we connect everything - ubloquity: Recent Episodes
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ubloquity started out in life as a food provenance platform, enabling our customers to trace their products back to the most relevant start point in the supply chain. We’ve since diversified, serving multiple sectors from logistics providers to livestock producers, retailers to regulators, pharma firms to food and beverage companies…enabling us to connect (more or less) anyone to anything. In this podcast we explore the world we operate in, speaking to those at the cutting edge of advancements in technology, to understand how they are harnessing our platform to enable frictionless trade and power the trust economy.
In this podcast we speak to Ellen Moorehead and Scott Grant about ubloquity’s Innovative Leap with Digital Catapult and McColgan's Quality Foods.
ubloquity, a frontrunner in distributed ledger technology solutions based in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, is helping transform data management in the food industry.
Our flagship paVe platform is not just a tool; it's an innovative approach to upholding the integrity of critical data in supply chains in an increasingly complex world.
The Digital Catapult project aimed to revolutionise the way critical data is captured, verified, and stored on ubloquity’s paVe platform. Our goal was to establish a secure chain of custody, demonstrating compliance with set auditing standards.
Armed with a £100,000 Digital Catapult grant, our six-month journey focused on capturing critical data from its source, ensuring its security on a distributed ledger, and granting access to key stakeholders. These included the data originator (a food testing lab), the compliance coordinator (the factory’s food safety technical team), and the retail customer or their independent auditor.
The Challenge:
Traditional compliance and auditing methods in food manufacturing are often manual, time-consuming, with processes that are at risk of human-error. Ellen Moorhead from our project team explains, "Our objective was to address the cumbersome and potentially error-prone process of data management in the food industry."
The ubloquity Solution:
Our tech team, led by Scott Grant, developed a solution based on a distributed ledger system. “We introduced a system to digitise and secure the entire data journey, from the laboratory to the final audit,” explains Scott. “This approach streamlines the process and guarantees data integrity and transparency.”
Key Features of Our Solution:
- Efficiency: Automated data ingestion reduced manual entry time, leading to operational efficiency.
- Transparency: The introduction of an immutable audit trail fostered unprecedented trust among stakeholders.
- Cost-Effectiveness: The project aimed to demonstrate up to 30% cost savings due to the streamlined processes.
Ellen elaborates on the project's impact, "We transformed static, manual processes into dynamic, digital ones, reducing human intervention and enhancing data reliability." Scott adds, “Our system provided real-time, immutable data access to various stakeholders, revolutionising compliance in the food industry.”
Real-World Application and Future Scope
Our project's success was evident in practical applications. Ellen says, “Consider the lab result process – previously managed through emails and manual spreadsheet entries, now automated and securely stored on our platform. This saves time and resources and minimises potential human errors.”
Looking to the future, Scott sees vast potential: “What we’ve achieved with McColgan’s is just the beginning. The possibilities for enhancing compliance and audit efficiency are immense and span various industries and sectors, not just food.”
Conclusion: Pioneering a New Era in Data Management
Our Digital Catapult project with McColgan’s is a testament to ubloquity’s commitment to driving innovation for practical applications. “We’re not just innovating; we’re pioneering a new era of trust and efficiency in data management,” says Ellen.
Would you like to be interviewed for the podcast?*The ubloquity podcast is designed to help demystify how blockchain technology is being operationalised in the real world.
If you'd like to be featured or have an idea for an episode don't hesitate to get in touch with Dom.*
Alan Lowry is the CEO at ESF - a serial entrepreneur and award winning director, he is also an expert in overseas trade and export sales.
He is an export champion for the Department of Business and Trade, and Chair of Federation of Small Businesses in Northern Ireland.
Having worked and travelled all over the world, he is now based in Northern Ireland - a hot bed for innovation.
Alan never rests on his laurels, and is always interested in how to push things forward. In the street furniture sector he was one of the first to actively target the big theme parks like SeaWorld. A few years ago one of the biggest issues with the Parks was the fact that kids didn't want to stay all day because their cell phones or their mobile phones died. So he started chatting to them about how he could come up with a solar powered device that would allow people to charge their phone in the park without them having to introduce any energy, which meant that was also movable, and it would then keep the customers in the park longer and therefore increase their food and beverage and their merchandise sales.
They've ended up exporting the idea to 30 countries around the world since then, and are on to generation three with USB phone charging, LED lighting, and SIM card enabled Wi Fi from the bench so that they can extend the Wi Fi signal.
And I haven't even mentioned his collaboration with The Wombles! Yes, that's right. Listen to find out more.
Would you like to be interviewed for the podcast?*The ubloquity podcast is designed to help demystify how blockchain technology is being operationalised in the real world.
