OT3 and OT4 were originally investors in Warwick Effect Polymers which was acquired by Abzena and which is now a quoted company on the AIM market.

Biopharmaceuticals are an increasingly important class of medicines with over 400 products estimated to be in clinical development and the market expected to increase from US$199.7 billion in 2013 to US$497.9 billion by 2020. Antibody-based products and therapeutic proteins are the two largest and fastest growing segments of this market.

Abzena provides a suite of complementary services and technologies to R&D organisations to improve the chances of successful development of therapeutic proteins and antibodies, and it is therefore poised to capitalise on the growth of the biopharmaceutical market. The Group has significant know-how, supported by a broad patent estate, to enable it to create better biopharmaceuticals for its customers.

Abzena operates a balanced business model with growing revenues from its service business and the potential for significant future growth through royalty bearing licences for the application of its technologies to biopharmaceutical products. The Group’s technologies and services are provided through its wholly-owned subsidiaries, PolyTherics and Antitope.

PolyTherics and Antitope have been developing and offering their technologies and services for over 10 years and their scientists have provided expertise to a wide range of companies, including most of the top 20 biopharmaceutical companies, many large and small public and private biotech, and academic groups, across the world.

The 5 main areas the company works in are:

Immunogenicity assessment

Antibody drug conjugates

Antibody | protein engineering

Optimisation of pharmacokinetics

Cell line development

At 30 November the bid price for Abzena’s shares was 78p per share. Abzena is listed in the FTSE AIM All-Share Index in the Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology sector. (Code ABZA)

In July 2007, Arecor was spun-out as a separate company with all existing shareholders in Insense owning their pro-rata shares in Arecor.  Arecor then raised additional capital (OT4 was able to subscribe but OT3 did not have the capital with which to do this at the time). Arecor has made good progress.  As proteins increasingly dominate the drug development pipelines of major pharmaceutical companies, many are seeking assistance in developing stable formulations.  The company has paid feasibility studies with ten of the top twenty pharmaceutical companies to new stable formulations of specific therapeutic proteins and vaccines.   In the spring of 2010, Arecor signed a broad agreement with Genzyme, Inc. under which Arecor will develop stable formulations of Genzyme’s proprietary proteins and license the Arecor technology for an ongoing pipeline  of products.    In April 2011 Arecor signed license agreements covering two vaccines with GSK Bio.  In December 2011, Arecor reached agreement with the American company Eli Lilly which provides for licenses on formulations of new and existing products.  Currently, Arecor is working on three products under this agreement with the first expected to go to license in the coming year.  A second agreement was signed with Lilly in May 2012 providing for a license on a specific undisclosed marketed molecule.  If the development is successful these agreements can generate very substantial milestone income on each molecule plus ongoing royalties to Arecor.   Arecor has expanded the initial patent portfolio to fifteen patent families covering all the major pathways of protein degradation and improved formulations for specific products.  The Company has recently received official notification of its first patent going to grant.  In the year ending in May 2012 achieved revenue of £1.2 million with income expected to grow to £2million in the coming year.

When Impact Applications was sold to Castleton Technologies, OT4 acquired shares in Castleton as part of that deal. At time of acquisition (29 May 2015), the shares were worth £1.09m.

Dexela was acquired by PerkinElmer Inc. in 2011.

Dexela was formed in 2004 to address critical issues in breast tomosynthesis, a 3D technique for accurate breast cancer screening and diagnostic imaging. Breast tomosynthesis requires an X-ray detector that combines a low dose per image with a rapid sensor frame rate.

In 2007, whilst developing tomosynthesis methods, the company became aware that no detector existed with the required speed and sensitivity for their approach. Upon investigation of other medical and non-medical applications it became clear that such a detector could target both the emerging breast tomosynthesis market and growing markets for real-time and 3D imaging such as fluoroscopy and dental CT. In 2007, Dexela acquired detector developer Aviex LLC to facilitate the development of a novel fast, low noise X-ray detector suitable for breast tomosynthesis and digital mammography (2D breast X-ray) and other applications. In 2009, Dexela launched its family of CMOS X-ray detectors. The products attracted customers in all the target markets from North America, Europe and Asia. Dexela has now been sold to PerkinElmer Inc., a US healthcare technology leader.

