March 2010 Australian Oil & Gas Conference, Perth Convention Exhibition Centre, Perth, Australia

Syntropharma strikes ‘transformational’ multi-million deal with a US distributor
Less than a month after its auditors slapped a “material uncertainty” warning over the firm’s future funding, the fledgling Scottish pharma company announced that Indian giant Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals will market and distribute Syntrophrama’s first skin patch in the US - a deal estimated to yield revenues of $37.5m (£23.4m) over 15 years.

Started by two former executives of ProStrakan, Syntropharma, which develops existing drug compounds, raised more than £1 million from a consortium of investors in its first funding round in November 2006.

The consortium included Highland Venture, business angel syndicate Tweed Renaissance Investors Capital (TRI Cap) and Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Co-Investment Fund. The funding has enabled Syntropharma to relocate to a bigger site at Tweed Horizons Business Centre in Newtown St Boswells, Roxburghshire. Syntropharma was founded in 2005 by chief executive Andrew Gardiner and non-executive director David McHoul. According to Gardiner, the company aims to get products to market within four years. This is faster than companies testing new drugs, which can take about 12 years.

Gardiner says: “The traditional model of a pharmaceutical business is to invest huge amounts of money in researching and testing new drugs but this can take years and is very risky for investors. We recognise that there are lots of drugs currently available that could be improved by reformulation. This often significantly enhances their usefulness for both doctors and patients.”

www.syntropharma.com

Technology Strategy Board funds new hydrogen fuel cell programme
Ultra Electronics Precision Air Systems has been awarded £400,000 grant to develop hydrogen fuel cells, which are seen as a key green power source of the future.

The funds come from the Board’s “Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Technologies” programme which has the aim of making hydrogen fuel cells more cost effective. Fuel cells are thought to be part of the answer to the world’s energy problems. They combine hydrogen and oxygen to create water and heat, which is converted to electricity, and produce only a fraction of the greenhouse gases of conventional fuel.

They can be used to run anything from small appliances such as radios to industrial-scale power stations when linked together.

Ultra is leading a consortium which comprises Sussex firm Diverse Energy, Hampshire-based TURBOCAM Europe and London’s Dynamic Boosting Systems and City University London (Centre for Energy and Transport).

The partners plan to improve the performance of standalone fuel cell generators that can be used in remote locations, for example for mobile military telecoms systems.

The team will work on the gas flows and humidity within the generators, which have a critical influence on efficiency and running costs.

The project is a new departure for Ultra, which has so far put its scientific know-how into developing defence, security and aerospace systems.

Andy Yates, managing director of Ultra Electronics Precision Air Systems said: “This award marks an exciting move into a new sector for the business.

“It is one where Ultra can apply its systems engineering skills to integrate and optimise sub-systems and components to improve the overall performance of a fuel cell power system. I look forward to the project’s successful conclusion and the resultant business opportunities that will follow.”

www.ultra-pas.com - www.dynamicboost.com - www.turbocam.com

Webley, one of the oldest names in the gun trade, seeks £1m of expansion capital

Established in 1790, the company designed and patented its first airgun 100 years ago. It is probably the most famous English name in guns in the USA and until the mid 1960s sold the most popular shotgun there.

Control of Webley was acquired by the current shareholders on 31st December 2008 by the acquisition of its assets from the administrator. During the last 12 months, developments have been brisk. Month-to-month, profitability has been established; product supply has been re-established; quality control has helped restore customer confidence.

Webley & Scott became the third top-selling shotgun in the UK, behind Beretta and Browning, new multi-stroke pneumatic air pistol has been introduced and has sold over 400 units in two months, a new, UK designed and manufactured, single-stroke pneumatic air rifle will be shipped in March.

The company is now looking to raise up to £1 million in new equity. Any investment would be eligible for EIS or VCT relief.

