TechHub

Welcome to a new feature on the TechHub blog - Member Posts. We're selecting a TechHub Member each week to tell you a bit about their company and product, and to talk about some of the issues they're facing or interesting industry news that's caught their eye.


First up, is Neil from Caped Koala Studios...


Neil & some of the Caped Koala guys in their previous digs before they moved to TechHub.

I’m Neil, CEO of Caped Koala Studios creators of educational virtual world Pora Ora. 

We’ve been resident at TechHub since Oct 2010 and you can see from the photo why we wanted to move here and away from the serviced office at Regus – paying £950 for a tiny desk and 1Mb/second internet connection does not compare to the more flexible approach at TechHub and their 100 Mb/second connection.

Our product Pora Ora is a 3D virtual world where primary school children can learn, play and interact online. All content on the platform is mapped directly to the national curriculum with a ‘parents’ portal, providing parents and teachers with personalised progression reports. 

Our aim is to foster a love of learning in young children, by engaging them in fun, social and educational content. The game offers children incentives including in-game currency, character progression and the ability to unlock new levels, enabling them to improve key skills at a level tailored to their personal ability.

Since moving to TechHub we have benefitted enormously from the  wide range of networking opportunities which have contributed directly to a number successes, namely: 

    Won the IC digital innovation contest
    Runners-up at geek n rolla
    Listed in the top-100 European startups in the Telegraph

We are now working actively testing our next release of Pora Ora which will be available to the public by close of play this week. This has many new exciting features that will kick-start the Pora Ora rollout. We have also engaged the BallouPR guys who sit behind us at TechHub and they will be running a number of events for us in the coming weeks so watch the space...

We have offices in London, Cork (Ireland) and Poznan (Poland) and, in total, employ 16 hard-working and creative individuals who want to put the fun back into learning!

In terms of recent news that's caught our eyes: we're seeing active increased interest in the MMO gaming space with the recent news of Tiny Speck’s latest  $10.7m round.

This really hammers home the message that there is significantly more money available on the West Coast US that Europe for early stage pre revenue companies. 

If you'd like to chat, you can find us on twitter:

@PoraOra
@Nelzer_1999
@capedkoala