The purpose of the initial investment was to build an experimental furnace to develop a novel process to produce a diamond coating on a variety of substrates. The results of the initial work were very promising and the company was able to produce a variety of diamond coatings which were: 1) extremely hard (diamond is the hardest natural substance) 2) very low friction (lower than Teflon) 3) thick (up to 60 microns – most diamond coatings are much less thick) 4) applicable to a wide variety of substrates due to low deposition temperature. This combination of qualities is ideal for prolonging the service life of mechanical components which experience high levels of wear and which are also expensive to replace. At the beginning of 2008, the company filed a patent covering its process and secured its first repeat orders for a commercial application in the oil/gas industry. In December 2008, the company raised additional capital and in 2009 opened a production facility with two production chambers based in Caswell, some 30 miles north of Oxford. Diamond Hard Surfaces has made steady progress. The business model is to find customers who are having difficulties with particular mechanical parts which have to work in extreme conditions and which therefore have a relatively short working life. DHS supplies samples for testing and once qualified enters into a funded programme of development/testing with the customer. The customer begins placing regular orders for the supply of these components once testing is completed and the benefits are proven. DHS has development programmes with some 27 companies including with the two largest companies in the world, Apple and Exxon. DHS has 10 separate development with another large US company. However, the testing and development programmes have taken much longer than expected.

In 2013 DHS received its first regular production order. This is for coating sensors which are used down-hole when drilling for oil or gas. DHS now coats a batch of these every month. Also in 2013 DHS won a TSB grant to help develop a production chamber to be used for a specific application which should result is reduced production time and reduced costs.

Sales remain small and DHS has not yet reached breakeven, but, in summer 2014, it has more than ten programmes, mainly with large global companies, in which parts for particular applications are being coated and tested in the field. In some cases the expected production contracts could be worth more than £1m per annum.

One of these programmes is for the removal of heat from an electrical circuit. The DHS coating is applied in a low temperature process and the coating can be thick (60+ microns). The coating is a good electrical insulator but a good conductor of heat. So the coating may be applied to an electronic circuit board when it will remove heat from hot components. This is potentially a large application for DHS.

OT4 has invested a total of £176,726 in Dynamic Extractions Ltd and owns 23.2% of the equity. The chemical reactions which produce pharmaceutical drugs typically produce mixtures of compounds, from which the desired compound must then be separated and purified. Dynamic Extractions (DE) designs and manufactures High Performance Counter Current Chromatography (HPCCC) instruments which, in certain circumstances can greatly increase the throughput and efficiency of this purification/separation step. HPCCC uses a liquid stationary phase, rather than the solid phase used in conventional chromatography. This brings a number of advantages. Dynamic Extractions was formed in 2001 having spun-out from Brunel University, where the patented HPCCC technology was developed. OT4 invested in Aug 2005, when DE moved to purpose built premises in Slough. DE has four sizes of HPCCC instruments, from the Mini, for doing milligram quantities in the laboratory, up to the Maxi, which is for production scale separations. One of the important advantages of HPCCC is that it scales automatically. So what works at small scale will also work at production scale. This is not true of conventional methods. During 2009, DE opened an office/laboratory in the US, the better to serve its US customers. Also in 2009, Dynamic Extractions was awarded a grant from the Technology Strategy Board, as part of a consortium with GSK, Pfizer and Brunel University. These grants are awarded to companies developing technology believed to have strategic importance for the UK economy. HPCCC is potentially a much more efficient method of drug production and the hope is that developing this technology will keep pharma companies in the UK.

Growth in sales has been much slower than originally hoped, but DE has nevertheless progressed.

As well as selling instruments, DE also offers a contract separation service. It now has a fully automated instrument which can run unattended 24/7.

Glide Pharma is developing a needle-free drug delivery technology and aims to manufacture and supply not only the device which delivers a needle free injection, but also to reformulate the drugs which are delivered.

The patented technology takes the form of a spring-powered device, which looks not unlike a pen. In use, the device is pressed against the skin. When a critical loading is reached, the spring releases and pushes a tiny pointed grain of drug beneath the skin. The sensation is the much the same as an injection with a conventional needle, except that there is no needle. In principle, the device is suited to a wide range of therapeutic compounds. The key advantages of the system over existing delivery technologies are that drugs are more stable in solid form, that there is no needle (so no needle-phobia, cross-contamination or disposal problems), that the device is ideally suited to self-injection, and that the rate of release of the drug can be controlled by incorporating quick dissolving and/or slow dissolving compounds into the formulations. In the first trial on human volunteers 16 out of 16 patients said that the sensation from the administration with the Glide SDI was clinically acceptable and 14/16 stated that they would prefer to be injected with the Glide SDI rather than a conventional needle and syringe.

