silversmith award winner

The work of award-winning silversmith Alex Ramsay – who has just moved from a remote workshop in Hackney Wick to the sparkling heart of the diamond and jewellery industry in Hatton Garden – has been selected to launch British Silver Week at Goldsmiths' Hall in June.

Alex took the decision to move her studio soon after winning the silver award in the Goldsmiths' Company Craftsmanship and Design Awards earlier this year.

“The last few months have been very exciting for me,” says Alex. “I exhibited a new collection of work at the Goldsmiths' Fair and at Somerset House, and I sold out at both shows. I also make bespoke pieces of jewellery and silverware to commission and I’ve recently finished a number of interesting projects, including engagement and eternity rings, wedding presents, candle sticks and pepper pots. So I’ve booked myself into some of the top silver shows taking place this year, and I’ve made the decision to base myself in Hatton Garden, the centre of London’s jewellery market.”

The announcement that her work will feature in British Silver Week, the trade’s most prestigious fair, was made last week. “I have to design a new one-off piece to exhibit,” she says. “I’m working on a glass and silver pepper pot which will be a special limited edition with an exclusive hallmark.”

Alex Ramsay specialises in contemporary tableware using advanced techniques to combine silver with other materials, including glass and felt. Her latest collection is inspired by the dramatic landscape of the West Coast of Scotland, where she spent a year as a silversmith in residence from 2006-7. Her memories of slate grey rocks and thundery skies threaded with silver sunlight lay behind the design of her glass and silver bowls and dishes. An ethical designer, she only uses diamonds that are certified as coming from zones free of civil war and conflict for her rings and bracelets.

“The rise in gold and silver prices and the second thoughts people have about luxury purchases as consumer spending falls may hit the market, but jewellery is still, generally speaking, a booming area of sales,” says Innovatory business advisor Patrick Nicholson. “The strong wedding market, and new forms of body jewellery, are all driving sales. Affluent buyers are still willing to splash out for bespoke engagement and wedding rings and other high ticket jewellery items to mark special anniversaries. There are many strong opportunities for creatives and innovators at the top end of the jewellery market.”

cycling safety jacket

First prize in this year's James Dyson Award has gone to London-based product design student Michael Chen, whose Reactiv jacket makes cycling in the city safer.

The Reactiv jacket uses an accelerometer to sense the rider's movement, changing the colour of LEDs on his or her back to green when accelerating, and to red when braking.

A tilt switch in the jacket makes LEDs in the sleeve flash amber when the cyclist lifts their arm to signal a turn.

James Dyson said: "Michael took a very real problem for cyclists ­visibility - and has engineered a solution. Reactiv is a brilliant safety device, especially when cyclists can be so vulnerable. The use of arm movements to operate the tilt switches and LEDs is especially clever".

The James Dyson Award is supported by the James Dyson Foundation, a registered charity whose aim is to inspire and excite young people about design engineering.

Michael is hoping to get his jacket into production, believing that it will reduce the 20,000 accidents involving cyclists on London roads every year.

masterclass in software development

“If you don’t get to know the needs of your customers better, and check out their willingness to buy first, you’ll waste more money on developing new products and then trying to sell them than you will ever get back,” software millionaire Ben Finn OBE warned a masterclass for computing companies at the Innovatory last week.

When it comes to making money from carefully crafted software, Mr Finn – who received an OBE in 2007 for his services to the industry - knows what he’s talking about. Early last year he sold the international music notation company Sibelius - a business which he founded with his brother Jonathan when they were at university twenty years ago – to American media giant Avid Technology for $23 million.

The musically minded brothers started work on the specialist software – which was used to make movies including Billie Elliott and James Bond – when they were still at school. After twenty years of product development, clever pricing, and well chosen distribution partnerships, Sibelius is now the industry standard worldwide. The educational version of the package is also used in three quarters of the schools in the UK.

Mr Finn’s presentation converted two decades of experience into ninety minutes of expert advice. He explained how to develop radical new products and ideas, choose the right business model, set up the best distribution channels, and select the best strategies for pricing and copy protection, right through to the best way of demonstrating new products and how to pick a name for new software that customers will like and understand.

