Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career

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Providing big data solutions for multi-national clients - Charlie Toprak & Ben Jones Aug 08, 2019

Show notes

Charlie is the Senior Technical Recruiter and Ben is the Group CTO at GfK.

GfK harnesses big-data on consumers and brands to provide multi-national clients with actionable intelligence that helps inform their strategies and shapes markets.

GfK Tech is responsible for the entire life cycle of global market research applications. They develop applications for internal and external customers to enable big data. They apply modern technology and proven practices to solve problems around big data storage, big data processing, machine learning, and complex data visualisation. We build innovative greenfield cloud-native data analytics products.

Ben Ben is A passionate, customer and delivery focused global, digital technology leader with broad industry experience across media, financial services and retail as well as a top-tier consultancy foundation.

Charlie Charlie is responsible for managing hiring across GfK. He sources and places candidates in Architecture, Development, DevOps, Data Science, QA & UX/UI roles.

Curating musical playlists for businesses - Marco Baldini Aug 07, 2019

Show notes

Marco is the VP of Engineering at Ambie

Ambie is a smarter way for businesses to manage their background music. By combining music experts with smart and simple tech, we help hundreds of businesses around the world increase efficiency while creating the perfect atmosphere, using music.

Ambie curates playlists for businesses. Their mission is to deliver the right music at the right time to create the mood the business owner expects or what the business owner needs.

Finding your feet in your first management position - Leanne Lynch Aug 01, 2019

Show notes

Leanne is the IT Digital Services Director at Heathrow Airport

A highly accomplished and resilient IT Director, Leanne has global experience in leading the development and execution of IT Strategies to support business transformation. Her success is underpinned by her ability to weave together ideas and the right talent and get tangible deliverable done. Leanne is known completing transformation projects and she makes sure that everyone involved understands the purpose of the transformation and that they have fun when they’re doing it.

Upgrading the auto-auction industry - Mike Stoodley Jul 31, 2019

Show notes

Mike is the development manager at Manheim Auctions.

Starting his development career working on with the little known coding language ‘Progress’, Mike moved from developer to lead developer to development manager. He is now responsible for 11 people who he manages in an agile fashion.

He is currently overseeing the rollout of a business-wide Azure deployment. This project is the culmination of 18 months of work and will be affecting all of Manheim Auctions sites.

Embracing remote working - Juan Cruz Viotti Jul 24, 2019

Show notes

Juan is the software engineer team lead at Balena.io

He focuses on building high-quality software and is passionate about open-source, maintainability, testing, software correctness, and static program analysis. He’s been with Balena for 4 years moving from a Software Engineer to a team lead and now he is the Engineering Lead.

Prior to Balena.io Juan worked as a Software Engineer for Rulemotion and PikaPay.

Delivering products using agile - Drew Murdoch Jul 22, 2019

Show notes

Drew is the Delivery Manager at Karhoo

A self-proclaimed ‘recovering project manager’ Drew’s career started in engineering. He was a backend engineer in the era of Java. Prior to KarHoo, Drew worked at a technology agency working with various clients in the UK in a project focused role delivering technology software.

Drew now manages the creation of award-winning digital products across web, mobile and tablet devices. He is experienced in managing teams of developers, analysts, UX, creative and testers delivering compelling digital products through full product life cycle development and evolution.

Defending your personal privacy with Bitcoin - Nicholas Gregory Jul 19, 2019

Show notes

Nicholas is the CEO at CommerceBank

A cryptocurrencies entrepreneur & software engineer, Nicholas has been involved with bitcoin since 2012. Nicholas is a technologist first and foremost, he caught the bitcoin bug through writing software for banks.

Although he was working in banking Nicholas did question the ethics of the 2008 financial crisis and thought it was unfair that they got bailed out. He came to the conclusion the traditional banking sector wasn’t for him.

This realisation spurred his interest in Blockchain and he found the concept of bitcoin fascinating. This culminated in his role as the CEO at CommerceBank

Nicholas is regularly quoted in major cryptocurrency publications and he is an experienced advisor for government trade bodies on crypto.

Delivering data solutions to the housing sector - Douglas Silverstone Jul 17, 2019

Show notes

Doug is the Head of Data at Metropolitan Thames Valley

Douglas Silverstone is the Head of Data, Analytics and Information Security at Metropolitan Thames Valley. Responsible for the data on 60,000 homes more than 100,000 tenants and countless repairs and components. Housing Data is becoming increasingly complex and interrelated. Be that legislative requirements, IoT, or simply providing a better service to our tenants, both the data we collect and the information we manage is increasing by the day. Douglas has led the Data governance initiative at Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing. Beyond this, he is a thought leader in the sector setting up a housing data forum and a strong advocate of the HACT data standards, which enable associations to work better together and deliver more for their tenants. His approach has led to a fundamental step-change in the way data is understood and used, and helps MTVH to be leaders in their field.

Using video games to learn a language - Matt Parish Jul 09, 2019

Show notes

Matt is the lead full-stack game developer at Wibbu

Currently the lead full-stack game developer at Wibbu, Matt makes games for language learning. His goal is to create immersive experiences for players to learn languages. From the player perspective, this is done as a second point to the game. Wibbu wants its players to enjoy their game experience and then once they’ve finished they realise they’ve learned a language. The school version of Ruby Rei is sold and endorsed by Cambridge University Assessments and is accompanied by an extensive Teacher's Handbook developed by Cambridge University Press.

Before Wibbu Matt has worked in web development and for a games company called Everi, which specialised in slot machine games.

**At 9.13 Matt mentions mention that the school's version of Ruby Rei is scheduled to release in May. As schedules usually do, this has changed. The school's version is currently being sold in Turkey and is going to be launched in Mexico and Spain within the next year?

Getting your company ‘bought in’ to a data strategy - Bo Ruan Jul 08, 2019

Show notes

Bo Run is the Head of Data at the Alzheimer's Society.

After a year leading a data department at Greenpeace, Bo returned to Alzheimer’s Society and became their first Head of Data. This decision was influenced in part by the amazing work the Society does to combat dementia. He was also drawn to the organisation as he relished the challenge of developing a data strategy in what is effectively a greenfield site. Alzheimer’s Society has yet to leverage the data it has access to up to Bo’s appointment so he was uniquely placed to roll out an effective and robust data strategy for the charity.