In August 2007, Glide Pharma signed an exclusive license agreement with Paladin Labs Inc giving Paladin the exclusive rights for sales of Glide Pharma own-brand products in Canada. The deal includes milestone payments and a royalty on sales. Paladin will assume responsibility for local clinical trials and registration, marketing, sales and distribution. Paladin also invested in Glide.

In February 2013 Glide secured an investment of approx. £14 million, led by Invesco Perpetual. This will enable the Company to scale up the manufacturing processes for both the novel dosages and the injector so that the first Glide products can be commercialised. Glide is currently working on several development projects including:

1. Parathyroid hormone (PTH) which requires a daily self-injection and is for treatment of osteoporosis. In November 2012 the UK BioMedical Catalyst (managed jointly by the Medical Research Council and the Technology Strategy Board) awarded Glide £2.3m to support this development.

2. Anthrax vaccine. This is a development with Pfenex Inc, based in California, as a partner with funding from NIAID (National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases) in the US. At present the US government stockpiles anthrax vaccine in liquid form but in the event of a major attack it will be very difficult to inject a large population (New York, say) with needle and syringe. In addition, the vaccine in liquid form only has a shelf life of c18-24 months before it has to be remanufactured. With the Glide SDI, the population may be vaccinated more easily and in solid format the vaccine should have a longer shelf life.

3. Epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) is prescribed to patients who suffer severe allergies. In case of emergencies patients need to have an 'EpiPen' immediately available at all times. However, the epinephrine is in a liquid form and has a relatively short shelf life plus current injectors are threatening and not pleasant to use. A Glide epinephrine product should be easier to use and should also provide a longer shelf life for the product.

In parallel to progressing its own product pipeline Glide will be looking to attract new pharmaceutical companies who want to develop proprietary drugs and vaccines in the Glide SDI.

Glide has acquired rights to a technology to measure zinc in biological samples. Lowered levels of zinc in semen can be an indicators of prostate cancer, however measuring this has previously been difficult. Glide has access to the required samples to determine the effectiveness of the approach.

Historic Futures make it possible for companies to collect and manage value chain data, from primary production to finished product and to communicate good practice to their customers.

Having gained truly unique real-world experience of large traceability and value chain projects over the past few years, the business is currently developing a brand new online service (called String3 (http://www.getstring3.com/)) focused specifically on streamlining the onerous task of collecting reliable information describing the origin of raw materials. HF's experience across textiles, forestry and mining/ minerals indicates that most brands and retailers require better information about origin across a greater proportion of their product portfolio - and that they have no efficient tools to collect and analyse this data today. The project is currently at the prototype stage, with in-field testing commencing later in 2014.

Imagineer Systems Ltd. is a 2002 spin-out from the University of Surreys Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing. The company has developed a series of software tools that enable film and television production companies to complete the post-production steps, immediately prior to releasing a film (or other broadcast media) as well as a series of tools for transforming (2-D) films into 3-D films.

Imagineer’s software allows post production teams to remove cables, wires, even people from film footage, or to insert elements seamlessly, such that they look as if they had been part of the original set or cast. Imagineers software has been used by dozens of post-production companies in Europe and the US, and in high profile films such as Harry Potter, X-Men, Pirates of the Caribbean, Poseidon, Iron Man and Shutter Island.

MirriAd, another investee of Oxford Technology 4 VCT, is a spin-out from Imagineer Systems.

ImmunoBiology is developing novel vaccines using a proprietary heat shock protein-complex (HspC) approach. Hsps are an important family of protective proteins that are produced by cells under stress - they were originally observed in cells that had been subjected to a sudden temperature increase, hence the name heat shock protein.

The HspC technology allows the production of vaccines incorporating a range of different antigens from a single pathogen bound to a carrier protein the heat shock protein. ImmBio’s research shows that HspC vaccines are more powerful, longer lasting and potentially provide broader protection against multiple strains of a particular pathogen than existing vaccines.

OT4 first invested in Impact Applications in October 2005, and has made several further investments since then, and currently owns 49% of the company.

