Annika Bizon is the Director of Mobile Experience at Samsung UK and Ireland, and she came in the week of the Galaxy S25 launch. Five million people in the UK are already using Galaxy AI — more adoption in 12 months than the internet achieved in eight years.

The practical examples are the most interesting part. Live translate means you can hold a phone conversation in England while someone in Japan speaks back in Japanese and both sides hear their own language in real time. Circle search finds products from any photo on your screen. Now Brief gives you a morning summary that combines your sleep data, schedule, boarding passes, road works and whether you need an umbrella — pulled from all your apps, spoken back to you in one go.

Annika also talks about the things that actually matter when rolling out AI to millions of people: privacy (Knox Vault on-device encryption, you choose what goes to the cloud), data ownership (unlike Facebook, your Samsung data stays yours), and the bias question (early AI had problems but it's learning what's wrong as well as what's right). The audio eraser feature (remove a singing friend from your concert video) and Galaxy Trim (AI picks the best 30 seconds from your footage) are genuinely useful for small business content creators.

Guest: Annika Bizon, Director of Mobile Experience, Samsung UK and Ireland | Samsung Galaxy S25 — samsung.com/uk

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 7 February 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Jess Pomfret is a data platform engineer at Data Masterminds, a small consultancy that solves data problems for businesses across gaming, healthcare, retail and more. The conversation starts very technical — SQL Server performance, indexes, cloud migration, GDPR compliance, the particular pain of a dashboard that takes six seconds to load — and stays genuinely interesting because Natalie has enough background to go deep with her.

Then Jess tells her story. She grew up in Wiltshire, wanted to be a professional footballer but there was no women's league, got a college soccer scholarship to Ohio, had to choose a degree, liked one database class, graduated, stayed in the US on a job offer from a company happy to train her on the job. Twenty years later, she saw a tweet about a data team being built in Southampton and her American wife said "just see what happens." They moved in January 2020, the week before COVID. It has worked out.

Jess is now a Women in Tech Hampshire regular, a contributor to the open source DBA Tools PowerShell module (thousands of users worldwide, started by Chrissy LeMaire), a LinkedIn Learning instructor who recorded her latest course in a California studio, and co-host of the podcast Finding Data Friends. Her speaking tip — slow down, breathe, give the audience white space to process — is advice she had to actively learn when she noticed her Garmin watch recording her first presentation as a workout.

Guest: Jess Pomfret, Data Masterminds | Podcast: Finding Data Friends

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 31 January 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Pasha Jam grew up in Saudi Arabia, came to Southampton at 17, studied software engineering at the University of Southampton, got a job straight out of university, then packed everything up and flew to Turkey to launch a marketplace startup with two friends. It didn't work. "We were all men and all engineers and we thought that's enough." It wasn't.

The failure taught him exactly what was missing — and a few years later he joined Bumper, now one of the Financial Times' 50 fastest-growing companies in Europe. Bumper is essentially Klarna for car repairs: you split your service bill rather than paying it all at once. As CTO, Pasha oversees engineering teams in London and Turkey (in-house, not outsourced, because "culture is everything") and is navigating the challenge every fast-growing company faces: how do you scale from 20 to 100 people without breaking what made you good?

He also has a one-year-old son. His wife is a VP of Product at another company. They both work full-time. He starts work at 9am. Bumper accommodates new parents — they even had someone who returned to work brilliantly after having triplets. The secret, Pasha says, is boundaries and planning, and an exec team that actually means it when they say they support families.

Guest: Pasha Jam, CTO — Bumper (bumper.co.uk)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 24 January 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

This special edition features two pre-recorded interviews from Natalie's ongoing series on female tech founders.