If you'd like to be featured or have an idea for an episode don't hesitate to get in touch with Dom.*
Alex is an internationally experienced CTO/CPTO leading diverse global technology teams for major companies. He has led seven technology transformations, achieving top quartile performance and accelerating profitable growth.
Starting in software development, Alex rose to head of Retail Banking technology at a leading UK internet startup bank. He later co-founded an eCommerce consultancy and led iconic CTO interim roles for 8 years.
He transformed Sainsbury’s online platform as eCommerce IT Director, and later led the digital transformation at Barclays Retail Bank in London as Multichannel IT Director.
In 2012, Alex joined Walmart Global eCommerce technology in California as the multichannel technology director. He led the world’s 2nd largest grocery home shopping platform, the UK's fastest-growing fashion platform, and pioneered groundbreaking ‘click-and-collect’ initiatives. It was here that our paths first crossed.
Since then he's also had senior roles at YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP in Italy and Emirates Group - where he was global CIO and global CTO respectively, overseeing the strategy and transformation of a 2,500-strong team to modernise the technology landscape, enabling business growth and innovation.
Alex is now on a mission to unlock the potential of product & tech teams by harnessing the power of data and AI.
"We’re infusing data and AI to assess and improve teams’ productivity index, enabling efficient and predictable delivery outcomes, helping our clients achieve their digital transformation goals faster. "
Alex feels in some ways, over the last decade or so, he's been trying to solve the same challenges, but in different roles with different companies. And now he wants to have the opportunity to figure out how to solve this for every company, in every industry, so that they can measure the productivity of the tech teams, but can also improve it.
The second part of this is that he wants to really leverage the same platform, and his experience to create a new kind of tech community, bionic teams where productivity levels are off the charts. And he thinks technologies such as generative AI and blockchain are key to solving this.
Alex lends his expertise to startups, guiding them in product development best practices and the innovation applications of cutting-edge generative AI.
Alex holds a Statistics degree from University College London and an MBA.
Would you like to be interviewed for the podcast?*The ubloquity podcast is designed to help demystify how blockchain technology is being operationalised in the real world.
If you'd like to be featured or have an idea for an episode don't hesitate to get in touch with Dom.*
Ellen Moorehead is ubloquity's award winning agri tech manager. A farmer herself she knows first hand how bureaucratic processes and paperwork add complexity and cost when seeking to move animals across borders.
In her role at ubloquity and as the coordinator of a new consortium - TETA - she is helping lead the way by testing innovative processes, and introducing blockchain-enabled smart technology.
One such scheme being piloted is at the Rhug Estate in Wales - where alongside The Institute of Export & International Trade (IOE&IT) - Ellen is creating a remote witness app. The technology seeks to reduce the burden on farmers, processors and abattoirs, and enable vets - who are a scarce resource - to remotely and digitally audit and sign off compliance.
Would you like to be interviewed for the podcast?*The ubloquity podcast is designed to help demystify how blockchain technology is being operationalised in the real world.
If you'd like to be featured or have an idea for an episode don't hesitate to get in touch with Dom.*
Najaf Gillani has over 20 years of experience running Global Software Engineering teams working for eCommerce giants like eBay, Walmart, & technology disruptors like Openwave systems.
He is now OpSec Security’s Chief Software Development Officer. OpSec Security, is a global leader in physical and digital anti-counterfeiting and brand protection solutions.
Along with Najaf's strong professional experience, he has an entrepreneurial background and solid business acumen, which has enabled him to start and run a few businesses successfully.
He has also started several innovation labs during his career to incubate new ideas and built many proofs of concepts to disrupt different markets.
In this podcast we discuss the future of AI, and how best to blend tech by harnessing human curiosity and experience with the best innovative solutions and IoT available to stay one step ahead of fraudsters and counterfeiters.
Would you like to be interviewed for the podcast?*The ubloquity podcast is designed to help demystify how blockchain technology is being operationalised in the real world.
If you'd like to be featured or have an idea for an episode don't hesitate to get in touch with Dom.*
In this podcast we discuss the challenge of needing more regulation to ensure our food is safe to eat, while recognising there are less resources for regulators to carry out 'in-person' checks.
We explore the potential for new and emerging technologies like blockchain and IoT devices, to help tackle the problem, while making the entire system better, simpler and cheaper.
Dom is joined by two legends from the food regulation and food safety industry - both of whom are officially 'retired', but aren't letting that get in the way of continuing to thought-lead and contribute on the global stage be that advising major companies or the UN and WHO.