Impact provides software to local authorities, housing associations and their contractors which enables them to manage the tradesmen who maintain and repair their housing stock. One of Impact's clients is a large local authority with 44,000 council houses, and managing the repair and maintenance of all these houses is a major business in its own right. In June 2009, the Council began using Impact's flagship product, ImpactRESPONSE for management of repairs undertaken by its in-house contractor, which is responsible for just over 20,000 houses and which require some 3,000 repairs each week.

When a tenant phones to say that a repair is required, ImpactRESPONSE immediately schedules the repair with the appropriate tradesman and sends a text message to the tenant saying when the repair will be done. Each tradesman is issued with his own mobile device (PDA) on which they can then view the job details. For example, "Your first job on Monday morning is to repair three broken windows at 10 Acacia Avenue. You already have two panes of glass on your van – collect another pane from stores en route. Mrs Jones is expecting you in the morning and the repair should take 1h30m (Mrs Jones will have been sent a text message telling her to expect her repairman to arrive between 8am and 12noon.)" When he completes the job, he can record the materials used, collect a signature on the screen, and instantly report that the job has been finished. There is no paperwork at any stage, and the invoice to the appropriate department can be issued immediately. The tradesman receives details of his next job on his PDA and he can also send a text message to the tenant with his expected arrival time. If he is running late he can update the tenant with a new expected arrival time, and the staff in the back office can see the current status of all jobs in real time. Often this latter feature has had a dramatic effect when ImpactRESPONSE goes live for the first time in a new application; tradesmen who previously filled in fictitious times were exposed.

Impact has grown steadily but not yet dramatically, and has encountered and had to overcome many problems associated with growth along the way.

Impact was sold to Castleton Technologies Plc. OT4 recieved £1.585m in cash, and £1.09m in shares in Castleton from the sale.

Insense Ltd is a spin-out from Unilever and has developed a range of active dressings, which can be applied to the skin to treat a variety of conditions. The essence of the technology is that the the dressings consist of two (or more) parts which are then brought together on the skin when the dressing is applied. The parts then react to produce a chemical (s) which is slowly released over a period of hours or days and this chemical then actively helps the condition.

The first products were for wound-healing. Insense produced two dressings, Iodozyme and OxyZyme. The first was for infecxted wounds produced a steady flux of Iodine and oxygen at the wound surface. The Iodine reduced or elimianted the infection and the Oxygen promoted natural healing processes. OxyZyme was for non-infected wounds and produced a steady flux of wound-healing Oxygen at the wound surface. (The best treatment for wounds is to leave them open to the air. But the problem with this is that the wounds can become infected. Oxyzyme allows the wound to be bathed in a flux of Oxygen while also allowing the wound to be covered to keep out infections.)

Insense sold these products for several years to the NHS, but did not itself have the marketing organisation necessary to achieve more than a small volume of sales and Insense did not reach breakeven on these sales. In 2012 the rights to the manufacture and marketing of these dressings were sold to Crawford Medical. Insense received an up-front payment which will be followed by further payments based on performance.

In order to sterilise the Insense dressings after manufacture, Professor Davis had to develop a method of stabilising the proteins so that they would withstand ionising radiation. Having done this, it transpired that many pharma companies were interested in using this technology for their own protein-based products. This led to the spin-out of Arecor. All the shareholders in Insense received the same % of shares in Arecor which then raised capital to fund its own expansion. Arecor achieved sales of £860,000 in the year to May 2013, and sales increased during the year to May 2014.

Insense has developed treatments for a number of skin conditions. Insense is considering how best to exploit these opportunities. One method is by partnering with or licensing to larger companies who are already established in these markets.

In February 2006 OT4 made an initial investment of £100,000 in Meciria, a start-up company founded by Richard Hutton, which sought to develop a rotary steerable drilling tool for use in the oil and gas industry. The company designed and built a prototype drill which began a series of tests. OT4 and later OTECF were actively involved with the company In 2008 Oxford Technology Enterprise Capital Fund invested in Meciria to take the company forward. OT4 made small co-investments, but by this time had limited cash remaining. Modifications/improvements to the tool were made and by December 2011, OT4 VCT's total investment was £516k and OTECF had invested £1.5m. In February 2012 Meciria was sold and OT4 VCT received an initial payment of £2.2m and OTECF £9.4m. In addition, there should be further payments over the next three years under an earn-out arrangement. This investment illustrates the importance of being able to invest in a start-up company over several years as it grows and develops.

