Ed explains why inclusive networks matter. He has run Venturefest South's open-mic pitching for around nine years, welcoming ideas from children, older people and disabled founders as well as established businesses. He recalls two Innovator of the Year winners whose AI product went on to attract £2 million in funding, while arguing that five per cent growth across many local firms can be just as valuable as one spectacular success. Southern Creative Catalyst extends the same thinking to coders, designers, architects, music technicians and other commercial creatives.

The conversation also covers dyslexia, changing attitudes to academic routes, the effect of AI on entry-level work and the need to retain local talent. Ed urges students to strengthen their cognitive and creative capabilities, reminds founders that a world-changing business can begin in a cupboard, and asks business leaders, freelancers and listeners to stop working in silos. His call to action is simple: show up, share ideas, build trust and help create the opportunities the region needs.

Guest: Ed Gould, Creative Director and Founding Partner, Carswell Gould

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 16 October 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

She explains why a request for “more pipeline” may conceal a different problem: buyers lack the tools to make a decision, CFOs receive the same material as CTOs, or product and sales are pulling apart. The conversation explores the 80/20 “land and expand” principle, the value inside existing customers and Natalie’s biscuit-fuelled quarterly reviews. Sally argues that maturing software companies need outcomes, proof and a clear product story, not another list of features.

They also examine AI in marketing, from intent data and HubSpot workflows to automated adverts that risk sounding like everyone else’s. Sally sees AI as valuable for repeatable work and data analysis, but says human judgement, brand, point of view and storytelling still create distinction. Her advice is to diagnose before prescribing, prioritise the three changes most likely to move the needle, learn the new tools without following fashion, and remember the value of being human.

Guest: Sally Yates, go-to-market adviser, Reset & Co

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 9 October 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

James talks Natalie through the reality of turning technical skills into a business: learning sales, marketing, legal and accounts; recognising that a team needs front end, back end, design and strategy; and building trust when clients are taking a risk on someone new. His advice is to start small, with a focused piece of work such as a design, audit, scope or specification, because good planning can identify 90% of the ways a project might go wrong before anyone starts building the wrong thing.

The conversation also covers Southampton's tech networks, the University of Southampton student enterprise team, the Catalyst programme at the University of Southampton Science Park, Southern Creative Catalyst, strategic partnerships with other software companies, and Novatura's focus on growth-oriented SMEs, including automotive after sales, vehicle repair and garages. James's message for founders is to stay humble, ask for help, get off social media, take useful risks and create opportunities for other people too.

Guest: James Harcourt, Director and Software Developer, Novatura

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 2 October 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Why is a stylist on a tech show? Because, as Natalie puts it, we buy confidence. Joana explains enclothed cognition (the idea that what we wear shapes how we think, feel and act) and tells the story of a client who moved from the end of the boardroom table, where she was the one asked to turn the TV volume up and down, to the side where decisions get made, and went on to lead a department. They also get into decision fatigue, the 'pretty or smart' messages many women grew up with, and why dressing one notch above the expected dress code is a useful rule of thumb.

In the final part Joana shares practical tips for moving from a formal meeting to a relaxed networking event, explains why AI colour-analysis tools can get it badly wrong (lighting and what you're wearing in the photo both skew the result), and reveals that she worked only with men for her first couple of years in the business.

Guest: Joana Meneses, Styling You Confident (stylingyouconfident.com)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 25 September 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Now he teaches teams to do change themselves. His starting question is always the same: what is it you're actually trying to do? Using Natalie's own idea for a nonprofit as a live example, he shows change management in practice: explain it clearly, energise people and draw them in. He walks through the levers of change beyond technology (people, products and services, process, structure, customers and markets) and describes the strange split AI has created, with some people adopting it at astonishing speed while others simply aren't getting involved.

Paul's central message is that the answer is already in the building. The people doing the work usually know what's broken, and ideas they help create are far more likely to land. He also explains why he built an AI version of himself as a coach, how he built his own CRM in an evening with Claude's help despite never having written Python, and why accountability can't be outsourced to consultants.