In September 2009 it introduced an all new, patent applied for, dual-stroke pneumatic pistol, the Alecto. Mike Hurney, CEO of Webley. “The new Alecto is ergonomically perfect, available with either right or left handed dedicated grips each incorporating a comfortable palm and thumb rest.

“This ‘easy to cock’ pistol goes way beyond traditional single-stroke pneumatics, with the introduction of a patent-pending dual-stroke technology that allows muzzle velocity to be set at 120 metres per second (“mps”) with a single stroke, increasing to 160 mps with a second “no sweat” cocking action. Maximum muzzle energy is limited to 5.8 ft’lbs,” he added.

Contact: Simon Atkins, Technical and Quality Manager - [e-mail].

Marine Current Turbines secures yet more funding – is it breakthrough time?
One of the favourites of the Gibson Index SME database, Marine Current Turbines has secured funding of £2.7m from the Carbon Trust’s Marine Renewables Proving Fund (MRPF).

It will support the enhancement of SeaGen, the world’s largest and so far only megawatt scale grid-connected tidal current energy system that has been supplying electricity to customers in Northern Ireland since December 2008.

The Carbon Trust funding will be used to assess SeaGen’s operation, our engineering processes, construction and installation techniques and assist us in reviewing and evaluating a range of other important issues. Marine Current Turbines aims to deploy its first tidal farm in UK waters during 2012. The company is partnering RWE npower renewables to develop a 10MW tidal farm off Anglesey, and in Canada MCT is working with Minas Bay Pulp & Paper to deploy a single SeaGen device in the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia during 2011.

The company was established in 2000 and its principal corporate shareholders include BankInvest, Carbon Trust Investments, ESB International, EDF Energy, Guernsey Electricity and High Tide. The company has a power purchase agreement with Ireland’s ESB Independent Energy for SeaGen’s output.

www.marineturbines.com


Tasty contract for Bavaria from London’s fast-emerging micro brewer
British microbrewer Meantime Brewing Ltd, based in Greenwich, have awarded the contract to build their new 100 Hectolitre brewhouse to top brewery equipment maker Rolec in Bavaria, southern Germany.

The firm has installed equipment in a significant number of the leading microbreweries in the USA: firms that have played a major part in redefining beer making as part of America’s brewing revolution, including Stone, Magic Hat, Victory and Brooklyn.

Meantime’s Brewmaster, Alastair Hook said. “Rolec are uniquely placed to combine traditional brewing engineering expertise, at which the Germans are unsurpassed, with an understanding of modern, uninhibited brewing methods.”

The new Meantime brewery on the Greenwich Peninsula will enjoy state-of-the-art automation, freeing brewing staff to focus on the hallmark standards of quality and flavour upon which Meantime has built an international reputation.

Capacity growth to the 100,000 Hl per annum that Meantime believe London will soon be demanding will be achieved by incremental additions to the tank population currently employed at the existing premises. Some 30 or so vessels will be moved the 1.25 miles between breweries in a phased relocation.

Founded in 2000 Meantime Brewery is London’s largest privately owned brewery and is Britain’s leading brewer of quality hand-crafted bottled beers producing both traditional classic beers styles and new, innovate modern beers.

In December 2008 Meantime founder and Brewmaster, Alastair Hook was named ‘Brewer of the Year’ by the British Guild of Beer Writers.

 Meantime’s other new investment in 2010 will be a bar, restaurant and brewery in the new £6.5m Discover Greenwich complex at the Royal Naval College. This is to be opened by Mayor Boris Johnson on March 22nd 2010, to coincide with Meantime’s 10th birthday celebrations.

www.meantimebrewing.com

Octopus Ventures Ltd led an investment round of £3 million into Mi-Pay Ltd
Mi-Pay Ltd, a leading processor of payments for the fast-emerging mobile money sector, has an impressive client list of well known brands including Tesco Mobile, The Carphone Warehouse, Vodafone, Du in UAE, KPN Telfort and Zain among others. The allocated funds for Octopus were provided by the Octopus Titan VCT funds, together with the Octopus Eureka EIS and the Octopus Investor Group.

