MOBILE phone location technology entrepreneur Gordon Povey is returning to his roots with a service that will help people create a diary and life management tool from the masses of information held online about them.
The entrepreneur is developing a system that will link all the material posted by people on social media with things like payment and travel records held on their mobile phones to create a comprehensive digital footprint. They could use this to see what they have been doing and to manage future activity.
He plans to develop this using some of the technology owned by the Trisent business, which he sold to Artilium for £1.7m in 2008. Trisent was best known for developing software that could figure out where phones were. It also produced a prototype of a system that could automatically record where people had been and what they had been doing.
Mr Povey has bought back some of the intellectual property concerned in the belief it could be used to develop a product with wide appeal.
“I think there’s a huge market for this,” he said, adding: “Most people now own a smartphone that can run apps and simple context aware services are already used by online retailers such as Amazon to try to suggest products based on what they have learned about you.
“The Trisent vision is of a platform that automatically collects all of your personal data for you in one place in order to provide useful and personalised services.”
The Glasgow-born businessman reckons the core technology will allow his systems to offer advantages over other ‘lifelogging’ products.
He is considering business models which could include the business generating revenues by offering hosting services under which it would keep records about users secure.
Potential investors have expressed interest but Mr Povey does not want to sell shares at this stage. He expects to fund the initial development work with a six figure investment, drawing on savings accumulated in a career which has spanned academia and business.
The electronics expert has relaunched Trisent after spending two years running Dukosi, which has developed battery management technology for the motor industry.
Mr Povey took charge of Edinburgh-based Dukosi in January 2014 following the death of its founder Stephen Churcher in a cycling accident. He focused the firm on technology it had developed to boost the efficiency of batteries with an eye on the growing market for electric cars and helped it raise more than £2m development funding.
Dukosi has huge potential in Mr Povey’s opinion. He decided to leave to return to the mobile sector with a business of his own.
“I have re-acquired what I needed from Artilium to re?launch Trisent with the vision
suitably adapted for today’s technology and markets,” said Mr Povey.
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