Metal Nanopowders is a spin-out from Birmingham University, and was established to commercialise a process invented by Dr Isaac Chang for making very fine metal powders with diameters less than 100 nanometers. The purpose of the investment was to build a machine which is capable  of producing kilogram quantities of these powders. After the investment the company hired its first employee whose first task was to automate the production at lab scale, and then to design and build the kg scale production machine. Dr Chang has retained his academic position but is a director of the company, and is actively involved in its development.

Following the investment, it proved more difficult than expected to automate the process at lab scale, and it has transpired that it is much more difficult to make some powders than others. It proved necessary to go back to basics and to try to understand more about the fundamental physics of the process. The original engineer left, and a PhD student Lucian Faulticeanu became involved. Good progress was made and the company is now able to produce larger quantities of nanopowders reliably. Samples of many powders were made for a variety of customers with a variety of potential applications. If one of the applications leads top a commercial product then Metal nanopowders would scale up to produce tons and the business would become viable. In 2010 the business was scaled back with the founder, who continues  with his academic job at Birmingham university being the sole employee, sometimes assisted by a PhD student. During 2010 the company received a grant to make samples of a specialist nanopowder for a defence application. At the time of writing the first of these samples is being evaluated. In 2012, the company is involved in 7.8M Euros EU-FP7 NMP project entitled “Better Upscaling and Optimization of Nanoparticle and Nanostructure Production by Means of Electrical Discharges (BUONAPART-E)” to develop and demonstrate large scale production of nanoparticles at a rate of 1Kg/day.

MirriAd was spun out from another Oxford Technology 4 VCT investee, Imagineer Systems, in 2006.

MirriAd is able to deliver Embedded Advertising into video streams, ranging from user generated content, such as on YouTube and MySpace, to studio and broadcast quality productions, such as Casino Royale or Pop Idol. This capability allows real time ‘In-Video Advertising’, where branded products for instance, Coke cans, advertising hoardings, or even cars can be placed into video streams, appearing to the viewer as if they were there on the original film set. This means, for example, television game shows could be regionalised by inserting different branded products into multiple variations of a single show for example, Pepsi into one version of Pop Idol, for broadcast in the US, and 7 Up into another, for transmission in Europe. Popular clips on YouTube could be monetised by inserting branded objects or images into the background with the particular brand automatically selected according to the demographic of the individual downloader.

The company has made substantial progress and has contracts with major broadcasters in Europe, the Middle East and Australia.

Novacta Biosystems Ltd was founded in 2003 to discover and develop novel pharmaceuticals with a particular focus on infectious disease. OT4 first invested in Novacta in 2005 although since then the company has been restructured.  ‘Novacta’ is now comprised of four separate companies: a parent company (Novacta Holdings Ltd), and three separate intellectual property holding companies. References to Novacta here refer to OT4’s combined holding in all four companies.  The company uses proprietary microbial technologies and enzymes (biotransformation and pathway engineering) to make subtle modifications to complex drugs to optimise their properties such as selectivity, potency and toxicity.   Novacta’s lead programmes are centred around a class of small peptide molecules called lantibiotics, a drug class that until now has been underexploited due to the lack of adequate research tools. Its lead programme, a molecule to address the increasing clinical problems with the ‘superbug’ Clostridium difficile (“C.diff”), has generated extremely good data from pre clinical trials and is now in Phase 1 clinical trial.

Orthogem has developed a method for producing a biocompatible, artificial bone graft called TriPore to replace the use of autograft - the patients own bone, allograft - cadaver bone, or xenograft animal bone.

Over the last decade, great efforts have been extended to producing human bone substitutes and with recent horror stories about bones being surreptitiously removed from bodies in morgues and sold into the medical device market, the search for an artificial replacement becomes more urgent.

TriPore blocks and TriPore granules were CE marked in 2006, and approval by the United States FDA was received in 2007.

Oxis Energy is developing a rechargeable battery with the following exceptional properties:

- Extremely high specific energy density 1.5-2x existing best rechargeable battery

- Wide temperature of operation 0°C to 125°C

- Inherent safety - no control electronics

These properties represent a step change in performance versus existing rechargeable battery technologies and for some markets they will be a key enabling technology, for example, the energy weight ratio specific energy density is pivotal in electric vehicles because the weight of the battery is a significant part of the total vehicle weight.

