The London startup scene is well-documented. But the UK innovation ecosystem is not confined to the city. All types of companies are emerging from surrounding places, in Cambridge, Edinburgh, Brighton, Manchester, Birmingham, small Welsh villages, an island in the English Channel.
Here is a list of the top 25, although we could've easily named 125. Nominate some of your own picks in the comments below.
1. SongKick, London
On Songkick's platform, fans can track their favorite bands and artists, and find the latest concert venues, tour dates and ticket news. The site indexes venue websites, ticket vendors and even local newspapers to create a huge database of upcoming concerts around the world.
2. PixelPin, Bath
PixelPin replaces passwords with pictures as a form of online authentication. Users choose a personal image and four "Passpoints" in sequence on the image. This approach cuts out phishing, hacking and dictionary attacks, and users can access web services from mobile, tablet, laptop or PC.
3. Brandwatch, Brighton
Social media monitoring system Brandwatch reads and summarizes web discussions about brands, people and products. The company parses through these huge amounts of data by finding and analyzing relevant information. Its online application lets users define keywords, which it tracks continually. Users can access and respond to every keyword mention and analyze the bigger picture of trends, campaigns and competitors.
4. Crowd.fm, Manchester
A promotion tool for events, Crowd.fm allows promoters to list and select their events across social media channels, as well as event-specific sites such as SoundCloud, Songkick and Last.fm. It saves time and maximizes reach across fan networks. Users can track all events to not only generate business, but also to measure their efficiency.
5. Storystream, London
Storystream is a content curation and publishing tool that enables brands, products and events to tell stories in real time. The SaaS platform brings together audience insight, social content and content creation tools. This means brands can publish real-time stories on their websites and across social media, on any device and any platform. Launched in 2012, the company already works with brands like Porsche, Getty Images, Michelin and Credit Suisse.
6. Psonar, Cambridge
Unlike other music streaming services, Psonar is pay-as-you-go. Users can buy credits for tracks that have neither expiration dates nor ads. Users pay $0.01 per track and receive 70 free tracks to start. You can see why the company describes itself as a "digital jukebox in the cloud."
7. IOVOX , London
IOVOX is a voice as a service (VaaS) platform with which entrepreneurs create voice applications, offline advertising and accompanying analytical tools. IOVOX ascribes analytical value to phone calls, allowing users to monetize more than minutes. It's using data to turn the traditional voice business into a big data play.
8. Videoplaza, London
Videoplaza empowers broadcasters, publishers and ad networks to maximize their advertising revenues from the new IP-delivered TV. Videoplaza’s ad management platform, Karbon, monetizes video experiences across PCs, mobile devices, tablets, game consoles, IPTV and smart TVs.
9. Bloom.fm, London
Bloom.fm is a streaming music service for the smartphone generation. The app's beautiful interface is simple to use, boasts a vast 18 million song catalogue and an innovative pricing structure. The free service offers ad-funded genre and artist-based radio stations and the world's first $1.50 per month subscription, and lets users "borrow" 20 tracks at a time. More features are available for $7.50 and $15 a month, respectively.
10. The Painted House, Wales
Rather like a cook showing off recipes and techniques, The Painted House shares how to renovate homes. Its highly trafficked website offers tips and videos on painting houses. Based in a small Welsh village, the company nonetheless earned customers across the globe, as it's a business based on "applicators," not applications.
11. gamesGRABR, London
With GamesGRABR, gamers can discover, collect, play and buy titles across the web. Players can create their own unique collections, browse other gamers’ collections, follow friends, reGRAB games into their own collections, as well as share, rate, play and download games created for any device.
12. Bardowl, Bath
Bardowl is disrupting the world of audiobooks, by presenting the "Spotify of audiobooks" in one app. For $15 per month Bardowl allows time-saving, unlimited exploration and streaming of audiobooks. This includes favoriting for continued listening even when offline, and social sharing of short audio quotes.
13. Every1Mobile, Brighton
Every1Mobile uses mobile social networks to build communities for 15 to 35-year-olds in Africa, across health, education, jobs and entertainment content. Based in Brighton with an office in Cape Town, the company recently raised $1.7 million in angel funding and records more than 3 million monthly visits to its sites; it serves 25 million pages each month.
