Why is a martial arts instructor on a tech show? Because Steve Griffiths is proof that every small business is now a technology business. Steve runs Aspire, a community-focused martial arts academy in Eastleigh teaching Choi Kwang-Do, a body-friendly South Korean martial art that anyone can pick up. He's a third-degree black belt, and he's had to become, in his words, a black belt in business and tech as well.

Steve walks Natalie through the tools behind the academy: a CRM that nurtures new enquiries with automated emails, texts and videos, membership software to keep students motivated, and WhatsApp Business messages that remind people about trial classes and answer common questions with one tap. He also introduces the AI content tool he built with his business partner at Evolved Automation. It's a browser extension that turns an article, PDF or video into a fresh, SEO-friendly post with a call to action, ready to schedule. The crucial rule is that nothing goes out until a human has reviewed it and pressed the button.

They discuss why trackable calls to action show you what your audience actually wants (often not what you'd expect), group chat etiquette, and why you are not your own target audience. Steve also talks about Aspire Fighting Chances, his community interest company that opens martial arts to children from low-income families, survivors of domestic abuse and disabled people, and why staying strong and mobile matters so much as we age.

Guest: Steve Griffiths, founder of Aspire martial arts academy and Evolved Automation

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 2 May 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Anew Gabrielle is a technologist and co-founder of Portsmouth Tech & Cultural Hub, a Community Interest Company on the South Coast working to bring people from different backgrounds into technology and shape the next generation of tech talent across Portsmouth, Southampton and the UK.

The conversation starts with a simple observation: technology is built to serve everyone, but if it's only designed by a small subset of people, it can't do that. The food metaphor lands well — the richness of what we all benefit from comes from diversity, and technology should be the same. From there it opens into AI ethics (who decides what's fair when the training data reflects existing inequalities?), the employment impact of AI on communities that are already underrepresented, AI strategy for organisations that want to get this right, and what digital inclusion and education actually need to look like to reach the people who currently aren't in the room.

Guest: Anew Gabrielle, Portsmouth Tech & Cultural Hub CIC — https://uk.linkedin.com/company/portsmouth-tech-and-cultural-hub

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 25 April 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Chris Lewis has spent his career noticing that organisations hand people powerful software and then never teach them how to use it. Now he's turning that frustration into a business: one-to-one tech productivity coaching, bespoke training, and digital skills sessions at a local college.

The conversation is packed with things you can actually do right now. The WhatsApp paperclip icon sends files as documents, bypassing image compression — your photos will arrive at full resolution instead of looking like they were taken through fog. Buying your own router instead of leasing it from your ISP saves around £4-5 a month (pays back in under a year). Hover over any link in a suspicious email and the status bar shows you the real domain. And if you're clicking 12 times to reach a file in Teams that lives on SharePoint, you can drag the URL to your bookmarks bar and do it in one.

But the bigger point is the Lloyds Bank Future Now report: 52% of UK adults can't complete 20 basic digital tasks — things like sharing a folder from OneDrive, spotting a phishing email, or logging into an HR system. That number has improved since 2023 but they're still 20-25 years away from full digital inclusion. Chris's argument is simple: nobody was ever taught this stuff, and the gap between what computers can do and what people know how to do costs enormous amounts of time and money every single day.

Guest: Chris Lewis, tech productivity coach

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 18 April 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Sarah Eggleston met Natalie through Women in Tech Hampshire, and her story starts somewhere most tech careers don't: international schools across three continents, moving every two or three years because her father worked for the World Health Organization. The early exposure to diversity — genuinely mixed classrooms of people from everywhere — gave her something she's still drawing on: a reflex for inclusion and a strong instinct that technology designed by a tiny subset of people will always fall short of what it could be.

She came of age in an era when tech wasn't presented as a career option, found her way in anyway, built a career at IBM, and is now building Flow — a company she's shaped around the things she noticed weren't being done well enough anywhere she'd worked.

The conversation covers how international schools compare to the English system, what inclusion actually means when it's baked into the environment rather than bolted on, and what it takes to leave a big corporate career to build something of your own.

Guest: Sarah Eggleston, Flow | Women in Tech Hampshire

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 11 April 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Beverley Poole's career spans an era most people in tech today didn't live through. She started with one of the first companies providing online support software on physical disks, moved into recruitment and training working with Chrysalis Interactive, Motorola, CellNet (now O2) and BT, spent 10 years in education, and is now running Aspire for Business Academy.

The conversation covers the full arc: what it was like to be in tech when none of the brands had the names they have now, the shift from physical media to online delivery, and the lessons from a decade in education that she's brought back into the business world. Beverley's perspective on what holds people back in tech — and what helps them through — comes from having seen both sides of the desk for a very long time.

Guest: Beverley Poole, Aspire for Business Academy

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 4 April 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Emma Woollen brings a leadership lens to the technology show. She opens with DISC personality profiling — the four colours — and why understanding your own colour and others' makes you a more adaptive leader and a better communicator, especially in the moments when you need someone's buy-in and your natural style is getting in the way.

The product vs project management distinction is one of those conversations that sounds obvious until you get into it. Emma is clear: product is about outcomes (why are we building this, does it solve the problem?), project is about delivery (on time, on budget, in scope). The best teams have both. Agile isn't always the answer — she makes a strong case for when waterfall is genuinely the right choice, and why the MVP mentality of shipping fast and learning is often misapplied by teams that mistake "minimum" for "unfinished."

