Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The event was attended by over 500 delegates, who conducted more than 800 one-to-one meetings – designed to gain commercial exposure for small companies in the region with viable technologies – and visited the exhibitions of the 40 companies in attendance.

“Now in its fourth year, Technology World is maturing into a must-do event for the region's ICT businesses - it is unique in enabling delegates to meet groups of buyers and have one-to-one meetings all in one place,” said UKTI international trade director for the EoE, Paul Williams.

“For smaller companies in particular is it a great opportunity to get access to large multinationals without traveling half way across the world.”

In the big boys corner; Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo, LG Electronics and Sharp all made an appearance, while local firms were represented by the likes of Plextek, Cyan Technology, C-MAC MicroTechnology and Raspberry Software.

Raspberry Software's director, Simon Hopper told of his successful meeting with Samsung over deploying Raspberry's Smartphone applications on its devices, and getting intelligence and feedback on the market in Japan from UKTI's commercial officer based at the British Embassy in Tokyo.

“Coming to meet these people at TechnologyWorld gets us over the problem of cold calling or sending emails to these large international companies, where it is virtually impossible to get to the right person to talk to,” he said.

Operations director for Cambridge-based wireless technology company IOTAS, Kevin Spalding had a similar experience: “More than 70 per cent of our business is overseas mainly in Japan, Taiwan, China and the US, so being able to meet key decision makers from our potential customers in these markets here in Cambridge is fantastic - providing great savings in time and money, as well as high quality first time contact.”