Finding Technology Companies

Category: Blog

By Janice

10/07/2015

We founded Company Connecting (CC) in October 2014 because we wanted to help IT tech companies talk with one another and to provide a showcase for these companies.

We started to gather information about tech companies, which we broke down into various categories and attributes. We then assigned attributes against companies to create a granular search mechanism.

We were keen to work with other organisations to get a prototype up and running. Business Gateway, put CC forward to Interface which helps connect business with Universities. This led to us receiving a grant from the Scottish Funding Council to work with Strathclyde University, and in early April 2015, the prototype was up and running. By this time we had reviewed and categorised 50% of the tech companies registered in Scotland. The prototype was a great proof of concept and led to us engaging with our first customer.

We used the prototype to identify potential suppliers to develop the production site. We selected Verinote who are located in Codebase in Edinburgh. While Verinote built the site, we continued to work on the data, and by the end of June we had loaded 95% of the IT tech companies registered in Scotland. We also started to look at tech companies in other areas i.e. other parts of the UK, in particular London, Estonia, Italy and the Netherlands. We are actively reviewing how best to load the data from these areas and countries, as well as other countries such as Ireland, Norway, Lithuania, Latvia and Finland.

In summer 2015, we are ‘live’, however we are continuing to develop CC and all feedback is most welcome. We are interested in how people will use the site, how useful the information is, what else users would like, and anything else you would like to tell us.