John Barnes is a former Senior Civil Servant with extensive experience developing and delivering food safety controls, including relevant legislation and guidance at a national and international level. He retired from the Food Standards Agency in 2015, and now works part-time providing strategic advice at company Board level on national and international food controls.
David Edwards is a food safety and business consultant. He was the joint founder of CMI which was sold in 2007 to NSF International. Currently David is an investor and advisor to food sector businesses and service companies drawing on 40 years experience and knowledge of the global food safety and health and safety standards and regulatory services market.
Both agree the current regulatory system is not fit for purpose. John says the system needs to be modernised as the resources for regulators aren't there. He outlines three strategic tramlines to enable change:
- using data and technology better
- collaborating more - the private and the public control systems working together and sharing more data
- more transparency between the regulator and the industry
David believe transparency is an under utilised tool by regulators and thinks back to Campylobacter when league tables were reduced to drive positive change by retailers in their food supply chains.
John believes change is necessary but there are obvious weak points. When it comes to meat, veterinary inspections and certificates are the 13 amp fuse in the whole system.
David adds, you can have a really efficient system of digitising all the paperwork that goes with food transport across borders. But the chicane in the system is a really clunky, old fashioned inspection system, where you have to have a veterinary inspector present to sign off masses of paperwork.
He believes there's a real imperative for regulators to deal with that chicane, streamline it, but he says it can be done, and it is being done.
Listen to the full podcast or read the transcript to see what else they had to say.
Would you like to be interviewed for the podcast?*The ubloquity podcast is designed to help demystify how blockchain technology is being operationalised in the real world.
If you'd like to be featured or have an idea for an episode don't hesitate to get in touch with Dom.*
Oran O'Flynn is the CEO and founder of Soul Search, having graduated from University College Cork with a degree in chemical engineering.
But even while he was still at school he was innovating, and was lucky to be one of 50 students from across the globe to spend two weeks at NASA in Houston, Texas planning a mission to Mars.
Soul Search is a start-up that aims to revolutionise the way businesses and individuals verify and maintain their relationships. Utilising blockchain technology, Oran and his team have created Digi-Proofs, a digital proof of relationship between two parties.
These Digi-Proofs serve as a secure, tamper-proof record of partnerships, collaborations, investments, and more.
With its Soul Bound Search Engine, users can easily find and verify relationships between companies using our unique Soul ID.
In this podcast we discuss where we are in the Web3 revolution and what opportunities exist for companies like Soul Search to provide assurance and verification of relationships before people transact with one another.
I also get Oran's prediction on when we will send people to Mars and beyond.
Ine is an inspirational leader. One of the co-founders of ubloquity, she is highly skilled at managing complex, global IT projects. Last Thursday she was recognised as a leading innovator at a gala event in Belfast at the Women in Business Awards.
Under her COO leadership, Ine has been instrumental in the scoping and project delivery of ubloquity’s secure borders solution for Fujitsu, and the establishment of the provenance blockchain for one of the world's largest food manufacturers.
She mentors and guides more junior staff in the team, including award-winning Ellen Marks, who puts her success in no small part down to the support that Ine has given during her time at ubloquity.
We all think the world of her yet she is so humble in return.
Under Ine's leadership ubloquity is operationalising blockchain technology across global supply chains, optimising the accuracy and traceability of critical data to enable goods and services to flow more seamlessly.
Using multifactor verification, Ine and her team are able to create a single source of the truth, establish new levels of trust between producers, manufacturers, hauliers, retailers, government agencies and regulators.
With Ine's deep supply chain expertise and experience, she blends best-in-class technology with cutting edge science to prove, authenticate, validate and ensure supply chain integrity, removing unnecessary friction, speeding up processes, and increasing the security of assets throughout their lifecycle.
Ine came up with the idea to design, build and test a new end-to-end digital chain of custody, utilising distributed ledger technology (DLT) to seamlessly connect the dots in a major food manufacturer’s supply chain. A world first. Her aim was to give the in-house compliance team an accurate, high-definition view of its chilli spice supply chain in real-time, via an online portal, utilising user-friendly dashboards.
Ine and her team mapped the entire supply chain from the drying yard - where batches of chillies are given a QR code - all the way through to final bottling. Although the organisation had the ability to establish traceability, relevant data was held in three separate and distinct systems. Retrieving it was time-consuming and inefficient.
In cases where a safety risk was identified further upstream, it was difficult to locate and isolate a specific impacted batch of chillies. Each entity in the chain could only see the data relevant to them, but it was not shared horizontally or from end-to- end. Also, the data wasn’t immutable. Records could potentially be overwritten, altered, or even tampered with.