Guest: Paul Cook, The Transformation Guide (thetransformationguide.co.uk), author of the weekly Change Brief newsletter

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 18 September 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Natalie asks the philosopher in the room about the headlines claiming AI labs are hiring philosophers. Julia's view: it's good to see, but research funded by the labs happens in a very particular context while public-interest research is drying up, and that skews the story we're told. She wants more nuance between the two dominant narratives about AI, endless abundance on one side and doom on the other.

She Shapes AI began in 2024 to show that women are already doing groundbreaking, responsible AI work (they aren't absent, they're busy working), through awards, events and training for female executives. Natalie makes a confession about feeling judged for using AI to build software, which opens up a conversation about why women are often more sceptical of AI and judged differently when they use it. Julia argues that scepticism is healthy, that opting out of the conversation isn't the answer, and that using AI well depends on real expertise and judgement. There's also a strong case for pen and paper.

Guest: Julia Stamm, founder and CEO, She Shapes AI

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 11 September 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Emma argues for the messy middle between hoarding data to monetise it and locking it all down for fear of GDPR fines. Why spend money protecting data you don't use, and why wouldn't you protect something so valuable? She makes the case that GDPR isn't anti-business, that transparency is simply good practice, and that the first step for any organisation is to know its data estate, especially with AI, where garbage in means garbage out. She explains why one-off workshops don't work for data mapping, and how Friday's tool (called Antonio, because everything always gets named after women) maps data continuously without reading individual records.

The conversation also covers data sovereignty and depending on platforms you don't control, why SMEs shouldn't hold themselves to the standards of big companies that get it wrong, data trusts, and the fair value exchange consumers deserve when loyalty schemes use their data.

Guest: Emma Dunn, co-founder, Friday Initiatives

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 4 September 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Becky explains what drives her. Her parents were teachers working on inclusion long before it was mainstream, she grew up on the edge of a council estate, and as a neurodivergent woman she knows how badly the school system can fit some brains. Desk2Educate uses AI to personalise learning to how each individual is wired, and helps learners understand how they learn best. It's now running paid pilots, including one with Portsmouth City Council.

The conversation also covers rejection sensitive dysphoria and why high sensitivity can be an underrated strength (it helped make her a top-performing salesperson), her white paper for the Business AI Alliance on the barriers facing women in business and STEM, being streamed away from science at school, and why she believes neurodivergent people will shape the next wave of technology.

Guest: Becky Lodge, founder, Desk2Educate (desk2educate.com) and Startup Disruptors

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 28 August 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

She tells Natalie about the journey that followed: leading payment and document systems, moving Lloyds' Microsoft Dynamics platform into the cloud (the bank's first highly confidential application to go there), advising an investment bank, working as a programme director at PwC on public-sector transformation, and now working as business design lead at the Pensions Regulator. The thread through all of it is sitting at the intersection of business, data, architecture and technology, and translating between them.

Vikki is also a passionate advocate for women in tech. She supports Women in Tech Birmingham, mentors 15 people, and visits schools as an ambassador to show children that tech careers are for everyone. She shares her view on why women leave tech in the 'sticky middle' of their careers, why she stayed, and why AI will only work if the data foundations are right. There's also a warning about the gap between an AI policy on paper and what staff are actually uploading.

Guest: Vikki Szymanski, business design lead, mentor and women-in-tech advocate

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 21 August 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Mark explains how it works. It can be loaded with an organisation's own policies, so staff can ask things like 'can I take a second job?' without interrupting their manager. It can also advise employers on issues such as managing performance, drawing on his own experience and trusted sources like ACAS guidance. Natalie asks the obvious question: why trust it more than a general chatbot? The answer is guardrails. It's told not to make things up, it cites its sources, it gives a confidence rating for every answer, and it flags risky situations (a dismissal involving protected characteristics, for example) and tells the user to speak to a human expert.

They also discuss why much of HR is really a process, how far AI agents have come in the last few months, and why AI works best as a very capable junior colleague rather than a replacement for experience. Mark describes the other side of the coin too: employees are using AI to write strikingly polished grievance letters and information requests, making HR issues more complex for small businesses.

