Photo: John Herbert (cc)
Aside from the Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, London is also home to a really pumping startup scene. During the past years, the city has become one of the hottest international startup hubs in the world and year 2015 promises to be an exciting year for the British capital.
In the upcoming months, London will host many tech and startup-related meetups and conferences, such as BitcoinEXPO 2015 (January 24th-25th), The Europas Awards and Conference (June 16th) and London’s Second Fintech Week (September), among many others.
The London startup scene has been buzzing since 2010, when Prime Minister David Cameron launched Tech City UK, a publicly-funded organization which aims to accelerate the growth of digital businesses. Plenty of tech startups have been created in England in the last years, and many of them are already reaching global success. We have been following many of them and gathered a short lists of some we really like…
Here are 10 London startups you should follow in 2015:
1. Hailo
Launched in November 2011 and already available in more than 20 cities, Hailo is an easy-to-use app that allows you to get a taxi in two quick steps. Since September 2014, Hailo also includes an innovative service that automatically recognizes when a passenger is in a Hailo vehicle and allows to pay for a street-hailed taxi ride with the app.
2. Citymapper
Citymapper is an award-winning app that makes it easy to get around in a city. With Cittymapper, you can look for directions, find public transport or even pin an address, convert it in a link and send it to your friends. Also, you have your own dashboard, where you can save favorite places and public transport stops and lines.
3. TransferWise
Under the slogan “money without borders”, TransferWise allows people to send money abroad in a fast simple and cheap way, charging you 10 times less than the usual bank fees.
4. SwiftKey
SwiftKey is an on-screen keyboard that adapts to the way you type. It learns your writing style, predicts what you’re going to type next and shows its suggestions on top of the keyboard, so you can enter a whole word with a single tap, instead of typing it letter by letter.
5. Teddy The Guardian
Teddy The Guardian claims to be the first smart flush toy. It’s a smooth, baby-friendly teddy bear that carries a high tech sensor that tracks your baby’s heart rate, oxygen saturation and body temperature, and sends the data to your smartphone’s TTG app.
6. Babelverse
Based on the fact that machine translations are not reliable for real conversations, Babelverse is a global community of remote interpreters. It offers a real-time interpretation service, without the need of expensive specialized equipments nor requiring interpreters to be on-site.
7. Moves
Moves is an app that automatically recognizes if you are walking, running or cycling, keeps a record of your activity and calculates the distance, duration, steps and calories burned. Unlike other pedometers, Moves is always on, so you just have to keep your smartphone in your pocket or your bag and the app will do all the job.
8. Triptease
Created by three travel lovers, Triptease aims to reunite hoteliers with their guests, taking middlemen off the equation. Triptease’s widget, installed on the hotels booking engine, displays live prices from around the web, giving customers the confidence they need to book directly at the hotel website. Besides that, Triptease allows hoteliers to invite guests to create a digital postcard and share it through their social media, what incentivize guests’ friends to join the hotel’s database and to book directly.
9. HomeTouch
HomeTouch is an elderly care digital service. They offer an online marketplace of curated carers and a tablet-based app, that includes medication reminders, mood tracker, activity goal settings or radio, among other features.
10. Yplan
Yplan app lets you browse through a curated list of the best events in town every night. It also allows you to book and pay for the tickets, in just two taps. Events are typically featured 48 hours before they start, so Yplan is intended for spontaneous.