Commercially, the company is currently focused on three key markets, down-hole oil/gas tools, electric vehicles and power tools. The oil/gas industry currently spends in excess of $100m/year in primary batteries (one time use) in downhole tools.

Oxis ability to operate in a high temperature range and its inherent tolerance to high charge/discharge are critical advantages ' and of course there is significant value because one rechargeable cell has the potential to replace up to 30 primary cells.

OxTox is a spin-out from Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry. The company is developing an electrochemical approach to measuring drugs of abuse in saliva, with an initial focus on cannabis and methampetamines.  The product is called DrugSensor.

Just as a 'breathalyser' measures how much alcohol a person currently has in their system, so Drugsensor measures the amount of 'drugs of impairment' such as cannabis and the varieties of amphetamine, by rapidly analysing a small sample of saliva. The product is rapid (testing takes around 30 seconds), accurate, and easy to use (both for the person taking the test, and the person administering the test).

Existing roadside technologies have not been adopted widely because they are based on immunoassay technology (ELISA tests) and so are relatively slow (many minutes from sample collection to readout), and cumbersome (have multiple steps and require the mixing of solutions). With tests being used by roadside police, tests need to be simple and readout in less than a minute.

OT4 invested in Pharma Engineering when the company was formed as a phoenix from an earlier company. The total investment grew to £64,000 and OT4 owned 46% of the equity. In Nov 2013 the shareholding was sold to the founders for £500,000 to be paid over a three year period.

The company designs and manufactures specialist equipment for the pharmaceutical industry. Its first product was a machine for deblistering pharmaceutical tablets. The production of pharmaceutical tablets is highly regulated and once a manufacturing procedure is agreed by the regulator, then it must be followed rigidly. In most cases today, tablets are produced in blister packs. However, in many instances, large numbers of unblistered tablets are required. For example, some care homes have their tablets delivered in the form in which they will be used by the patients. So Mrs Jones will take six tablets of different medicines in the morning, 5 tablets in the afternoon and 7 in the evening. These tablets will arrive in small pots, each labelled appropriately eg "Mrs Jones' tablets; for use at 10am Tuesday 3 March." So in these cases the care home or hospital will receive a weekly delivery of all the tablets required for all the patients, all in small pots. In order to make up these pots the pharmacy has to deblister each of the thousands of pills involved. The deblistered tablets are then placed in the hoppers of a machine which then makes up the individual prescriptions. The economics are such that it makes sense to have a machine which deblisters the tablets automatically. Pharma Engineering manufactures and supplies deblistering machines which do this task. The machine not only deblisters the tablets but also ensures that all the small pieces of foil are removed.

The customers for these machines are large pharmacies and also the pharmaceutical companies themselves. This is because things sometimes go wrong with the manufacturing process – the wrong tablets in the wrong packaging, a bad batch of tablets. When this happens the pharmaceutical company may need to deblister millions of tablets, and it makes sound economic sense to do this by machine. During 2010, the company delivered the first prototype of a machine which automatically extracts blister packs of tablets from the packaging (normally a cardboard box) in which they arrive. This is quite a complicated machine since it has to be able to deal with such a large variety of sizes and shapes.

Pharma Engineering made good financial progress. Sales increased from £597k in the year to Dec 2010 to £836k in the year to Dec 2011 and to more than £900,000 in the year to Dec 2012. In Nov 2013 the sale of OT4’s shareholding was agreed.

Plasma Antennas incorporated in 2001 is a producer of antennas which are used to send and receive radio signals using beamforming and beamsteering techniques. The company, located in Winchester, continues to develop a range of 'all silicon' antennas in which the reflector is a plasma (in this case, a cloud of electrons) which is generated in a silicon disc and that can also act as an RF lens. The shape and orientation of this plasma can be changed in a few microseconds, ie real time so delivering a beamforming, beam steering antenna with no moving parts capable of wideband operation, and the antenna provides high gain, pencil beams with full 360-degree coverage and are 100% electronic (therefore reliable and in volume, relatively inexpensive). Plasma achieved its first pre-production prototype which was demonstrated in 2013 and this prototype was independently measured and assessed by QinetiQ on behalf of the MoD.

