Finding A Home for Emotional Technology

The Crowdie gang. From right to left, Steve, Pat, Diego, Matt, Jing, Ginni, Chris and Stefano.

The BBC kinda feels like our Mum.

Goodbye BBC

The BBC have been awesome. But, in startup terms, we’ve reached our restless teenage years. It’s time for us to move out. Our team is growing. It’s a high energy and diverse group of people that needed a place to call our own. Where we can fail and be better, be noisy and on the rare occasion be quiet. Most of all, a place where we can find ourselves. But without the embarrassing tattoo.

Hello Hatton Garden!

Deep in the vaults of Hatton Garden amongst all the gems, you’ll hear the centuries old sound of artisans tapping away at their creations. Keep going and you may also stumble across our friend Jonathan’s place Keyboards and Dreams, a place where humans can interact with computers naturally. This is our new home.

Even though our tools are different, our goals are similar. We work with people to engage their emotions and unlock their potential.

Hatton Garden has been the centre of the diamond trade in London since Medieval times.

Should we swim with the current or against it?

When looking for a home Shoreditch gets mentioned a lot. It’s that magical place where tech startups gather round the tech giants like remoras clinging to a whale. The smell of arabica in the air, craft beer on tap, fastidious bicycle owners in tiny hats talking typography and collabs. Surely this is creative paradise. Or at least as close as you can get to paradise in rainy old London.

Even the pros’ can’t get this bad boy open, we may never know what’s inside.

Shoreditch and the greater Tech City is a great choice for those that are based there. However is embedding yourself in a group of like-minded entities a good way to stress test your ideas? Is being another remora clinging onto a whale desirable?

The cleaner is the hardest working member of the team.

To cut a diamond you need something hard, very hard.

To build a successful business we need to run toward our problems and solve them. Pretend you don’t have gaps in your strategy and you are only pretending you have a business. It’s vital to fail. It fuels the iterative process of getting better. We want to improve, so we need to look for challenges. We need demanding customers who are not shy with feedback. An audience that will break or validate our ideas. We need the opportunity to fail as much as we can.

beware! Mr Foxypoo lives on the sofa, it will attack unprovoked.

So from the start we didn’t want to take the easy road. We wanted to distance ourselves from the typical tech scene. After all CrowdEmotion is not a tech company. We are a people company with a great API.

Some day we will have chairs.

So, why Hatton Garden?

Human computing needs a fresh look. It needs a space inspired by art and technology equally. So much of our interpersonal communication is subconscious. We can’t describe how we get our gut feeling, but this intuitive sense is a superpower we have lost in the digital world. However you can see this power being used everyday in Hatton Garden. By the artisans in the workshops, traders on the street and the customers at the shop window. Hatton Garden is a real place, more analogue than digital. People use their gut feelings a lot here.

Despite this guys face, the food is awesome.

Also the food on Leather Lane is awesome. We Crowdies have 2 types of gut feeling. One is intuitive emotional intelligence. The other is hunger for food, lots of food.

CrowdEmotion provides the layer of emotional recognition, interpretation and response at a global scale for people who operate in the emotional era. Find out more at www.crowdemotion.co.uk