News English — Startup

Hullabalook aim to make product discovery fun from its current offices located in True.'s incubator/accelerator space in Victoria, just around the corner of the old House of Fraser head office. "We build beautiful and playful online shopping experiences that help to make finding the products we want to buy faster and easier." (Hullabalook) The company launched in June 2016 and moved into the True. space almost immediately and have been there since. Hullabalook is now a team of 10 people backed by Passion Capital and Playfair Capital. Clients already include Made.com, Houseology, Mamas & Papas, Kavehome and John Lewis. An...

Retail Technology: A Visual Future? This is a review of startup companies that we randomly met or which presented at the Tech London Associates’(TLA) Retail Tech meetup at River Island’s Shoreditch tech hub earlier this week. Of the companies, three stood out with clearly defined use cases for machine learning and computer vision technology (popularised as AI). Combined with our earlier work on fashion technology: visual search we are starting to sense a visual theme developing in retail which may or may not combine the physical and digital retailing channels into True Omni Channel retailing. The three companies anonymize data...

Our verdict (of 5): Admittedly we visited Ecommerce Expo in 2016 and were very impressed and the September 2017 edition did not disappoint on content or exhibitors. In fact it seemed as the quality of exhibitors was slightly better than the previous show. Ecommerce Expo had everything from the usual suspects such as Shopify, SAP Hybris, Bronto, Marketo and others to some of the more exciting startups such as Mad Street Den, Phrasee and others. SAP Hybris were mightily excited about their rumoured $350m acquisition of Gigya and the opportunties this will mean for upselling to existing Gigya customers and...

TechPitch 4.5 is monthly pitch platform for tech startups. Thomas Andersson of Styleintelligence was invited to sit on the judges panel for the Luxe, Retail and Fashion edition held in Irwin Mitchell's offices just off Chancery Lane. Eight startups got 3 minutes to pitch their businesses. This elevator-pitch style events are popular in London and get quite a bit of traction. What the judges thought: Optimonk Wearisma Genostyle What the Audience thought: Wearisma Genostyle It should be noted that out of all the eight companies Optimonk was the only company with close to $1m revenue, established customers on two continents...