The Financial Times

Venture Capitalists Name the Stars of the English Tech Tour
June 30, 2004

The 24 companies chosen for the English Tech Tour would make a fantasy portfolio for the venture capitalists that made the final selection. But if there was one company they wished they had in their real portfolios, which would it be?

Jamie Mitchell. president of the English Tech Tour, would take Splashpower. He says: "I have always been fascinated by the possibility of wireless power. getting rid of all those cables. and Splashpower seems to have gone halfway to solving the issue. They've developed recharging without wires."

The Cambridge-based company has developed Splashpad, a universal wireless charging platform that recharges mobile devices. It is simply a portable flat surface powered from any electrical outlet that devices can be placed on to charge them.

Nigel Grierson of Doughty Hanson likes Bristol-based Icera Semiconductor. which designs high-performance chips for mobile phones using a breakthrough signal-processing technology.

But his liking for the company has a lot to do with its founder. Stan Boland: "He built a company before - [chipset maker] Element 14 - that was sold to Broadcom for more than $600m, He is a serial entrepreneur with great passion and enthusiasm and !cera could be another great success."

Quester's Jeremy Milne says he has always been impressed by Manchester's Transitive Corporation: "It embodies everything that a VC looks for - clever technology. and it already has two or three customers that have paid it quite a bit of money for that."

Mr Milne says Transitive has been pursuing something of a "Holy Grail" in developing software that allows applications compiled for one platform or processor to run on another without any source code or binary changes: '"There's enormous amounts of value tied to the ability to do that."