Guest: Mark Bishop, founder, Phronesis HR AI

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 14 August 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Tim explains the problem with conventional heating. A radiator warms the air near it, the hot air rises to the ceiling, and it disappears the moment someone opens a door. NexGen instead covers 70 to 80 per cent of the ceiling with gentle, low-voltage far infrared panels (the same kind of warmth you feel from the sun, without the UV), so a room feels warm in minutes rather than an hour. Radar sensors can detect where people are and heat only those spots, from the sofa in an open-plan home to occupied desks in a half-empty office, and the heat stored in walls and floors adds a second layer of efficiency. It can also help prevent and dry out damp and mould, which is why social housing is its main sector.

There's a surprise detour too. Tim is a farmer, born and bred, who worked in precision farming 25 years ago, and the family farm now runs a coffee roastery, a pizza business and glamping alongside its sheep. Plus: why picking strawberries is still the holy grail of farm robotics, and what AI could add to smart building monitoring.

Guest: Tim Brock, NexGen Heating (nexgenheating.com)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 7 August 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Today John runs AiLab, a vendor-neutral AI training company he co-founded in 2017 with Emma Berry. He explains why understanding how AI actually works gives people knowledge that lasts when the tools change, and why AI for good (predicting floods and bushfires, spotting the warning signs of homelessness before it happens) deserves far more attention than writing emails faster. He also picks Jamiroquai's 'Virtual Insanity' and explains why its lyrics feel so relevant now.

Natalie and John compare notes on vibe coding (he prefers 'coding with my agent', or perhaps 'hope coding'), why an MVP isn't a production system, and why you need to learn your craft first. He also introduces Couch to AI, his five-week programme for building AI confidence at work, and shares his message for local businesses: be responsible, start with a real problem and start small.

Guest: Dr John Flackett, co-founder, AiLab (https://www.ailab.world/)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 31 July 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Before the awards talk, the pair go full nerd on their favourite new AI tools — Whisper Flow, Claude, Gemini — and Alan pitches his rename for AI: "amplified information", on the grounds that amplification never promised accuracy. Natalie, fresh from a conference talk on what vibe coders don't know they don't know, has strong feelings about presenters who wave away IP questions instead of just saying "I don't know". There's also the story of Alan's greatest April Fools' as a South African radio DJ: convincing an entire town that Boyz II Men were coming to visit. Chaos, escorted exits and home-baked cakes ensued.

Then the categories, with last year's winners as proof of range: AI Innovation of the Year; High Growth Tech Company (Tech Over, missile guidance systems, global but still rooted at the University of Southampton Science Park); Innovative Tech Company (Canary Care's home monitoring for vulnerable people); Large Tech Enterprise (Total Security); Managed Service Provider (Trust IT) — the unsung backbone companies you only notice when things break; Outstanding Achievement (IBM's Sarah Neenan, whose award Natalie presented); Rising Star for under-35s (IBM's Emma Dawson); South Coast Tech Company of the Year (CV-Library); Tech Employer (Trellint UK); Tech for Good (solar specialists Ecko); Tech SME; Tech Startup; and the judges' wildcard One to Watch, which last year went to two 19-year-olds with £2.5 million in VC backing.

The night itself: 15 October at the Leonardo in Southampton, hosted by Jason Bradbury of The Gadget Show — who reportedly arrived at the Thames Valley awards on a hoverboard. As Alan puts it, it's a party, but it's not just a party: shortlisting puts you in front of the region's movers and shakers, and winning carries real weight with investors and future hires.

Guest: Alan Lindstrom, Insider Media (South Coast Tech & Innovation Awards, 15 October, the Leonardo, Southampton)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 17 July 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Chris explains why so much of his team's value lies in the diligent, unglamorous work nobody chases them for: keeping configurations to best practice, patching vulnerabilities, and making sure things still work after the person who built them has left (a cautionary tale about Power BI dashboards tied to one employee's account). He also makes a surprising admission. After years in the industry, starting at IBM, he's realised he isn't really a technologist. What fascinates him is people, and he now thinks of himself as a gardener, creating the right conditions for his team to grow.

The conversation turns to peer groups and the loneliness of leadership, why mid-sized SMEs often struggle to adopt technology and may face a stark divide with AI, gatekeeping in tech, and how people with privilege can use it to amplify others, including why curiosity and a willingness to ask questions make such a difference.

