Member Article

Behind the business with Linkz

Andrew Perry-Smith is the chief executive of mobile direct response platform, Linkz, which lets consumers securely convert media into digital content for use on smartphones and tablets. Bdaily went behind the business with Andrew to find out more.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

As a mobile technology business, we are very reliant on the operating systems uses smartphones, principally iOS and Android. Apple recently changed some of the rules about how apps interact with information on phones using iOS, which has had a substantial knock-on effect on how we upgrade apps working on iPhones. A quick bug fix for a key client resulted in nearly a month’s work and delay with a consequent loss of momentum on a critical sale. This has meant taking some tough decisions on resource allocation and delaying other opportunities.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

We built a mobile technology platform from scratch that delivers very advanced print to mobile interactivity, allows clients to develop mobile optimised content and sites at very low cost and has unique data tracking capabilities. This has been a substantial investment and the goal posts have moved all the way round the pitch and back again. Although the Linkz platform will be an ever-evolving mobile solution, delivering it in time and below budget has been an enormous achievement.

What is your most important focus for the coming year, and what do you hope to achieve?

Achieving commercial breakthrough is the key challenge for this coming year. We have had many conversations with key clients and the interest in the technology has been enormous. We are in the process of agreeing licencing deals in India, Australasia, US and Europe and I have signed up a number of resellers in the UK. There are some big consumer brands interested in using the platform and detailed conversations on implementation are on-going. Although Linkz is already in use in some areas, we need the big, high-profile campaign to change the game.

What excites you most about your industry and business?

It is evolving extremely fast. Our mobile phones are increasingly integral to our lifestyles, as evidenced by the look of panic on someone’s face when they realise they have lost theirs. We use them all the time and do more things with them. Trying to keep pace and anticipate what may happen next is exhilarating. And it’s all backed by the confidence that this market can only go on developing, growing and evolving.

What do you wish you’d known when starting out?

I wish that we had appreciated more at the start how important it is to keep things close and under direct control. When you have very scarce resources in terms of both time and money, it’s important not to waste it. We made some early and wasteful mistakes in contracting out for some key commercial and development tasks, which proved to be costly as the people to whom we contracted didn’t understand our vision and weren’t interested in keeping pace with its evolution.

What will be the “next big thing“ in your industry, and how do you plan to handle it?

Google Glass is a very exciting project – it will change the way that people interact with information and content around them. For Linkz in particular, which is an interface between passive media and interactive content, this will be a massive development.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .