Talented teens plan high-tech creative conference for Derry

Teenage DNA normally dictates that summer months are spent lazing about. But six teenagers, who appear to share an entrepreneurial gene, are barely drawing breath this month as they race to raise money on a crowdfunding platform to bring their inspired business idea to life.

The group, aged 16 to 18 years old, are masterminding what they claim is the North’s first high-tech creative conference (Create: 2014) to be designed and produced by young people, next month.

They have already secured funding from the NI Science Park and CultureTech, the digital technology festival held in Derry each September, to make it happen but want to raise a further £2,500 on Kickstarter to ensure the conference on September 17th really impresses.

None of them has ever done anything on this scale before, but then these are not just a random group of teenagers with nothing to lose. What makes them stand out is their high-tech achievements – mainly while attending school – which is why they are being widely tipped as next-generation entrepreneurs.

Homework app

The group includes 18-year-old Sarah McBride, who with school friends devised an enterprising homework diary app, and 16-year-old Joshua Kempton who, as the official marketing director of Create: 2014, is the youngest in his field in the North.

Matthew Carson and Jordan Earle, both 17, co-founded YouthEast, a website and app mapping youth services in east Belfast, are also on board, as is 16-year-old Kennedy Keeney Robinson from Derry, who was a previous finalist in the BT Young Scientist Exhibition. The remaining Create team member is Gareth Reid, a 16- year-old student from Belfast.

They say the aim of Create: 2014, which will take place in Derry, is “to get people excited about the creative economy and the possibilities within”.

“To us, the success of Northern Ireland depends on people realising the potential of this sector,” they add. It’s not exactly the sort of thing you would expect to preoccupy the average teenager. But then, these six are far from average as Reid’s track record demonstrates.

A pupil at Grosvenor Grammar School in Belfast, Reid has devised a mobile app “Write to Read” to help his classmates with dyslexia.

He had noticed that people with dyslexia were more comfortable reading text in a font like Comic Sans, so he developed his own comic font and then built an educational app that allows the user to photograph text and have it converted into the bespoke “Write to Read” font.

Investor interest

Reid wants to develop his prototype app – which he says will be available shortly on the App Store – with commercial software.

In the meantime, Write to Read is beginning to attract investor interest and has just been shortlisted in a competition designed to find local inventions with the greatest commercial potential.

Reid’s app, which can also be installed onto web browsers, PCs and Macs, is one of 12 local products that have been selected as among the most exciting prototype technologies around.

Others in the Invent Awards shortlist range from a 20W, 360-degree, super-bright, long-life LED bulb, to a cloud platform for cemeteries and crematoria that manages all their operations in the one place, to a novel nasal vaccine delivery system.

California prize

Entrants are judged across six categories and winners receive return flights to California to pitch their ideas to potential investors and also a chance to compete for a slice of a £33,000 prize fund.

But, before Reid gets his chance to shine at the final of the Invent Awards in Belfast in October, he and his Create 2014 colleagues have the small matter of £847 remaining to be to raised on Kickstarter.

One of the carrots they are dangling in front of prospective backers willing to part with £50 for their cause is, among other things, the opportunity to get their hands on a “very rare, super special, incredibly fashionable, limited edition conference T-shirt”.

Perhaps underneath all their entrepreneurial ambitions the Create 2014 gang are really just like every other T-shirt obsessed teenager in the land – only they want your money for a genuinely, good reason.