Ine created the ability to tie the data together and access it at the touch of a button in milliseconds. The hidden and hard to reach data is now visible to every participant in the connected supply chain. As new information is written to the blockchain, everyone is updated at once - and displayed on an operational and user-firendly dashboard.
The ubloquity platform that Ine has created unlocks three key benefits:
• more efficiency in the supply chain – eradicating manual input by switching to scan and auto input, which is more accurate and efficient;
• proof of provenance and authenticity – providing the opportunity to charge a premium price for products and protect brand reputation;
• risk reduction – the immediate ability to recall a batch from supply, with the potential to save millions of dollars for each incident or issue.
Previously, had a regulator sought information on a specific batch of chillies - for instance the moisture content or pesticide use - finding the answer from multiple legacy systems could take a matter of hours or even days.
Doug Heintzman is the Chief Catalyst at the Blockchain Research Institute, a role that sees him travel the world sprinkling pixie dust and encouraging things to happen that otherwise may not and then to help them grow more quickly.
He's been in the technology sector for 30+ years, and spent nearly 25 of those at IMB.
He believes the role of the Blockchain Research Institute is to act as an accelerant to governments and businesses all around the world to help them on their web3 and blockchain journeys.
The publication of Don and Alex Tapscott's book (Alex is Don's son) called Blockchain Revolution - set the scene in 2016. In the book they noted that the underlying technology of Bitcoin, which was blockchain obviously, was going to revolutionise the entire structure of business. So they created the Blockchain Research Institute to catalyse that activity and to do deep research into what was happening and what was about to happen.
In the last year or so it has become clear that a number of technologies are all kind of maturing and merging into a new platform that is referred to as web3. The prediction of artificial intelligence, the measurement of IoT, the spatial visualisations of augmented and virtual reality and metaverse. And then the operating system, the state engine, which was blockchain.
Doug and the team are preparing for the annual conference and gala awards - W3B and Blockchain World - an immersive and experiential event that aims to encourage more dialogue, be conversation orientated, and much provide more opportunities for networking and socialisation.
Themed around a Canadian wilderness camp there will be fireside chats and a main lodge, gatherings and campfire sessions. Plus plenary sessions with some of the world's leading thinkers on blockchain and web3.
For information or tickets click this link. And while you're at it, wish us luck, as ubloquity is shortlisted as a finalist for the Enterprise Transformation Award in the Enterprise Ecosystems subcategory.
Ellen was ubloquity's official first ever employee and recently celebrated her first year in the role.
12 months in any startup is a long time and this is no exception. Ellen reflects on the role she started doing, and how she and the company have developed in such a short space of time.
In her first year she has trained as a scrum master and been recognised by her peers in the tech industry as one to watch.
Her advice to other young women or girls at school or uni would be to broaden your horizons and focus on building your network now.
Take opportunities and placements, ask questions of those around you, and experience new things.
Next month Ellen has her most important project to date to deliver as she heads off on maternity leave for the first time.
The entire team at ubloquity wish her and her family well. We know she'll make a great mum, as everything she sets her heart on achieving she succeeds.
John joined ubloquity following a wide and varied career in information technology stretching back 38 years.
He is always learning new technologies having worked in industries like financial services and banking, physical security, and time management systems.
When he first came across ubloquity and considered taking up a new role, what interested him was that we were using blockchains but not for cryptocurrency. It really piqued his interest.
He then learned about what we are doing in the field of provenance, and was impressed that for such an early start up company we already had two major customers under our belt.
He thought: "this company is going places!". It was also a new technology for him to learn. And learning is what keeps John interested in computers.
"Even though I've 38 years experience, I'm currently doing a master's in crypto security. So I'm always wanting to learn new technologies, and it keeps me young and interested. So it's not just a mundane, nine to five job, doing the same thing, I'm learning new things all the time."
Peter Bracher is a highly experienced food auditor and compliance expert having started out in life in the UK as a government environmental health officer, before moving into retail for Tesco then Asda.
Having left Asda, Peter helped the richest man in Asia Mukesh Ambani set up a retail empire in India, before moving to NSF and setting up its Asian Pacific operations.
He is now based in Thailand and is helping Supply Chain In-Sites (SCI) marry the world of compliance with the use of big data and algorithms.
Peter sees the on site audit by an auditor as the last resort. There is so much data available now that sending someone on a plane is hugely inefficient, and just encourages gaming of the system.
Instead he cites a prawn farm where satellite imagery, combined with verifiable data such as purchase receipts for animal feed, and a simple calculation reveal the maximum amount of shrimp that the farm can produce. If something doesn't add up, then further inspection or spot checks can be carried out.
He foresees a future where everyone knows exactly what they are eating and drinking and can be confident it is safe.