The conversation closes on psychological safety — the idea that the measure of a healthy team isn't whether people agree, but whether anyone at any level can ask a question, flag a concern, or say "I don't understand this." Emma's point: you often find the best questions come from the most junior person in the room, because they haven't yet learned not to ask.

Guest: Emma Woollen

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 21 March 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Luke Rickson is a cybersecurity expert and founder of Leading Security. His opening position is honest and slightly alarming: assume you will be hacked, and shift your mindset from "how do I prevent it" to "how do I reduce the probability and recover quickly when it happens."

The conversation is practical throughout. Luke explains how attackers operate — lurking in business systems for months before acting, watching emails to understand relationships before launching a convincing phishing attack. He covers the basics that most small businesses skip: password managers, MFA on every account (especially email), VPNs on public wifi, and DMARC records to prevent someone sending emails that appear to come from your domain. He also makes the case against outdated WordPress plugins as a silent entry point, and explains social engineering as the real frontier — attackers don't need to crack encryption when they can just phone your IT helpdesk and ask to be let in.

The closing philosophy is genuinely useful: security is about probability, not perfection. Every layer you add makes you a harder target and pushes attackers toward easier victims. You don't need to be unhackable, you need to be harder than average.

Guest: Luke Rickson, Leading Security | Podcast: The Leading Security Podcast

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 14 March 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Ben Moore grew up pricing potpourri in his mum's gift shops (Mimi, Hartley Whitney and Wokingham) and never quite left retail behind. Now he runs Foundation — a group of three companies offering integration tech, retail advisory, and financial consultancy to the kind of businesses that have great ideas and terrible spreadsheets.

The conversation ranges widely and stays interesting throughout. Ben argues that the British high street isn't dying, it's in metamorphosis — and that the answer isn't competing with Amazon on speed or price, but building experiences and communities that Amazon structurally cannot replicate. He talks about loneliness statistics, vape shops replacing independents, the flooding that nearly destroyed his mum's shop, and why he'd like to see government-backed technology that serves community rather than profit.

On AI, both Natalie and Ben land on the same place from different directions: you won't lose your job to AI, you'll lose it to someone who uses AI well. Natalie shares her story of using Claude to write ten safeguarding documents in a week to launch a community sewing club — something that would otherwise have taken months and eaten the entire budget. Ben maps this onto retail: automate the boring workflow so salespeople arrive at client meetings with full mental capacity, not half of it spent on journey planning.

Guest: Ben Moore, Foundation / Digital Cohesion — https://uk.linkedin.com/company/digital-cohesion-retail-advisory

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 28 February 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Kachi (full name Onyekachi Umukoro) came to Southampton from Nigeria via a fashion design career, a computer science degree, a UI/UX phase and a ChatGPT discovery moment. Her Applied AI and Data Science course at Southampton brought it all together. This is their first time on radio, and it shows in the best possible way — completely unguarded, genuinely thoughtful.

The fashion-meets-AI conversation is the most interesting in the episode. High-end brands are already using AI-generated models instead of humans for social media. Body-scanning apps exist that could take your measurements in seconds. The real problem isn't the tech — it's the data. For a model to understand body shapes across cultures (Nigerian women's proportions vs UK sizing blocks), you'd need industry-wide collaboration, and fashion houses don't collaborate. They protect their customer data because it's their competitive advantage.

The deeper idea that comes through: Nigeria had a stronger culture of made-to-measure before fast fashion arrived. Kachi's friend still wears pieces from 2019 because they were made to fit. Meanwhile, most people in the UK own clothes they can't wear because they're the wrong shape for a size 14 block. If someone built the data infrastructure to fix that — clothing that actually fits across different body types and cultures — it would require the kind of data generosity that competitive markets don't naturally produce.

The conversation closes with a serious point about AI ethics: the model is only as good as the data it receives, diversity in training data matters enormously, and we need regulation now before the fears about AI become reality.

Guest: Onyekachi (Kachi) Umukoro, Applied AI and Data Science, University of Southampton

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 21 February 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Adam Isles and his business partner Ashley opened The Electronics Hub in Woolston, Southampton, after being made redundant when Maplin Electronics closed. Six years later they're on eBay, Amazon, have a website, and are planning to add workshops so young people can walk in off the street and learn to solder, code with Arduino and build things.

The conversation takes a philosophical turn that somehow feels right for Valentine's Day. Adam has spent years studying human behaviour — Simon Sinek's Start With Why shaped his staff training method, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink explains why he can predict what a customer wants from the moment they walk in, and Joe Dispenza's Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself has been his current obsession. He's thought deeply about how we attract what we project, how our subconscious brain pattern-matches faster than conscious thought, and why one small thing — a genuine smile at the door — is the single most powerful thing any retailer can do.

On AI, Adam thinks it will do a full loop: everyone's piling on right now, but people are craving face-to-face interaction post-COVID, and one day it might be a selling point to advertise yourself as the place where no chatbot answers the phone and you can just walk in.

Guest: Adam Isles, The Electronics Hub — https://www.tehonline.co.uk/, Victoria Road, Woolston (green and grey, bright white windows)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 14 February 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk