To mark the conclusion of our first Engineering Accelerator, we spoke to Paul from PlaceDashboard, one of the four start-ups participating in the programme
What's your role with PlaceDashboard?
Founder and Chief Technical Officer
What motivates you?
I’m basically a geek through and through and love to tackle problems and challenges through innovative use of technology.
What's your favourite thing about your job?
Getting access to a huge range of tech and having the opportunity to explore its use cases within the business, then seeing it through to becoming a new product for customers.
What are your hobbies?
I love to get out and about with my family, visiting the lakes or a national trust location. I also enjoy baking the occasional cake and playing games, both digital and board.
What are you looking forward to in the next 12 months?
For the business it's bringing in AI tools and predictive models, and seeing what we can unlock from our behaviour modelling with these technologies. Outside of business, definitely Avengers Endgame and Star Wars Episode 9.
What's your proudest accomplishment?
Getting my two daughters into Star Wars, Marvel and Lego before my wife realised what I was doing.
The Engineering Accelerator is a collaboration between GCHQ, Wayra UK, Cisco and Manchester Science Partnerships to help start-ups in Manchester rapidly develop their products and services.
We provide business and technical mentoring to selected start-up companies to help them to grow. In return, our software engineers benefit from the unique opportunity of working with emerging tech companies trying to solve problems that have parallels with our own challenges.
In 2019 we mentored four emerging start-up companies on our three month programme. These were PlaceDashboard, Jobseekrs, Locometric and Y?Not.