Ruth Simmons is the co-founder of TACaccess (https://www.tacaccess.com/) — a platform described as "Uber for therapists" that connects sole trader counsellors, SEND specialists and mental health professionals directly with schools, colleges and other organisations working with children and young people. The business model is deliberately fair: the therapist sets their own hourly rate and keeps 94% of it; the platform takes 6%. Ruth spent 30 years in education and local authorities before the catalyst moment — seven completed suicides in her district in 2020, children aged 13 to 17 — made her pick up the phone to a retiring head teacher and say "what about this." The platform has 220+ therapists, went live in March 2024, and has helped young people access support within 24-36 hours where previously they'd wait months.

Kate Drover is the founder of AmazY.UK (amazy.uk), an EdTech platform that lets educators create AI-powered interactive courses, voice recording exercises and block-based content — cutting teacher admin from 50% of working time to near-zero. Kate's origin story is raw: she was an ESL teacher who broke down crying on Christmas Eve from exhaustion, realised she'd lost the connection with students she'd gone into teaching for, and built the tool she wished existed. The platform is live, seeking angel investment, with a vision to give every educator a personal AI clone.

Guests: Ruth Simmons, TACaccess — https://www.tacaccess.com/ | Kate Drover, AmazY.UK — amazy.uk

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 17 January 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Steve (director) and Sam from Spectrum IT Recruitment are launching Hampshire AI — a new discussion group running from the Southampton Science Park, focused on how local businesses are actually implementing AI in products and services. Their first event is on 28 January with two speakers: Andy Stanford Clarke from IBM, talking about the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (a completely unmanned ocean research vessel collecting data in the middle of the sea), and Mark Edmondson from CoreText, whose university library platform can detect changes in a student's reading behaviour and flag potential welfare issues.

But the best part of the conversation is the examples. The AI comparison to a Big Mac lands well. AI being used to craft beer by processing user feedback is fun. And the serious stuff is genuinely moving: an AI system detecting breast cancer 13% more accurately than human radiologists, potentially reaching 200,000-300,000 more people per year. Waymo's self-driving taxis have an 85% lower crash rate than human drivers.

The downsides get equal airtime: a fake Halloween parade generated by an AI bot that 5,000 real people turned up to; deepfakes, identity fraud via facial recognition, and the uncomfortable reality that the tools to attack our data are currently faster than the tools to protect it.

Find Hampshire AI on LinkedIn: search Hampshire AI | Event details at spectrumit.co.uk

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 10 January 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

It's January 3rd and Natalie starts the year the way she means to go on: by telling the truth. She got into technology at 13 because someone told her that's where the money was. She loved drama, art, and making noise — not circuits or mathematics. But money talks.

What follows is a rare, honest account of a 25-year tech career: the late nights and business-class flights of consulting (unsustainable by her late twenties); four years in Procter & Gamble manufacturing where she learned that the engineers on the factory floor know far more about the problems than any graduate who walks in with ideas; traveling Southeast Asia, meeting her now-husband, and starting a software company together with absolutely no idea how to run a business; and eventually growing that company to 16 staff and over £1M in revenue over 14 years.

The episode closes with Natalie's new year challenge: what are you continuously learning this year? Her own answers — sewing machine maintenance and improvisational comedy — are a very Natalie combination of the practical and the joyful.

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 3 January 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

It's the 20th of December and Dan Harrison is in the studio talking automation, AI and why more people need to be willing to break things. Dan runs Automation 4 HR (automation4hr.co.uk), helping outsourced HR companies build custom software and automations so their teams can focus on the human side of HR rather than copying and pasting between disconnected systems.

The conversation covers: AI explained in non-scary terms (a giant database with the reasoning of a five-year-old — which is why it responds well to clear, detailed language), the difference between AI and automation, ChatGPT vs Claude and the horse race between them, prompt engineering as just "how to talk to AI," and three concrete automation examples — an entire person's job eliminated by a button that copies between two systems in a second; a commission calculation process cut from three days to one hour; and invoicing being automated to near-zero from three days per month.

They also talk about whether AI poses a sci-fi-style existential threat (Dan thinks we need a human off switch, and also that turning things off and on again works for computers and humans alike), and close with a description of Dan's ideal client: an outsourced HR company crossing the £1M turnover threshold who wants Fridays back.