The investment round was also supported by existing institutional investor Albion Ventures LLP and management. Mi-Pay’s existing service enables customers to ‘top-up’ their pre-paid mobile phone directly on-line, or via their mobile phone, rather than using indirect brand channels such as Paypoint or bank ATMs.

Benefits of the direct service include cost reductions for mobile network operators and a more personal engagement with customers, removing the anonymity of customer relationships allowing substantial improvements in customer churn management. This round of investment will enable Mi-Pay to roll out its new mobile money services, which are now fully developed and ready to scale with blue-chip launch customers. The additional mobile phone services include International Airtime Top-up.”

Norman Frankel, Chief Executive of Mi-Pay, said: “With their help, we can develop the many significant opportunities in this dynamic market while continuing to deliver our award winning market innovation. The investment will enable us to achieve our strategic and operational goals which include driving International Airtime Top-up and money transfer solutions to a wider market in key remittance corridors in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Latin America.”

In November 2009, Mi-Pay received the Award for the “Most Innovative Company in Money Transfers” from the International Association of Money Transfers (IAMTN).

www.mi-pay.com

Sheffield firm first to supply components for armoured vehicles in Germany
Darnall-based MTL Group has been awarded ‘TL Approval’ – a pre-requirement for any company wanting to supply Germany’s national defence force, the Bundeswehr.

MTL managing director Dr Henry Shirman said “Exports have become an essential part of MTL Group’s growth over the past two years. Being the first UK company to be awarded TL approval by BWB is a massive step in developing relationships with Europe’s global OEMs who provide armoured vehicles to the BWB”

MTL has invested heavily in the latest processing equipment, including bevel laser cutting, robotic pressing, water jet cutting, CNC machining and robotic welding.

The company processes around 2,000 tonnes of armour a year and can supply components in both blast and ballistic grade armour ranging from laser or water jet cut plates which have been prepared for welding, up to fully fabricated structures, including hulls and cabs. Thanks to its systems and capabilities, the company passed the stringent audit to gain TL approval first time in all areas.

TL approval allows MTL to supply components manufactured from armour in accordance with strict German defence manufacturing standards for contracts specifically related to the BWB.

www.mtlgrp.com

Nottingham Scientific Ltd (NSL) starts important new KTP with De Montfort
In February 2010 a KTP between De Montfort University (DMU)’s Faculty of Technology and NSL was started to accelerate development of satellite navigation technologies and applications.

The company is faced with the challenge of adding value and supplying innovative solutions that would support growing market trends. A team of researchers, led by DMU’s Dr Eric Goodyer, was awarded £113,000 to fund the KTP, enabling them to develop, integrate and validate a pioneering navigation device known as the ‘Primo’.

The Primo is the world’s first universal Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) software receiver capable of simultaneously tuning into different satellite systems in a fully interoperable manner.

The team from DMU and NSL won the Innovation In Development Award at the East Midlands’ Lord Stafford Awards in September 2009. The Lord Stafford Awards recognise and encourage the development of collaborative relationships between businesses and universities.

DMU has benefited greatly by this collaboration in terms of teaching and research, as knowledge gained by University academics through the KTP will be fed back into the development of new modules and course material. The first Primo was successfully launched in December 2008, generating sales for the company, and although the KTP has now ended, an ongoing relationship between DMU and NSL is anticipated to exploit these GNSS products and explore opportunities for further co-operation.

www.nsl.eu.com

OC Robotics launches new range of snake-arm robots for the aerospace sector
The robots, designed to get to difficult-to-reach areas of equipment and machinery in higher-risk environments such as aerospace manufacture and nuclear plants, will enable engineers to probe into places and solve problems where access is tricky.

The Explorer snake-arm robots have a range of different diameters from 40mm to 150mm, providing options for different lengths and payload variants for each diameter.