14. Skyscanner, Edinburgh
Skyscanner is a global travel search site, providing instant online comparisons for millions of flights and over 1,000 airlines, as well as car hire and hotels. Skyscanner’s flexible search options let users browse prices across a whole month, or even a year, to obtain the best deals. The company employs more than 30 different nationalities from its offices in Edinburgh and Singapore, and serves 25 million visitors every month in more than 25 different languages.
15. Crunch, Brighton
Crunch is an online accounting cloud software system that helps people set up companies, raise invoices, record expenses and file tax returns. At a price point less than $90 per month, the company is disrupting the staid and traditional world of accountancy, with its team of human accountants and account managers to back up its service.
16. Sharemyplaylists.com, Sunderland
Playlists is a music discovery tool for Spotify that offers high-quality playlists to customers, for example, Recommendations, Charts, Most Played, Genres and Moods. The company’s music fans have shared 22 million tracks via almost 140,000 playlists, and the site receives 1.5 million unique visitors each month. For one, Playlists has 350,000 registered members, with 200 new playlists uploaded each day.
17. Powered Now, Isle of Wight
Based on a small island off the UK’s South Coast, Powered Now is a mobile admin platform that targets the building trade of plumbers, construction workers, electricians and heating engineers. With the platform, people in these trades can send quotes and invoices on-site and off-site, obviating the need to employ expensive admin staff.
18. Africori, London
Founded in 2012, Africori as a digital music company that aggregates, digitizes and distributes music in Africa to a growing number of digital outlets, such as telecom companies, iTunes, Amazon, and streaming services like Spotify and Deezer. Yoel Kenan, Africori founder and CEO, has more than 20 years of experience in the global music industry at senior level, in the fields of A&R, marketing and business development at Universal, SONY-BMG, MP3.com Europe and Jazz FM.
19. Decoded, London
Decoded runs a number of digital transformation programs that teach the basis of code. Passionate about coding as a tool to change business, owner Kathryn Parsons is one of London’s leading entrepreneurs. The company teaches leadership skills and innovation, and works across a range of clients, including Microsoft, BBC, National Health Service, Facebook, Google and Barclaycard.
20. I Am Loyd, London
Loyd Mobile is a free social app discovery platform that allows users to rate apps, share with their networks, and follow apps their favorite celebrities, friends and brands use, too. The company offers a fun way to navigate more than one million apps available on the market, finding ones tailored to the likes and recommendations of a user's extended network.
21. Seeker, London
Seeker allows customers to use their data to save time and money, plus increase revenue. It enables site testing (QA and Live) scanning in order to make strategic decisions from test data, and ensures bidding tools and management teams receive the correct data. Company founders Daniel Wilson and Tielman de Villiers previously met while working together at lastminute.com; they set up the business after teaming up a hackday event.
22. Droplet, Birmingham
Droplet is a mobile money app that allows customers to load currency on their mobile phones and send payments to people for free. Merchants sign up for the service, sync business bank accounts and send special offers to others who use the service. It also works with developers who aim to improve its service, by offering merchants new tools.
23. GetTaxi, London
With the GetTaxi app, people can call a black London taxi with one click. Make a payment, tip and even save a receipt through the app, which also tracks proximity of the London taxi. Set up in London, GetTaxi now operates in Moscow and Israel, and will launch later this year in New York. It also offers a VIP service, wherein frequent users can earn points for free rides and other contingent benefits.
24. Digital Shadows, London
Digital Shadows monitors and measures publicly available data and information that companies and individuals leave behind online. These "shadows" may expose a company’s key employees, IP or network and security settings. Its Spotlight product provides a risk assessment service that scours the Internet, and its team of security analysts work with the customer to mitigate the risks of hostile online comments and elements.
25. Locomizer, London
Recently accepted to the Collider12 and a UK-based startup accelerator program, Locomizer raised $150,000 in investment. The company’s science-based algorithm has built a B2B geo-behaviorial platform to provide matching, targeting and recommendation services. Locomizer’s Audience Discover Engine integrates into third-party services, or accesses them via its API, increasing yield for inventory owners through premium ads.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Shaun Dunphy