He thinks we're gonna get to a point in an interconnected world, with wise use of data, where we use algorithms to replace the routine bits, but you still have oversight of a person. AI and RI - real intelligence and artificial intelligence - working together so that you can be sure that what you buy is going to be safe.
He can't think of anything much more valuable than that.
Dom Burch caught up with cofounder and CTO Kieran Kelly on a whirlwind first 12 months of ubloquity.
Kieran shares his pride of seeing the vision he and his cofounders had 18 months ago coming to fruition.
ubloquity has quadrupled in size, signed an exclusive three-year partnership with Fujitsu, and built a food provenance platform for one of the world's largest food manufacturers.
None of it would have been possible without the support of our seed funders and advisors, and the hard work and dedication of the ubloquity team.
Louise Manning, PhD, has worked as an academic, management consultant, lecturer and business and personal coach for thirty-five years addressing business management, quality assurance, brand equity, food safety, animal welfare, corporate social responsibility, ethical issues, and environmental protection.
She is passionate about food and transparency.
People on the planet live largely within urban populations, and are therefore dissociated from their food. To be able to access authentic, clear information around their food, they rely on labelling.
As technology increases Louise believes we have the opportunity to communicate about what is in the food, how it is produced, and the impact of our purchasing decisions, and be much clearer about all of that to consumers.
But she adds if we are going to build transparency, what sits with that is trust. It's trust in how the data is being collected, how it's being used, but also trust in the data itself, that it's representative. That is is giving valid, actionable insights.
ubloquity today announced it has signed an exclusive three-year partnership agreement with Fujitsu UK & Ireland to underpin its smart border solution – Atamai Freight – with ubloquity’s enterprise blockchain technology.
The contract comes on the eve of the ubloquity’s first anniversary, during which time it has quadrupled in size, built a provenance chain of custody platform for a multinational food manufacturer, and won several prestigious awards for innovation and technology.
Rob Chester, ubloquity’s CEO is delighted we are partnering with Fujitsu to underpin its smart borders solution. He believes the future of global trade will be digital, and it will be carried on distributed ledger technology.
He describes how a consortium led approach has enabled Fujitsu and its partners to move faster than would otherwise have been possible.
For example, from the outset, leading logistics provider, Manfreight has been an instrumental part of the consortium. Its team immediately recognised Atamai Freight’s potential to transform the entire supply chain through the safe, secure, and seamless flow of goods.
Manfreight has pioneered the smart seal technology provided by b4b, benefiting its customers through end-to-end visibility and integrity across each consignment delivery.
Rob reflects on the first 12 months of ubloquity and is excited by the future. He outlines how the team are building blockchains across the entire value chain - and how our vision now is to begin to federate them together.
Gideon is the founder and CEO of Multichain, he started coding as a child and selling his software in high school. He has built a number of successful websites, including Copyscape, a leading plagiarism search engine, and Web Sudoku, the most popular sudoku online.
Gideon has a BA and PhD in Computer Science (Cambridge and Technion) and an MA in Philosophy (London). He is now a regular lecturer on software entrepreneurship in his home town of Tel Aviv, Israel. Rather refreshingly for the founder of a blockchain platform company, Gideon's most popular blog is titled: Avoiding the pointless blockchain project - written in 2015!
He first became interested in blockchain technology with the arrival of Bitcoin, which made him realise as a website owner he could transact directly with his customers removing the middleman - the credit card networks or PayPal.
He then started having ideas about using the underlying technology to transact other items across the blockchain network. Which led to the development of his first product Coin Spark - it probably came a bit early for customers and the technology at the time, but led onto the creation of Multichain.
Multichain is a piece of software that allows people to build blockchain. Rather than having to build the whole system from scratch, companies can use Multichain to build their own applications on top of the software. As a result they don't need to worry about the 'technical innards' of how blockchains work.
He believes there are things that blockchains can do, and things they can't do. For instance a blockchain is very good at creating a shared repository of information, which is shared between multiple organisations, and which no individual organisation can take charge of to corrupt the data or delete the data.
So if you think about all the participants in a supply chain, they're all dealing with the same goods at different stages in those goods life. And they're all writing information about what's happening to those goods. And some of them are reading that information. The blockchain enables them to create a kind of shared infrastructure, where they're all writing to the same conceptual place and all reading from the same conceptual place.
For Gideon what's crucial and unique about blockchains, is that the infrastructure created is not under the control of any one individual participant in that supply chain. It's something which they all share together and which no individual participant can control and therefore corrupt or mess with.