Guest: Chris Ward, Vermont Systems

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 25 June 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The conversation starts with how the conference came about — there had been a conference in the region before, it disappeared, and Seemin and her colleagues decided something needed to replace it. What they built from scratch is notable less for its line-up than for its structure: a 50/50 male-female speaker split maintained since the very first year, an outreach programme that gives away 20% of tickets plus all volunteer passes for free, and an application process designed for people who don't already move in tech circles and wouldn't think to put their hand up.

The exchange on gatekeeping is the heart of the episode. Seemin is clear and specific: the problem isn't that diverse people don't exist in tech, it's that the spaces where tech is discussed and celebrated aren't designed to include them. She talks about how they actively built a volunteer base that was 70–80% from under-represented backgrounds — and how that changed who came to the event, who felt comfortable, and who got to see themselves on stage. Natalie, who has heard the "it's just hard to find female speakers" line more times than she can count, pushes back on the excuse with relish.

Guest: Seemin Suleri, ReConnect Conference (community-led tech event, Dorset/South of England)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 19 June 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The first half of the interview establishes the foundations — what GDPR actually is, what it requires, and why the principles of transparency, accountability and data minimisation are not bureaucratic obstacles but a framework for organisations that want to use data well. Shahab is a good explainer: he takes the legalese out and replaces it with practical language, including a brisk tour of what ICO fines actually look like and what triggers them.

The second half is where it gets particularly timely. Companies are racing to implement AI tools on top of their existing data — CRM systems, customer records, operational databases — and many of them are doing so without asking the questions GDPR requires: Do you have the right to use this data? Do you know where your AI tool is sending it? Can you tell your customers what you are doing and why? Shahab walks through a practical checklist for navigating AI adoption without creating a liability, and makes the point that the organisations getting this right are not the ones treating GDPR as a constraint but as a discipline.

The conversation closes on culture: how different national and professional cultures shape attitudes to negotiation, compliance and risk — and why understanding that is increasingly central to Shahab's work with international clients.

Guest: Shahab Al-Baghdadi, GDPR Training Ltd

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 12 June 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Vanessa shares the findings of the Lovelace Report, research she worked on with the Tech Talent Charter and Oliver Wyman that puts an economic cost on failing to develop women in tech: billions of pounds a year, with somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 women leaving the industry every year. The top reasons are progression, pay transparency and recognition. Childcare was cited by just 3 per cent. Women wait twice as long for early-career promotions, and many are paying for their own certifications and still not moving up.

She and Natalie talk about fixing the system rather than the women ('it's not the fish, it's the water'), why women need to be in the room when AI is designed, why leaders need training too, and her new workbook-style book, 404 Women Not Found. Her advice: stay curious about AI, use the free training that's out there, and build your network before you need it.

Guest: Vanessa Vallely OBE, founder, WeAreTheCity and WeAreTechWomen

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 5 June 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Chris explains the building blocks in plain English. MCPs let an AI model query up-to-date information from other services. Skills are reusable instructions (a standard operating procedure in a Markdown file) that can include scripts, so repeatable steps happen the same way every time. He describes his 'sovereign brain': around 5,000 notes exported into Obsidian and made searchable by his AI, with a layer only he can write to, a shared layer, and a layer the AI uses for its own change log. It even produces an 'invoice' at the end of each session estimating what the work would have cost if people had done it.

They also discuss Anthropic research suggesting around 65 per cent of marketing tasks can already be done by AI, and why the remaining 35 per cent (judgement, taste and reading people) matters most. The conversation covers why so many organisations struggle with AI adoption, the need for psychological safety to experiment, and why neurodivergent people often seem to be leading the way.

Guest: Chris Talintyre, Polything (polything.co.uk)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 29 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The heart of the conversation is a thoughtful, optimistic take on AI. SJ loves it but understands exactly why people are frightened — the LinkedIn scaremongering about graduates being shut out of work is real — and her group's answer is a simple creed: you can be powered by AI, but you have to be human. Natalie, fresh from interviewing Microsoft, raises the "human in the loop" idea; SJ upgrades it to "subject-matter-expert in the loop," because not just any human can validate whether AI output is correct, and an LLM is only ever as good as the experience behind your prompt.

