London’s tech start-up competition flops

April 8, 2014 Leave a comment

Last updated: March 25, 2014 5:37 pm

London’s tech start-up competition flops

By Robert Cookson

A competition to attract tech start-ups to London has been quietly shut down after the organisers failed to find any suitable candidates among the thousand that applied.

The Million Pound Start-up competition, whose supporters included London Mayor Boris Johnson and the government-backed Tech City Investment Organisation (TCIO), was announced last May in a blaze of publicity.

But it has been cancelled with no public notice after the organisers decided that none of the candidates that applied from 72 countries were suitable for the £1m prize, it emerged on Tuesday.

Digital Shoreditch, the organisation overseeing the competition, was looking for a “dynamic young company” with the capability of using the £1m equity investment to “build a £100m company based in London”.

Its inability to find a suitable candidate from the 1,047 applicants is the latest blow to TCIO, a government-appointed body that promotes London as a centre for technology and media businesses.

While the government has sought to closely associate itself with “Tech City” – the cluster of technology companies in east London – it has faced growing criticism from entrepreneurs who say it is too bureaucratic and has done little to help them.

Digital Shoreditch has made no formal statement about the competition’s cancellation. But it announced on Tuesday that it had decided to “suspend new activities” for Digital Shoreditch Festival 2014, its annual festival for start-ups near the area known as “Silicon Roundabout”.

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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