We tackle the issue of energy consumption for blockchains, and how it differs depending on whether the blockchain is open or closed. Bitcoin is an open platform and as the value of the currency increases, people are prepared to expend more and more energy to mine the coins. The complex computational challenge is also required to ensure no one individual can take charge of the network.
However the method of consensus for a small, closed network is different, you don't need to have an energy intensive problem solve.
Multichain when used in production, for a permissions network, which isn't fully open to the whole world, is extremely low in terms of energy costs. And it's essentially no more than any regular database. But that's because it is a permissions network. That's because it's not open to the whole world in terms of participating, and in terms of building the blocks on the chain.
In addition to discussing blockchain we also talk about Collins Dictionary's word of the year - the NFT - non fungible tokens!
Sean Kane was appointed by Whites to the role of Agri Supply Chain Coordinator in June 2018 having graduated from Queens with a degree in agriculture. His degree consisted of animal husbandry, crop husbandry and business management - a joint qualification with CAFRI.
It opened up his mind to data and how you can apply it in farming.
In his role at Whites Sean is responsible for delivering improved oat quality and grower yield, and research and development. This includes farm trials and surveys, professional guidance on new seed varieties and mixes.
He was first attracted Whites because of the diversity of the role, combining office and field work but he also had a keen interest in research and how it can be applied to support and improve farm performance.
A unique aspect of the role is that he works with farmers in the field, follows the product in to the mill, all the way through to the breakfast bowl in the morning.
Capturing and analysing data across 100s of farms is key, and understanding what the top 10% are doing differently, key data points that can be shared with all of the other farmers.
More recently they have partnered with Foundation Earth and the lifecycle analysis of growing oats - it has opened their eyes to the supply chain.
Getting to net zero will require everyone in the supply chain to work together and collaborate.
Rob Chester started his career as a Saturday worker at Tesco, worked his way up to being a store manager.
Got into compliance and spent the rest of his career in various roles at Asda, Walmart US and China.
When he arrived in China on the back of a food crisis, the term compliance wasn't common parlance. Much of the traditional compliance tools and techniques were found wanting.
And Rob first witnessed how blockchain could potentially help.
At the same time Prof Chris Elliott was compiling his report for UK government on the horsemeat scandal, and many of his recommendations could be applied to China.
Fast forward a few years and Rob was UK MD at NSF International and he was introduced to ubloquity cofounder Kieran by former Asda colleague Dawn Welham.
Kieran had a revolutionary approach, starting at the beginning of a supply chain, not just going back one or two steps from the retailer.
Facing the truth, they spent the day redesigning the compliance model. Rob realised a new approach would enable you to manage risk and add value into supply chains.
Digital solutions were clearly going to start to have a major impact, be that sensors, cameras, telematics. So Rob has taken the plunge and joined ubloquity as its CEO.
He's relishing being in a startup environment where you can innovate quickly and seize opportunities in ways that are harder in large organisations.
Rohit Talwar is a global futurist, award-winning keynote speaker, author, and the CEO of Fast Future. His prime expertise lies in helping clients understand and shape the emerging future. He has a particular interest in how we can create a very human future by putting people at the centre of the agenda.
He has been interested in looking into the future ever since a man was put on the moon. He found himself getting interested in the new, the different, what happens after what happens next.
In this episode we discuss his next book, the 7th he's published, this one is called: Aftershocks and Opportunities 2, Navigating the Next Horizon. 37 thinkers from around the world talking about what the world will look like as we come out of the pandemic. Whether it's the future of regions like Africa, the future of food, how industries like insurance and travel might change, and how technologies like blockchain could disrupt our world and create wholly new possibilities.
The pace of technology innovation often outstrips our capacity to understand it or our willingness to make changes in our business to take advantage of it.
However what's different now is innovators are finding new ways to pioneer their applications and reach new markets in very different ways. For example 8,000 businesses have emerged within crypto to a community of more than 300m people globally who discuss their innovations on social media and enable them to thrive.
We can't hold back the technology tide so we need to raise our digital literacy, and raise our capacity to take advantage of it, to create the new jobs and opportunities that will be needed to help those who are displaced by the changes coming.
Brian has grown up with trucks and vehicles and the transport industry. Right from a very early age from being a 'truck wash Saturday lad' with a local family business, his aspiration was to be an international truck driver, much to my father's dismay back in the 80s.
He later decided that life on the road wasn't for him but secured a job with a company that specialised in moving freight to Ireland.
At the time, there were still borders in place, pre the common market, so he was dealing with exports and imports from GB into Ireland and vice versa.
Then he got an opportunity to join two other guys he worked with, to set up Trans-Bridge Freight Services. And 30 years later, here we are, TFS has evolved into one of the leading operators from the UK into Ireland.