“Windows is short, evocative and memorable, and it translates well internationally,” he said. “It’s a great name for software. But the first name Microsoft came up with was ‘Interface Manager.’ It was clunky, too long, and dreamed by technicians unable to see the product from a general customer’s point of view. A bad name can kill an new and innovative product.”

He gave detailed advice on international sales, explaining that American buyers are the largest market in the world but they expect to pay half the price that software is sold for in London. “When you get a distributor in the States, you’ll still have to go there to do your own marketing,” he pointed out. “They are great at shifting boxes, but that’s all.” He also highlighted how difficult it is to make money from software sales in Asia. “You can buy Sibelius in every city in China,” he says. “The problem is, it’s all pirated. We’ve never sent a single box east, nor received a penny of income back.”

Mr Finn placed a huge emphasis on the need for companies to research the real needs of their customers, and to check that new features they are planning to add to software products really are wanted, will be purchased, and can be created at a profit before going ahead with expensive development work. He set out a detailed mechanism for prioritising the development of new features and a tested formula to analyse benefit-cost ratios (BCRs) of software development work.

“The latest trend, providing software as a hosted service, reduces the delivery costs of companies and lends itself to charging subscriptions,” he explained. “It’s cheaper to get a new software business up and running now than it was when I first started out, and that’s good. But it’s also easier to lose sight of what your customers want, and to make the same old mistakes.”

Mr Finn was speaking to a group of software architects attending a masterclass the Innovatory on Old Street, where he is an associate of the business advice team.

His words has a strong and immediate impact on the twelve companies taking part.

“I feel that the transfer of knowledge from software gurus like Ben to a company like mine is invaluable for someone like me, as I move from factory management to software development,” said Marcia Lazar, the director of F2IT in Great Eastern Street, which is designing software to manage production processes in the fashion industry.

“He was really well informed on all the key issues facing software companies which want to grow,” said Leon Tong, the manager of Bright Lemon, which builds social networking sites for the government and the British Council in its studio in Provost Street. “I’ll be putting some of his advice on marketing and pricing into practice straight away.”

"It was well worth attending," said Geoff Marchant of Coublis in Tabernacle Street. "I found Ben's comments about internationalisation, particularly differential pricing, interesting, the distribution discussion was very relevant and his views on brand names were entertaining."

The masterclass was sponsored by the Gateway to Investment, which has helped more than thirty new companies in London raise a total of £22 million of private equity investment over the last two and a half years.

temporary designer hotel for shoreditch

Eye catching temporary apartment hotels could be erected in the north and south of Hackney over the next few years, before being donated to charities for the homeless, as the result of a radical design breakthrough by local architect Tim Pyne.

Sclater Street in Shoreditch has been selected as the most likely first location for a pioneering thirty two unit self-catering hotel which will take only nine weeks to build, and operate for eight years, before being taken apart and relocated to another piece of wasteland somewhere else in the capital.

The M-hotel – pronounced motel - is a development of the highly acclaimed M-house, a luxurious two-bedroom metal bungalow Pyne designed with Michael Howe of Mae Architects.

The apartment units are made from insulated aluminium panels and lined internally with plaster walls. Made in Newcastle, they contain state of the art kitchen and bathroom fittings, and top end furnishings in the living and sleeping areas. The apartments, each of which has a balcony, slot into a customised steel rack, and are designed to last one hundred years in a changing series of locations..

“At average rental costs for the area the self-catering units will pay for themselves within twenty four months,” Pine explains. “The new hotels will put unused land waiting for development to good use, and give a better return to landowners than temporary car parks, an all too common use of land in limbo. They will draw the European business people arriving to work in the City’s new skyscrapers into Hackney, which will benefit from higher council tax revenues and increased spending in local shops, bars and restaurants. At the moment international business staff are often put up in hotel chains or distant suburban flats with long commute times. Temporary self catering hotels of this kind are also an obvious way to accommodate people working on Olympic projects in the north and east of the borough over the next four years.”

