's to improve the accuracy of forecasting.
Shamus Husheer, who is chief executive and chief technology
officer at the company, came up with the idea while working on his
PHD in chemistry and instrumentation at Cambridge University. "The
availability of processing on demand means that it is foolish for
us to invest capital in equipment. Using a provider that is better
than us at creating a datacentre also means that we can maintain
uptime, ensuring that when a user plugs in their device the service
is always there," he says.
CTC, which is housed in the
Cambridge Science
Park and employs 10 staff, has also deployed a range of Linux
servers in-house to run its open source SugarCRM applications and
XTuple's OpenMFG enterprise resource planning software. It has
likewise used open source tools for development purposes, employing
the GNU Project's R programming language for statistical and
graphical development because it can be replicated on different
machines easily without any licensing concerns.
The free availability of Microsoft software for three years
under the global BizSpark programme means that its versions of C
and C++ have also been used for other development work, while the
supplier's Windows operating system has likewise been installed on
the desktop.
"Open source used to have large barriers to adoption, but we
have enough technical people in the company who know about it that
it has been relatively easily. The fact that you can go on to the
web and download this stuff for free, and the fact that Microsoft
is making its pricing equally attractive, makes it much easier for
start-ups these days," says Husheer.
CTC, which was set up in 2007, has just completed trials with
100 couples across Europe, 40 of which were based in the UK, to
build up information in its database, fix bugs in the system and
improve its user-friendliness. All of the couples were recruited
via search-based advertising on Google, but the company is
currently in discussions with retailers and distributors about
stocking DuoFertility, which costs £495. It has also added a
shopping cart facility to its website.
E-Stack - low-energy ventilation systems
E-Stack has developed an
automated natural ventilation system based on industry-standard
programmable logic controllers, which it claims can reduce heating
bills by as much as 50%.
The idea behind the company was born out of a five-year
BP-funded research project on low-energy buildings that was
undertaken under the auspices of the Cambridge University-MIT
Institute. Following on from this research, co-founders Shaun
Fitzgerald and Andy Woods set up E-Stack in 2006 after receiving a
two-year £75,000 applied research grant from the
Carbon Trust to fund the development and testing of a prototype
system.
The firm has been operating commercially for the past 18 months
out of the St John's Innovation
Centre in Cambridge, which provides office accommodation and
business support to early stage companies. It has so far sold the
system to 15, mainly new-build, primary and secondary schools in
areas ranging from Cambridge to Newcastle and Birmingham. Over the
next three years, it also plans to target the offering at public
sector buildings, excluding social housing, and retail developments
such as shopping malls.
Fitzgerald says that although the organisation's system is
proprietary, it uses components that have been used in the building
industry for a long time.
"We are not trying to produce new components that have not been
used before, with all of the associated risks involved in that. The
equipment we have developed is controlled by programmable industry
controllers or sensors that have been configured in a novel way to
deliver performance," he says.
The controllers, which sit both in rooms and at the base of
ventilation shafts, measure factors such as external temperature,
room temperature, CO2 levels and humidity. When such vital signs
become too high or low, the sensors in a given room send a pulse
width modulation signal to the central E-Stack ventilation
unit.
This also includes a controller and optimises air flow using a
variable control damper and air-mixing fans. Signals are also sent
to a key panel, which includes a blue light to let staff know that
windows should be opened and a red light to indicate that they
should be closed.
"Historically, natural ventilation has been associated with
manually controlled windows, but to achieve better energy
performance in buildings, ensuring that they are thermally
comfortable and comply with building regulations, you need some
automation. We are bringing intelligence into rooms by using IT
that controls bits of hardware. It is a simple idea, but the
algorithms we use are non-trivial and that is the clever part,"
says Fitzgerald.
Inkling Software - time series data analysis service
"These days, you can get started with very little, as most of
the infrastructure for solving problems exists," says Andrew
Walkingshaw, a co-founder of
Inkling Software.
"You can take software and build on what others have done. You
can buy in the support services. And all the information you
require is on the web if you look for it. The only thing you need
is the idea, the ability to take things forward and the commitment
to do it," he adds.
Inkling Software was set up in September 2008 by Walkingshaw and
two other physics researchers, with the aim of launching
Timetric. Timetric is a
software-as-a-service-based tool for aggregating time series
statistical data, such as stocks and shares and interest rates, and
displaying the information graphically so that users can view it in
context, and compare and analyse it. The data can then be embedded
into blogs, intranet pages or other online documents.
"Context is where the value is, and the obvious market is
business as companies have internal statistics and indicators that
would be useful to compare and to view in a wider market context,"
says Walkingshaw. "It is about providing a system that makes it
possible to pull together all of the information you need and
enables everyone in the organisation to look at it over the web. If
you can push data out in a form that everyone can use, you are
engineering serendipity."
The company, which is housed in Cambridge University's
Cambridge Enterprise Laboratory incubator, has already
undertaken a trial using statistics from Twitter by launching a
"heckle meter" based on
the number of tweets celebrities receive to gain feedback on the
service.
It has also signed up the Guardian as its first fee-paying
customer and as a means of garnering further feedback. Inkling is
now working in collaboration with journalists to
develop graphs that complement blogs and news stories using the
newspaper group's Open Platform application programming
interfaces.
But to date, the only physical IT equipment it has purchased is
Adobe's Flex for building and maintaining open source applications.
The three founders subscribe to the Google Apps personal
productivity application service and undertake their software
development on their own Apple Mac laptops. They do Windows testing
using PCs they already owned and run Timetric on Linux servers
provided by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service.
Timetric was developed with the Python open source scripting
language using a Django web framework and is in the process of
being migrated from the PostgreSQL open source database to its
cousin, Tokyo Cabinet.
Tokyo Cabinet is
particularly suited to storing vast quantities of time series data
and being able to retrieve it quickly and was discovered via a
blog. A bug tracking service is provided by Lighthouse and version
control by GitHub.com.
"It is a post-2000 phenomenon that more and more people are
getting started with less as they no longer have to do systems
administration. IT is no longer expensive so you can get away with
a few people and not much money. These days, it is about having the
idea and tackling the business side of the equation," says
Walkingshaw.
Useful links:
Photo by Geoffrey
Robinson/Rex Features