Pharmaceuticals is a big area of focus for Trans-Bridge, and the technology they deploy has to keep pace with the expectations of not only the customer, but also the regulatory authorities such as the MHRA in the UK.
Moving pharmaceuticals is highly regulated, they have to keep the products at a certain temperature. And that's not just vaccines, temperature requirements extend to anything that has a labelled temperature condition on it.
When they move a consignment, they have to be able to validate and prove the temperature of that consignment right through from from start to finish. Telematics is a key component for Trans-Bridge where they have to be able to see that the doors are closed, that the temperature in the compartments are correct that the vehicle is following the route that they intend it to.
The tech enables them to monitor 24 seven, with sophisticated systems that send text messages and email alerts if there's any deviation on the temperature or if there's any issue with the truck.
Brian sees the blockchain programme as being sort of an additional layer of security that can bring all those components together, the customs components, the temperature components, the security components, and you can have all that in one accessible platform. That's a real big sell for them and to their pharmaceutical customers.
Frank is the industry lead for customs and trade at Fujitsu.
He has over 20 years experience working for global technology organisations delivering services and solutions to the retail industry, the supply chain industry, as well as major government programmes, including the Government's DVLA electronic vehicle licencing.
Frank specialises in new and emerging technologies and his current focus is to support Government with its preparations for the UK's EU exit, together with the development of a vision of its future border capability for the UK, which will support growth in global trade and GDP.
He was tasked with considering if he had a magic wand and could create a smart vehicle that intelligently tells the border agencies what it's doing, where it's going, what it's carrying, where it's come from, then automatically give it permission to move through the border - what would he do? With that vision in mind he worked backwards to solve all the problems along the way.
Demonstrating in practice is really, really critical. So Fujitsu built the system, put smart locks on the back of trucks, they then followed those trucks using tracking devices and showed all of this information to the border agencies as the journeys were unfolding.
They could see on a dashboard electronically where the vehicle had come from, who had locked it, they could see the fact that it hadn't been opened or tampered with during its journey. It passed the port at this particular time and it arrived in its destination as it said it would and didn't go anywhere else.
And with that, they also shared all of the data about the truck, the owner of the trucks, the traders that put goods in into the vehicle, the customs declarations, and any certificates as well.
So all of the data had a digital equivalent on the system. And what that did is it showed the technology works. But equally, it showed that the hauliers could use the smart locks and therefore adoption of the technology was easy.
Frank says that now that we have a border strategy, the Government's published that the 2025 strategy, we need to invest in delivering that strategy to the point where solutions like smart freight are readily adopted. And we move the checks away from the border. It happens in other regions or programmes in Sweden and the American/Canadian border. where these sorts of schemes are developing at pace and are being used today.
He believes the UK needs to be best in class because 50% of our trade is with the EU - and following Brexit the issue of borders is not going to go away any time soon.
John Best is a pioneering farmer from Northern Ireland. He has been plying his trade for nearly 50 years, having graduated from university with a degree in agriculture.
Along with his two sons he is a mixed arable and beef farmer. His family has been working from this farm for more than 100 years.
He aims to keep his supply chains short and supply local markets with beans and oats. He also looks after a herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle.
He's seen a lot of changes in the last few decades across the farming sector - but less so in terms of beef.
But that's not stopping John from innovating. Most recently he has been trialling new technology such as RFID tags, DNA samples, together with traditional registration numbers for cattle that are collected at birth.
He's interested in finding innovative ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and put figures around the performance of their animals. Looking for easy calving, and premium cuts. To understand how to select for them, you have to know what you have.
You can't manage what you don't measure. It's about collating the data over a number of years, ease of calving, weight of the animal. Then spotting patterns and areas you can improve on, such as reducing feed.
In the past finding a prize bull was done visually by a judge at a show giving out awards.
Now it is about genotypes and smart tags. Being able to identify the animal for the whole of its life - using DNA samples in addition to the normal static tag in the ear. The other innovation is using smart tags on the animal to detect changes in its temperature. Which can act as an early warning light that something needs to change.
He says Northern Irish farmers can't easily compete with Argentinian or Brazilian beef, but they can create premium products, rising above the commodity market. You do that by giving customer assurance at every step of the way.
John is excited by the opportunity of harnessing the blockchain to capture and verify carbon sequestration on farm, and that selling carbon credits is a very real opportunity for progressive farmers.
Carbon sequestration is the long-term removal, capture, or sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to slow or reverse atmospheric CO2 pollution helping to mitigate or reverse climate change.
In this episode Dom caught up with Professor Chris Elliott OBE - a globally renowned expert in food fraud and has investigated the complexity of supply chain networks for more than 30 years.