The hotels could turn Hackney’s backstreets into designer locations. “Attractive visual branding from fashion labels like Paul Smith and Prada will be mounted on the external panels of the hotels, sharing and promoting their visual cool,” he says. “Olympic sponsors may also be interested in this feature.”

As well as providing much needed accommodation for the growing international business community, at high speed and low cost, Pyne believes that his innovation will benefit some of the poorest people in the capital too.

“I would like to think that when the apartments are removed from temporary sites, having paid for themselves many times over, the units could be given to charities so that homeless people and couples caught in miserable, temporary accommodation could benefit from them,” says Pyne. “I believe that many large companies could be persuaded to do this. I also think that housing associations and charities will realise that units of this kind can be deployed more quickly than traditional new build, and can complement their modernisation plans.”

“The M-hotel is an innovation with potentially huge local benefits,” says Patrick Nicholson, a construction specialist at the Hackney Enterprise Network. “Hackney’s daytime workforce in Broadgate and in the Olympic Park will get local accommodation, landowners will get higher rental income, local traders will get increased business, the Town Hall will get more Council Tax, and charities and the homeless will get a valuable trickle down too. It’s a great idea.”

Pyne’s rapid assembly, mobile M-Hotel has already generated enquiries from developers in Libya and Dubai, from enthusiasts for extreme sports who need accommodation near mountains and glaciers, and from the organisers of an international sports event shortly to take place in Africa.

inter faith hospital gown

The Inter-Faith Gown is a new hospital gown for patients who would like to be more modestly clothed. It has been developed by Interweave textiles of West Yorkshire. The gown preserves the modesty of patients whose culture or religion requires head garments and trousers in additional to mainstream hospital wear. The elements can be mixed-and-matched to enable the patient to obtain the required degree of coverage.

The Linen Services Manager at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust identified a need for the gown and developed the design.

software development for fashion sector

You don't need an MBA or research background to create an innovative and investible business. Marcia Lazar had spent twenty yeas developing the clothing company Science London, but she couldn’t find an off the shelf software package to manage her production cycle with the price and functions needed by the owner of a small business. So she wrote a new system called WhatsIt herself, with functions that guided procurement decisions, costings, the production process, and every step through to packing. She sold a beta version to friends and then to fifty commercial clients, before asking the Innovatory for help with a business plan. Before long, she became a client of the Gateway to Investment and raised a six figure sum to develop the final product from investor Simon Worth. "When you work for yourself," Marcia say, "you don't always value what you know as much as you should." Marcia's experience in the garment industry meant she had an extremely clear vision of a problem in the marketplace and the quality, functionality and price of the product that could solve it," says Kevin Davey of the Innovatory. "This led to an innovatory product, and the birth of a scaleable business that knew its route to market. No programming house on its own could have encoded a product so well informed by decades of problem solving in the international industry targeted by this product." The software is now being sold as F2IT and you request a demo here.

diy kyoto fight climate change

There’s a lot of pressure on small businesses to reduce their energy consumption and their impact on the environment these days. This may well push up the costs of many local firms. But the financial health of one friend of the Innovatory, DIY Kyoto in Penn Street, has been boosted by worries about global warming.

DIY Kyoto's list of shareholders is growing steadily, and hardly a month goes by without the business featuring on TV or in the national press.

The product attracting all the attention is called the Wattson, a tool which measures the electrical consumption of household items and helps you to estimate the annual bill for items like your kettle, your cooker or shower. The Wattson reveals startling facts about the huge and secret appetite for electricity of many household appliances.

“We have found that leaving the microwave on, just so you can use the clock, can cost as much as £50 a year,” says director Richard Woods. “The Wattson also shows that many television sets use ten times as much energy as music systems in homes. And it confirms that most items left on standby soak up just as much power as when they are in full use. People don’t know these things, and the device helps families to learn about energy use, and energy waste, while they are together in the home. We want to help households to understand and to reduce the amount of electricity they waste. The investment we have received will get the Wattson into mass production, and we intend to follow it up with new energy saving products for the home.”