Plasma is now targeting high volume applications in LTE and other wireless networks. The potential demand for such antennas is very large - one market is the next generation of short-range, very high capacity wireless networks, operating in the millimetre wave bands (WiGig, 60GHz). When in production it would suit the high volume sectors - automotive radar,, satellite receivers plus several military applications.

In October 2007, Plasma Antennas took these concepts and delivered its first product using conventional technology, ie a spin out of the Plasma device. This was for two selectable 8-beam antennas with a value of £25,000. During 2009 and 2010 Plasma with an European grant developed a flat-panel steerable antenna designed for use in civil applications to increase data speeds for broadband wireless access (BWA) and wireless backhaul.

In 2010 Plasma launched antennas that incorporate the above capability, i.e. selectable beams (1 thru 20), beamsteering and beamforming in both azimuth and elevation for use in the cellular infrastructure industry for backhaul applications. It also received its first contract for the design and supply of more significant numbers of an antenna for military use. The customer was a large defence company, the ultimate users were mobile military units who need mobile point-to-point (and therefore more secure) communications in the field. Since 2010 these antennas have been sold into leading backhaul radio manufacturers for incorporation into their products and also to one or more cellular radio manufacturers for use as an access antenna for current 4G (LTE) small cell applications.

In parallel Plasma continues to sell its high value beamsteering antennas into both Government and MOD for use in many security applications.

Plasma Antennas now has an established portfolio of both cylindrical and planar antennas which are used in the cellular/mobile sector for both backhaul and access use, the Oil, Gas and Utility sector for data acquisition, backhaul and video surveillance, are about to be evaluated for use in the automotive sector, the geographical survey industry and by several Satellite operators for ground to space, space to ground and space to space for commercial and military use.

Cost engineered versions of the company's antenna are currently under trial or about to be trialled by 4 of the largest Tier 1 cellular operators, and many Tier 2/3 operators for small cell access and small cell backhaul. Forecast sales for these units, 10,000 to 30,000 initially per operator mean it is now setting up volume production in China commencing Q4 2014. Plasma is also seeing volume indications from the Oil/Gas sector growing from 200/qtr to 500/qtr per customer.

Plasma Antennas is currently assessing how both its conventional and plasma technologies will be applied to very high capacity 5G backhaul and wireless access applications and is being encouraged by its customers to enter into strategic partnerships with them to commercialise its antenna technologies.

Since 2005, Select Technology has been working closely with Ricoh, the world's leading manufacturer of MFDs (Multi-Function Devices, formerly known as photocopiers but which now do many things as well as copying such as scanning, emailing, faxing and printing). Ricoh sells over a million MFDs globally each year.

Increasingly, as with computers 30 years ago, what persuades a customer to buy one model rather than another is not the hardware, but the software which determines the ease of use and also the number and type of applications which can be run. Some of these are quite complicated. For example, a global company may have a network of several thousand MFDs at offices around the world. A user in New York might wish to scan a document and then send it by fax to particular offices and as a PDF to other offices, where they might choose to print many copies for distribution locally. Working out which office gets charged and how much can become complicated. Ricoh is not itself an expert in such payment and paper management systems, and has therefore opened up its internal software to enable companies which have developed such systems to run them on Ricoh copiers.

Select has developed a software module which is embedded within Ricoh's operating system and which transmits data to the outside world about the state of affairs within the MFD and which enables an external system to control the MFD, and, for example, to change the screen. Selects software platform, known as m3i, can then be used for many different applications. The first application has been named by Ricoh as the m3i Access Module, and Ricoh awarded Select its Innovative Product of the Year award in Sept 2007 for this product. The m3i Access Module enables users with disabilities of various sorts to operate the MFD by using their personal laptop or mobile phone to issue the commands as required by the MFD. So, for example, a user in a wheelchair who is unable to see the MFD screen, can operate the MFD using the screen on their mobile phone. A wireless link is made automatically between the MFD and the phone. Likewise a visually impaired user is able to operate the MFD, either by having a screen on his laptop with very large letters and symbols which he can read of by using voice commands which are then echoed back as in About to print 10 copies of A 4 document in colour: Say Yes to confirm or No to reset. It is now a requirement in the US that MFDs in government buildings comply with disability legislation and having the m3i Access Module means that MFDs comply. A second solution developed by Select, m3i ScanSend, will be launched in the UK in February. ScanSend creates a single, easy-to-use interface in the MFDs own touchscreen for scan-to-email and scan-to-fax.

The frustration for Select has been the length of time everything has taken, partly caused by the fact that Ricoh has been acquiring other businesses both in the US and elsewhere and has been absorbing these businesses.

So increasingly, Select began to work directly with dealers and with partners rather than with Ricoh itself. Thus, for example, AMI Education Systems, a subsidiary of RM plc in the UK, which sells systems to the education sector, wished to develop a system which would enable MFDs to be used in schools and which would charge pupils for copying but allow staff to charge copying to the appropriate budget etc. Originally, AMI engineers believed that it would take them over a year to develop such a system. But then they discovered that by using m3i, the development time could be reduced to six weeks and they were able to launch the products to schools in autumn 2009 rather than autumn 2010. Each time a sale is made, Select now receives a payment for each MFD on the system, each one of which has m3i installed. Select makes a sale simply by supplying a license key which activates m3i.

Select is the UK distributor for Papercut, a document management system which is rapidly gaining in sales globally, because it is seen by customers to be much better value than rival systems. M3i is required if Papercut is run on a Ricoh MFD. Although Ricoh has a corporate global deal with a more expensive competitor to Papercut, in 2011 many Ricoh dealers are beginning to sell Papercut because this is what their customers are demanding. So increasingly, Select is working with Ricoh dealers and sales are steadily rising. Select has now become the main UK and European distributor for Papercut.

It has taken an agonisingly long time, but Select's financial performance is now improving:

In early 2012, Lucian Falticeanu, who was employed by Metal Nanopowders discovered a method of treating certain powders to produce a material which is super hard. (Hardness > 45 Gpa – believed to be harder than anything except diamond itself). The powder may be pressed into a shape which is then sintered at very high temperature to produce the end product. This may be electrically machined and also polished if necessary. It is believed that this may have several applications. A new company, Superhard Materials Ltd has been established in which Lucian has a 40% shareholding, to take this forward. The rights to this material, now called Superduride, have been licensed to Precision Ceramics Ltd in Birmingham. Lucian has also joined Precision Ceramics as Technical Director. Precision Ceramics will pay all the costs of manufacture and marketing of Superduride, and Superhard Materials will receive a share of the gross margin on sales.

The first samples have now been supplied to potential customers, and trials should start in autumn 2014. No orders have been received yet.

Telegesis designs, manufactures and supplies Zigbee modules. Zigbee is a communications protocol, in the same way that Bluetooth is a communications protocol. Bluetooth is for sending large volumes of data over short distances and is power hungry. Example applications are sending data from a mobile phone to a headset, or data from a computer to a printer. Zigbee is for sending small amounts of data over larger distances with very low power consumption. Crucially, each Zigbee device can communicate with up to 64,000 other devices up to 1km distant, and the devices automatically configure themselves into a mesh network, with the data hopping from node to node. This makes Zigbee networks very reliable – if one node ceases to function, the network reconfigures automatically and the data takes another path. A small battery will power a Zigbee module for up to five years, or power at a remote location may be provided by a small solar panel. Another key point is that Zigbee provides two-way communication. So a module is able to transmit data, for example about the level of a river, and is then able to receive a response and activate a sluice gate. The largest initial application for Telegesis modules was for reading water meters. Each meter is fitted with a Zigbee module and the reading is then transmitted automatically back to headquarters, at any desired time interval, once per hour, day, week, month, year, whatever is desired. Other applications have been monitoring the use of hotel safes, monitoring water run-off from airport runways, monitoring solar panels, and for factory/process plant monitoring and control. Potential applications are legion. Telegesis achieved sales of £250,000 in the year to June 2007. In the next year, to June 2008, sales increased to £1.5m, and Telegesis moved its production to China. This has worked very well, reducing costs and increasing reliability – each module is tested before shipment. However, much of the increase in sales was accounted for by sales to one particular company, and during 2009, this company got into problems of various sorts (nothing to do with Telegesis) but it stopped all orders, and Telegesis’ sales declined. However, Zigbee is steadily gaining ground especially in areas of “Smart Metering” and Solar Panel monitoring and also in an increasing variety of other applications. Telegesis sales have been growing, and the company is now profitable and cash generating.

Telegesis presented at the 2014 Oxford Technology VCT's AGM. A copy of their presentation is available for download here: Telegesis Presentation