He has published more than 300 papers in the field of detection and control of chemical contaminants in agri-food commodities and co-ordinated one of the world’s largest research project in this area (www.BioCop.org). He also co-ordinated another major EU research project QSAFFE which is dealt with contaminant issues along the animal feed supply chain.
Chris led the UK government’s independent review of food systems following the 2013 Horsemeat scandal.
He says a major issue for consumers is that we don't really know what we're eating. We don't know where it comes from. And we don't know how it's produced. And because of all of those factors, there is a general mistrust about the food industry.
However developments in technology are beginning to change that, and a coalition of the good are using data and the blockchain to link up supply networks, enabling more visibility, and forensic investigations into any areas of concern. Increasingly this will make it harder for fraudsters to operate in the food sector, as any changes to a product in that blockchain are detected early.
Companies not adopting this tech will be put under the spotlight and asked why. Why aren't you getting on board, what have you got to hide.
He admits when Kieran Kelly, the co-founder of ubloquity first raised the idea of blockchain seven years ago he hazed over! But over the years he has understood it is about digitising supply networks, joining it all together as blocks on the chain. And you can have multiple companies, multiple actors involved in the harvesting, in the manufacture, the processing, the transportation, the storage, joined up, helping bring them all together.
Each of those actors in that supply chain network has a responsibility to input data, and once it's in there, you can't move it. It then greatly reduces the wriggle room for fraudsters, as you can't claim to be doing something that actually you're not because that information is on that blockchain.
Ellen Marks recently graduated from Queen’s University Belfast and CAFRE the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise, with a degree in agricultural technology.
While on placement from uni she previously worked part-time for NSF Verify within NI on a pilot program focusing on Northern Ireland’s beef industry.
She also undertook a placement year with McDonald’s, as a progressive young farmer working within McDonald’s beef supply chain alongside OSI Food Solutions and ABP Food Group.
Ellen recently joined ubloquity as its agri tech manager having got to know Kieran Kelly while at NSF.
She is a farmer herself and alongside her father and sister is applying data analytics and using innovative techniques in order to drive efficiencies on her farm, and operate in a more sustainable way that is better for the environment.
While on her placement with McDonalds, there were nine other placement students who were working in other sectors like the poultry industry, the egg industry, so Ellen got to visit them too and see all aspects of the entire McDonald's supply chain. She got to see things she would otherwise not have had the opportunity to see, including farmers who were really pushing the boundaries in terms of regenerative agriculture and Holistic Management Practices.
In the future, she would like to see that when you walk into a shop, you take your phone out, you scan a QR code on a product, and it can tell you exactly where this product has come from. It's 'farm to fork' journey. Full traceability of that product.
And her advice to other young farmers just starting out, like she was before going to uni, ask plenty of questions. Talk to as many people within the industry as you can. Make those contacts, make those networks. Get to know people get to know what companies are doing.
Ellen is active, driven and chatty - the 3 words she would use to describe herself.
I challenge you to disagree!
In the first episode of the ubloquity podcast we hear from cofounder Kieran Kelly.
Kieran is a successful tech entrepreneur having worked with multiple organisations to help deliver positive economic change through digital transformation.
The three things that neatly sum him up are butcher, IT nerd and TEDx talker.
After spending almost two decades designing and delivering enterprise security solutions for Government, Defence and Aerospace clients, Kieran has been focusing on the benefits of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) and Blockchain to support and enhance supply chain security and digital asset management.
For the past six years, he has developed and deployed commercial Blockchain solutions for global brands across the food and beverage sector.
An established International speaker Kieran has been recognised by Forbes, Bloomberg, The Times and more recently TEDx as an innovator and thought leader in the development of Blockchain for asset identification and security.
Kieran has now begun work on identifying how emerging technologies can be utilised to reduce operational complexities and challenges across the enterprise to support frictionless trade, and harness the trust economy.
Kieran outline how the genesis of the blockchain is that it can't be corrupted, and although it's distributed it remains a single source of truth.
Consumers want to know not only where their food comes from, but that it is safe not only their food, but components. The objective therefore is to support frictionless trade, to pre clear goods to support a trusted trader, a good actor, and to remove that administration, but also to address the fraudulent activity that's in the marketplace.
Unfortunately fraud is increasing year on year, a recent PwC reports shows there's been a meteoric increase.
The pandemic has helped the sector innovate more in 14 months than it has in the last ten years. And people are now becoming more focused on their their food, where it comes from, their components, their clothes, the sustainability, the environmental impact.
And for traders to be able to communicate that story, whilst supporting frictionless trade is transformational, and can take so much cost and risk out of that supply chain.