The company’s team of three designers – Greta Clarke, Richard Woods, and Jon Sawdon Smith – met after graduating from the Royal College of Art.

It has taken them six years to develop the Wattson, which has two components, a sensor/transmitter and a reader. The sensor is clipped onto the power supply between the meter and the fusebox. It uses electromagnetic induction to measure the energy entering the house, and transmits the data, using wi fi, to the hand held reader anywhere in the house.

When you turn an electrical item on, the Wattson tells you exactly how much extra power you are using and what it costs. To underline its message, heavy electricity use makes the monitor glow red, and normal use blue. Up to date electricity prices can be downloaded to the handset over the internet.

“Many of our customers go round the house with their children, measuring how much leaving TV sets and computers on standby actually costs the household, and how much using the power shower adds to the family’s bills, “ Richard explains. “The data it collects on energy use - for a day, for a year or for a lifetime - can be recorded and stored, to guide changes in the household’s habits and to measure their impact.”

The Wattson was developed with support from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA). DIY Kyoto has also received a business grant and help with its search for investors from the Innovatory on Old Street, through the Gateway to Investment service.

The Independent praised the invention, dubbing it an “ecological tamagotchi” for the family. The Wattson has been featured on Richard and Judy’s breakfast show on Channel Four, and BBC 2’s Working Lunch.

For more information on DIY Kyoto visit www.diykyoto.com

eco buildings in hackney

The Olympic organisers and the developers in Broadgate aren’t the only people erecting futuristic buildings in Hackney. The borough is now attracting some of the most innovative architects in London, and they are using wood, straw, recycled materials and wind turbines in their attempts to reduce the local impact on the environment.

Plastered bales of straw are the main material used in an innovative new building at Hackney City Farm in Goldsmith’s Row, where a training centre designed by the environmental experts Amazonails has recently opened.

“The foundations of the centre are rammed earth tyres, and the bale walls are plastered with lime and clay recycled form the farm’s own pottery,” says Emma Appleton. “The main cross beam of the building is made of greenheart wood, a tropical hardwood reclaimed from the Norfolk sea defences. We also salvaged a teak boat from the 1930s that has been stripped down to make the desks in the room.”

“This building points the way forward for companies looking for less environmentally damaging forms of creating homes and workspace,” says Patrick Nicholson, a construction specialist at the Hackney Enterprise Network. “The materials for a house built with straw bales cost significantly less than brick and block. The outlay for a family-sized strawbale house in the UK would be about £60,000 plus the price of the land. Plastered strawbale walling has a surprisingly high level of fire resistance, and the UK currently produces 4 million tons of straw a year more than it needs. This is sufficient to build 250,000 well insulated and affordable new homes a year.”

Strawbale building techniques will be demonstrated at this year's Ecobuild show, an annual event dedicated to sustainable forms of design and construction, at Earl's Court from 26-28 February.

Hackney Council recently granted planning permission for a nine-storey tower in Murray Grove in Shoreditch which the architects, Waugh Thistleton, say will be the world’s tallest timber residential building.

The Stadthaus will be constructed using an Austrian solid timber system with wood from sustainable spruce forests, giving the tower – which will only take nine weeks to build – an unusually low carbon footprint. The stair and lift cores, load-bearing walls and even the floor slabs will all be constructed entirely from timber. Demand for the nineteen flats in the tower was extremely high and all the apartments were reserved on a recent launch day.

Waugh Thistleton’s designers are also the brains behind the fourteen storey Kinetica, fifty six apartments and three floors of commercial space to be built in Ramsgate Street, behind the Kingsland Shopping Centre, by 2010.

The futuristic tower is specially designed to harness wind power, which will be captured on its south side by four vertical turbines designed and installed by wind technology experts Quiet Revolution. Any renewable energy generated by the turbines which is not used by the residents will be forwarded to the National Grid.

The building will also have a very unusual façade – pixillated like an over-enlarged photograph - inspired by the images produced by German artist Gerhad Richter. The external surface will consist of thousands of black, grey and white panels made from waste timber.