A few years ago the company was a runner-up in the Royal Academy of Engineering’s MacRobert award, which seeks to highlight excellence in British engineering. Dr Rob Buckingham, MD, has led the company from a startup to its current SME status.

Contact: [e-mail] Alison Hallsworth - 0117 314 4700. For technical questions - email [e-mail] - www.ocrobotics.com

Pirates to fear new disabling effect of new maritime laser for cargo ships
In January 2010 a laser – named SeaLase - that dazzles and disorientates was developed by a Scottish firm to help shipowners ward off pirate attacks.

Glasgow-based ProForm Marine believes the non-lethal laser will prompt pirates to abandon their assault and seek an easier target. It was developed following a rising tide of attacks on cargo vessels and luxury yachts, especially off Somalia, which lies beside one of the world’s main trade routes to the Suez Canal.

ProForm said the weapon could also be used to defend other vulnerable sites from attack, such as airports, nuclear power stations, and oil and gas plants. It said it had also had interest from farms in South America. The laser, which costs £55,000, affects the vision of anyone on which it is trained for up to 30 minutes and makes them feel nauseous and disorientated.

SeaLase uses three lasers – red, blue and green – which together cannot be filtered out by protective glasses. Paul Kerr, its director, said the device could be used at a range of up to more than two miles, but was most effective at less than one mile. He said: “The effect is like staring into the sun.” The former Royal Marine commando said the laser offered a cheaper alternative to armed protection. He said: “Increasingly, the response to protect commercial interests has been the use of military escorts which has inevitably contributed to an increase in shipping costs and impeded delivery, for example of food aid.”

ProForm Marine, which employs five people at its base at the Holy Loch Marina, near Dunoon, formed a new joint company, Lasersec Systems, to devise the laser with Finnish firm Arctic Photonics. It now plans to add a heat-seeking camera to the laser to give advanced warning of approaching intruders to help users direct the laser beam.

www.proform-marine.com

New company aims to revolutionise the treatment of serious knee injuries
AIM-listed Fusion IP, which commercialises IP from Sheffield and Cardiff Universities, has formed a new spinout, Progenteq, under its agreement with Cardiff University.

Progenteq is developing a cartilage replacement therapy to be used on acute knee injuries. Fusion said the business is founded on the work of Professor Charlie Archer’s research group at Cardiff University’s School of Biosciences.

Professor Archer is leader of the Connective Tissue Biology Group. The group has isolated a defined population of cells from the articular cartilage which surround the main bones in the knee joint, Fusion said in a statement. It added: “These cells display stem-cell like properties and can be expanded in the laboratory to produce very large quantities of cartilage.

As a result this cell type could provide an ideal source of material for an ‘allogeneic’ cartilage replacement therapy, whereby cells derived from donors can be taken and used to grow a large tissue bank of cartilage that can be stored and is suitable for insertion into patients with acute knee injuries as and when needed.”

The new model would be a more cost-effective cell therapy than current “autologous” approaches, where cells are removed from a patient, expanded and then implanted into the same patient, it said. The firm had in the past received support from the Technology Strategy Board in catalysing innovation in regenerative medicine.

www.fusionip.co.uk

Software pioneer Quantix leads with new Cloud platform for delivering Oracle
The company has opened a new £500,000 virtualised data centre - bringing together cloud computing and Oracle expertise for the first time in the UK.

Using this data centre, Quantix is able to provide a platform offering high quality compute power, storage, database and application provisioning as well as an extremely cost effective disaster recovery service with 99.999% SLAs.

Dick Salmon, MD of Quantix, says “It is uniquely optimised for Oracle users.” Quantix will use the datacentre to offer a number of ‘on-demand’ services such as, test and development capacity for both new applications and migrations.

It offers ‘highly elastic and scalable storage provisioning with burst out capabilities’, Oracloud, an Oracle platform for rent and computing capacity on demand.

