Boldport in London

Boldport has moved to London. We have an office at WeWork Southbank and I've just arrived here to see it for the first time -- it opened today and it looks great!

The move was motivated by both business and personal reasons. You see, Cambridge is very much a technology-focused place where product design, productising, and packaging of technology is very often secondary to the technology itself. (Think of the initial poor usability of Raspberry Pi and ARM's licensing model to name a couple of prominent examples for this. A perhaps apocryphal story is that in a large Cambridge Consulting company, industrial design folk are lovingly called "yellow-plastic people".)

Cambridge is not a place that attracts designers, which are typically found in numbers and in quality in London. In turn London doesn't seem to have the kind of hardware engineers as Cambridge. I base it on my own experience of having myself and others imported from Cambridge to London for HW development and other anecdotal evidence. (Here I would have mentioned BERG as an example for a company that is certainly design-lead and that also developed hardware, but they shut down last month.)

Boldport's "beautifully functional circuits" is not just a cute slogan, it embodies the attitude of placing form and hardware functionality at the same level of importance, each constantly influencing the other in the design process. I think that there could be much more appreciation for this concept in London than there has been in Cambridge. It's also be easier to hire talented people.

Boldport is looking for business. You can help by talking to us about what we can do together, giving us your thoughts, or buying something from the shop.

I'm excited about this change and look forward to great things ahead!