In December last year TechNorthEast was founded to 'inform and connect' business communities across the North East and Tees Valley using a ‘rich picture’ of our Digital Tech Sector.
TechNorthEast is a completely free resource for anyone looking to start a business here; grow a business here; move a business here; those looking to raise finance; develop a career; build a workforce; looking for other companies to work with, those looking to shout about how good our region is, or for those, like our founder Stuart Lynn, who just wanted to find out what was really going on across our region and how to get involved in order to help develop and promote the sector.
Across the region there were many excellent groups and individuals already promoting our digital tech sector, namely; The North East LEP, Tees Valley LEP, Sunderland Software City, Dynamo North East, Digital Union, Sphere Network, and all of the Regional Invest organisations.
However, it was still incredibly difficult to navigate the region without knowing who the right people and organisations were to speak to. Also as a region we weren’t good at sharing a consistent narrative around the true potential of our digital tech sector. Worse still much of the narrative that was being shared originated from outside of the region and too often this wasn't representative and didn’t do our region justice.
Therefore, we created TechNorthEast to help build a consistent regional narrative and to complement the work of the aforementioned groups to further promote the entire ecosystem in order to realise the potential of our region's digital tech sector.
The TechNorthEast ‘rich picture’ was created by mapping and classifying the region's digital technology ecosystem to inform and help people easily understand and navigate our sector, and as you might expect, being a digital sector initiative, it’s delivered digitally via the TechNorthEast website.
The website is also complemented by a growing digital community; a daily news service, with content federated from TechNorthEast listed businesses; and links with the North East’s tech scene 'Tech Diary' and “Meetup’s” services.
Platform usage has grown steadily over the year and now includes 300+ linked businesses, a digital community with over 2000 supporters, and the level of engagement across both website and social media channels is very encouraging.
But nothing stands still. We’ve recently released a number of enhancements to the website:
1. To provide better access, especially small form mobile devices, TechNorthEast now supports a responsive deign.
2. We’ve simplified the user experience to make it more intuitive and significantly improved load and search times, whilst removing ~50% of the code in the process (less is definitely more).
3. We’ve extended the classification model and we’re experimenting with a number of new business types. For example, Fintech, Healthtech, and High Growth businesses can be filtered and explored quickly and easily.
4. The process of growing the listing of businesses is continuous, with an additional 30 new businesses included just this week.
If you would like your business to be listed on TechNorthEast simply drop us an email at contact@technortheast.co.uk and include your address, website URL and a high quality image of your company logo.
Did we say it was free, yes it's completely free, and we will never use your information for marketing purposes or otherwise. Check out the new website and let us know what you think.