Quantix’s expertise in Oracle support has been delivered to more than 200 clients for over a decade. It also offers a cloud-based disaster recovery solution – Rapid Recovery - starting at just £30 per day, using the cloud and virtualisation techniques to effectively ‘do away with’ the need for tape backs, forever.

www.quantix-uk.com

Pavegen is a new invention that produces renewable energy through paving slabs
This curious concept aims to ‘harvest energy from people’s footsteps. Pavegen converts the kinetic energy of each footstep into electricity that is stored in the slab.

Following recent tests in East London, Pavegen is now seeking both investors and additional testing sites for its eco-iconic innovation. If the energy people expend dancing and working out can power cellphones, lights and other electrical appliances, why not apply the same concept to all the energy spent by millions of people every day simply walking along city sidewalks?

That’s exactly the premise behind Pavegen slabs, which can be inserted among regular sidewalk sections to capture the kinetic energy people spend just walking. Each rubber slab from Pavegen Systems gets depressed by about 5mm each time it gets stepped on.

Using just that small movement, it can convert the kinetic energy used into electricity, which is then stored in the slab. Just 5% of energy harvested is used to make the slab’s LED glow, making it clear to users that their energy has been captured. The rest can be used to power pedestrian lighting, information displays and many other applications. Pavegen’s patent-protected technology has also been used to harvest energy from users’ footsteps on stairs; custom branding is available.

www.pavegensystems.com


Yorkshire start-up company develops welding technology for subsea applications
IPWL, based in Cross Hills near Keighley, has invested £500,000 over the past two years to develop a machine called the ‘Firefly Welding Bug’.

MD Phil Wainwright said: “There are other machines out there but ours has unique patented features which make it more accurate than others. The company launched the welding bug to the industry in February 2010 at the international Subsea 2010 exhibition in Aberdeen.

Mr Wainwright added “I was working incredibly hard using a machine built by one of our competitors and the idea came to me that I could do better.” After establishing the initial idea, Mr Wainwright and technical director Peter Holt set about designing and manufacturing a prototype.

A team of investors came on board and worked closely with them to develop the machine. Estimates suggest that up to £280,000km of oil and gas pipelines will be built around the world over the next 20 years. Mr Wainwright said: “That works out at about 11 million individual welds so we have the potential to take a large part of that market.” The machine, which has a retail price of £26,500, is designed to be operated by one person. A weld takes between half an hour and two hours.

Mr Wainwright said: “These pipes have a very hard life so they need to be well-maintained. The bug is designed to be able to take the rigours of that environment and still provide welds of incredible accuracy without diverting from its programme requirement. It is designed to be abused and still function in the same way.”

www.ipwl.co.uk

Enecsys attracts further investment of £2.5 million from Good Energies
The fund, a leading global investor in renewable energy and energy efficiency industries, will help this manufacturer of solar photovoltaic (PV) micro-inverters to expand.

The company’s unique micro-inverter technology promises lowest lifetime costs, highest reliability and faster, easier installation of solar PV systems. Micro-inverter architectures increase energy harvesting from solar PV systems, reduce installation and maintenance costs and eliminate the risk related to high voltage DC, enabling mass market deployment of solar PV.

The new investment adds to the £6m received from Wellington Partners and BankInvest in June 2009 for a total investment of £8.5 million in Enecsys.

Paul Engle, Enecsys CEO. “We believe this partnership brings unparalleled insight and expertise into the industry and positions Enecsys to become a global leader in solar inverters.” Good Energies invests in companies that significantly accelerate the clean-energy transition and that possess clear technology differentiation.

George Coelho, Good Energies MD said: “Enecsys excelled with respect to our investment criteria. The company’s combination of innovative patented technology, seasoned management and board, and a drive to succeed impressed us immensely.”

Contact: Sulaiman Ahmad, VP, Enecsys Ltd -01223 792 101 - [e-mail].