Maxim Berglund
Co-founder of StreetHub
www.streethub.com
We hope for another great year for London startups in 2014!
Technology is becoming increasingly location aware on a very granular level. Mobile phones are the perfect technology for location services and so we don’t see the trends for mobile-first or mobile-only startups slowing down any time soon. As more data layers are added on top of the physical world, it is opening up for startups to create solutions to many day-to-day location specific problems. We think this will lead to more disruptive startups in the hyperlocal arena emerging, hopefully many of them in London!
For 2014, I hope to make the right decisions, and pick the right priorities, and continue to motivate and develop a great team of aspiring eCommerce leader. We’re all still learning and it feels great to be part of the Fashion revolution. My predictions for 2014? All brands will try and be within an arms length of desire, personalisation will matter more, new channels will be born as true innovators turn away from Google.
Founder & CEO at Kabbee
www.kabbee.com
Hopes -> Kabbee will help Londoners looking for a cost effective alternative to driving or taking public transport. The app will offer greater choice of fleets and better coverage than ever.
Predictions -> We’ll see various incarnations of the virtual shopping centre allowing consumers to shop for absolutely everything through one app. There will also be a surge in marketplace businesses, pushing comparison to the forefront and opening up choice for the modern consumer.
Paul Aitken
CEO and founder of borro
www.borro.com
We hope to double in size across both our UK and US businesses, as well as to see continued success for our sale advance product where we work with clients who want to sell an asset through auction or private sale (instead we place the item for sale while providing the client with a sale advance loan for up to 70% of the estimated sale price). We’re also looking forward to continued success in our channel partnerships with wealth managers, IFAs and art dealers to name a few. In 2014 we predict an explosion of new investment and M&A activity in the disruptive alternative lending space driven by the first venture-backed IPOs.
Brett Harding
MD & Co-founder of Lovestruck.com
www.Lovestruck.com
Hopes for 2014
There’s no doubt that 2014 is going to be an extremely exciting one for the ‘mobile dating’ user, with apps like Lovestruck, Tinder, POF and Match providing a wealth of choice in the palm of your hand. However, browsing hundreds of profiles on a mobile is still a compromised experience, so I expect that 2014 will see native tablet apps come to the fore and provide an unrivalled visually-arresting and immersive experience that eclipses that seen on website, mobile web and phone apps.
Predictions for 2014
As people are becoming more and more comfortable with technology integrating deeper in to their everyday lives, online dating has the ability to match people in the most incredible ways; augmented reality, smartphone/watch geo-matching, Facetime dating, leveraging the realtime social graph into matching – anything that the online dating industry does to replicate the feeling of ‘serendipity’ would be warmly welcomed by the planet’s 2.3 billion singles.
Alex Saint & Tom Valentine
CEO & MD at Secret Escapes
www.secretescapes.com
Secret Escapes is absolutely in execution mode on a successful business model, so we’re focused on rolling out the model internationally while also increasing our mobile capabilities by providing apps to supplement our existing mobile sites. As a push marketing business, we’re watching carefully the potential disruption to email driven commerce from push notifications and instant messaging apps.
Thank you to Maxim, Alex, Justin, Paul, Brett, Alex and Tom.
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