Guest: Dan Harrison, Automation 4 HR — automation4hr.co.uk

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 20 December 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Ngozi Chinye is the founder of Sota Safety Consulting and now a software startup building bespoke tools for chemical process safety. She didn't start with a software background — she started with decades of engineering consulting, a passion for staying in a warm dry office rather than climbing process equipment in winter, and a slowly building frustration with a piece of work that everyone in her industry does on Excel.

HAZOPS — process hazard analyses — have been carried out since the 1960s, first on paper and then in spreadsheets. Excel was free once you had it, so it became the default. But Excel is terrible for text-heavy documents, doesn't spell-check properly, doesn't wrap text well, and can't manage the volume of information these analyses require. Ngozi went looking for specialist software. What she found was 1990s Microsoft Access-based interfaces that looked like "clever Excel". So she decided to build something better.

She talks about having her daughter during COVID lockdown, doing the risk calculation of starting a business vs sitting on savings for two years, and the moment she stopped asking "who am I to do this" and started building with a brilliant team. She's currently bootstrapped, funding the software development from her consulting day job — as a mum, full-time consultant and startup founder simultaneously.

Guest: Ngozi Chinye, Sota Safety Consulting

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 6 December 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

This special edition starts immediately with no preamble — two thoughtful conversations about technology and community.

Fred Bassett set up Skyrock Communications in 1996, one of the UK's first web agencies, and spent the next three years explaining to businesses what the internet was (before the dot-com bubble did it for him). He later founded Blue Latitude, a digital marketing consultancy he exited in 2019 — two months before the pandemic. Now he's involved with the RSA, Future Worlds, and Growth Leaders, working to build a creative and tech community in Southampton. Fred and Natalie have a wide-ranging conversation about the dot-com era, co-creation in software development, user experience in healthcare, and the crucial difference between a programmer who writes beautiful syntax and one who actually solves the business problem. He's hosting an RSA event on 28 November about unlocking Southampton's creative tech potential.

Kate Drover is the founder of AmazY.UK (amazy.uk) — an EdTech platform where educators can create AI-powered interactive courses, exercises, voice recording assessments and personalised content. Kate's origin story is raw: she was an ESL teacher who broke down crying on Christmas Eve, exhausted by admin and disconnected from the students she loved. She built AmazY while also talking to teachers in the US, UK and Europe who cried when they shared the same story. The platform is live, subscription-based ($12-15/month), and seeking angel investment to build a vision that ends with every educator having a personal AI clone.

Guests: Fred Bassett — RSA Southampton, Growth Leaders | Kate Drover, AmazY.UK — amazy.uk

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 22 November 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Lucy Quick runs Three C's Consultancy, and she's spent her career in audiovisual, software development, cloud hosting and telecoms — industries she didn't always think of as "tech" until someone told her she was "not scared of tech" and something clicked. She and Natalie met through Women in Tech Hampshire.

Lucy talks about her experience of coding at university with a pink notebook while classmates laughed, how she eventually stopped trying to do it their way and used coloured pens to draw out the logic first — and outperformed people around her. She ran a software company where developers in Liverpool worked with a team in Pakistan, and where the implementation of JIRA and GitHub transformed not just the communication but the culture. She was also deliberate about not creating a "girl group" — mixing diverse team members intentionally rather than siloing by gender.

The conversation moves into innovation (it doesn't need to be millions of pounds of new tech — it can be changing how a meeting works), and closes with a genuinely useful section on digital whiteboard tools: Miro, Mule and Lucid Sparks. Lucy explains why giving everyone a way to contribute simultaneously — including the person who's always sketching quietly at the back — produces better outcomes, more engagement, and a team that actually owns what they built.

Guest: Lucy Quick, Three C's Consultancy
Women in Tech Hampshire — search on LinkedIn and Eventbrite

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 15 November 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk