Tech Trends | Mark Ridley, Owner & Founder, Ridley Industries

Mark Ridley’s illustrious career has seen him hold the CTO title several times. The technical co-founder of reed.co.uk, Mark’s perspective on the role of CTO has grown organically through his own trial and error. Now he helps scale-ups structure, go to market and get results.

Emerging tech trends – 00:03:51
One of the fascinating things for me has been the availability of these building blocks of the next generation of tech is becoming more and more profuse. I was around at a time when companies were developing their own websites, the dotcom boom. One of the big changes was the democratisation of the ability to build websites. What we’re seeing now, is a similar thing happening with the ability to build machine learning. So the toolsets available from Microsoft, Amazon, Google to actually democratise machine learning, so you don’t have to be a deeply mathematical statistician to work as a data scientist but actually you can be a mechanic who knows how to slot things together, is going to be extremely profound. It’s not just that it’s machine learning, it’s the availability of different tool kits, from all of these first class, very significant players in the market.

Speed to market – 00:06:10
What’s happening is, the creation of any application, any delivery mechanism – a company doesn’t need a logistics team or distribution, it can go to market – you create a marketing website, you create a product. In the mid 2010s, the teens you would outsource development and potentially find an offshore partner to build you something. But as you’re highlighting it’s easy for an entrepreneur to plug and play their own product.

Auto Machine Learning – 00:07:15
Auto ML, is one of these building blocks. Auto Machine Learning. Google has just released this to Kaggle. The ability to allow people to trivially use these auto ML features, Microsoft has its own version, I think will be interesting exploration for businesses next year.