"Glazed Conference - The Dawn of the Wearable Economy (London 2014)"
Raphael Crouan, Tony Fish, Paul Miller, Benjamin Joffe: these investors knew not to “miss mobile” and many of them have made the transition to be early adopters on the venture side. Hear their thoughts and opinions on how the EU investment model shakes out in the next few years. Will the EU fall flat or will they see more Tapulous and Angry Birds on the horizon?
"Products transform the ability to go and get funding where software is getting harder and harder and harder."
Tony Fish, Investor, Author and Entrepreneur, SBT Venture Capital
Board Director with innovation and high growth experience cutting across mobile, web and digital. Having founded, co-founded and sold a number of businesses over the past 25 years, I remain passionate about highly disruptive tech which is fast scaling and at an early stage. Tony has a style which is based on fast iteration, trust, deep involvement, clear decision making, robust financials, transparency and strong open governance controls. You can follow Tony on Twitter at @tonyfish.
"Three years ago we didn’t have anybody coming to us about hardware stuff. Two years, one year ago we had a lot of people coming to us with wearable devices. Now we get more people coming together with data services based on other people’s devices.”
Paul Miller, Partner, Bethnal Green Ventures
Paul is a partner at Bethnal Green Ventures where he leads our strategy and partnerships. He was previously co-founder and CEO of education technology startup School of Everything as well as working for the think tanks Demos and Forum for the Future. You can follow Paul on Twitter at @rellimluap.
"There are three kind of avenues for wearables: either you are very specialised and then it’s all about the function or you are invisible, it’s non-invasive but it does the job or you are fashionable. And I think we are still a few steps away from finding really good wearable products with these characteristics."
Benjamin Joffe, General Partner, HAXLR8R
Benjamin is General Partner of HAXLR8R (“HAX”), the first accelerator building “lean hardware startups”. An expert on startup ecosystems with 14 years experience in China, Japan, Korea and USA, he has been invited to speak in over 200 events across 23 countries including at TEDx, SXSW, LeWeb, TechCrunch Disrupt, GMIC, Stanford, Berkeley and INSEAD.
Prior to HAX, Benjamin founded the consultancy Plus Eight Star Ltd., and worked with clients such as Microsoft, Tumblr and Harvard Business School to identify innovative services in Asia’s digital space. Benjamin is also an angel investor in Asia-based and hardware startups. You can follow Benjamin on Twitter at @benjaminjoffe.