It's also a lovely episode about who people are beyond their job titles. SJ's "side hustle" — growing dahlias, 175 of them this year, as chair of a flower show — turns out to reveal as much about her as her day job. She's even enlisted Claude as her gardening assistant, managing her lists. Along the way: her route into tech (a particle-physicist dad who got her a computer in 1980 when she was six), a heartfelt thread on women driving early computing (Hidden Figures, the first programmers), and a gorgeous management analogy — a struggling employee isn't a bad worker, they're "a flower in the wrong part of the garden," and move them into the light and good water and they flourish.

Guest: SJ Walker, Ecrubox (digital/e-commerce agency)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 22 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

From there the career arc is genuinely interesting. At the Coastguard he went on to run a modernisation programme — consolidating roughly 22 data centres into a two-data-centre model for the 999 service under the principle "change the technology, but don't change the business," and introducing AIS triangulation systems for tracking people and currents at sea so operators could work more effectively. He then co-ran a niche, technically-led consultancy (Systemup), working with small organisations, local councils, Parliament's digital services, HMRC and banks, partnering with Microsoft, Amazon and Google as the cloud providers took shape around 2015-16. A key lesson he shares: when he got pulled away from customers for a year or two, he lost touch with what really mattered to them in a fast-moving field — so they deliberately pivoted to keep directors on the ground with customers. The business was eventually sold through acquisition, which led him toward Microsoft.

The forward-looking half digs into AI — the hot topic of the moment — what it means for financial services, and Marc's advice for anyone who'd like a career like his over the next one to five years. A warm, candid, genuinely useful listen on building a tech career from an unconventional start.

Guest: Marc Esmiley, Head of Product for FinTech, Financial Services Commercial Engineering, Microsoft

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 15 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The differentiator is the bit Josh is proudest of: Town works solely with independents run by one or two owners who really care about their communities — no national or regional chains. The whole point is to push more spend toward those businesses and the local economy. It launched six weeks ago in BCP (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole), expanded to Bristol, and is now rolling into Southampton over the coming weeks — so for now a Southampton user downloading it sees a cheerfully blank map that's about to fill up with independents.

Natalie, a software developer herself, presses on the hard parts she knows from experience: the enormous data and onboarding work behind any local directory, and whether there are real success stories this early. Josh is candid and specific. Town is coded from scratch — no templates, no no-code tools — by his co-founder Allard. The team meets business owners, learns their challenges, and builds each a custom loyalty scheme they manage through a 24/7 dashboard. It's free for consumers (friction removed on purpose); businesses pay because the loyalty tech costs money to build and, over time, more than pays for itself in repeat customers and higher spend. Six weeks in, Town is live across around 30 places, with testimonials already on the website.

Guest: Josh Williams, co-founder, Town (Town Local Loyalty app)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 8 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Before the cleaning, there's the data. Antoni is a serious triathlete who trains 10-12 hours a week and wears every sensor going — heart rate, core temperature, power meters, even goggles with a screen on the inside that show his pace and heart rate while he swims, and at-home lactate testing with his partner taking the blood samples. It's a properly geeky conversation about turning noisy data into real performance gains, with a detour into the sub-two-hour marathon and how physiology hasn't changed but training and technology have.

The second half traces Antoni's accidental path into cleaning. He arrived in the UK in 2010 with a dream of franchising waterless, petroleum-free car washes; the market wasn't ready, the franchising dream stalled, and he ended up running the car washes himself — "a humbling experience." That led, by 2012, into office cleaning done his own way: "sustainability by design" from day one, no bleaches or ridiculous chemicals, an ethos rooted in a Bulgarian childhood spent camping and running adventure races outdoors. The approach paid off — Eco Drift won Sustainable Business of the Year at the Portsmouth Business Awards. Along the way Antoni makes a sharp point about what "sustainable" really means: not just the environment, but whether a business can sustain itself through its life cycle without depending entirely on its founder.

Guest: Antoni Dimitrov, founder, Eco Drift (sustainable commercial cleaning)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 1 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

From there she zooms out. She reports back from Solent Futurescape 2026 at the King's Conference Centre in Hedge End (where she won a stand and admits the AI-generated dancing robot rather unsettled her), flags open nominations for the South Coast Tech and Innovation Awards 2026, and runs through the week's headlines: Meta planning to cut one in ten jobs after spending billions on AI, the pattern of US firms over-cutting and quietly rehiring, the looming end of Tim Cook's era at Apple, and Anthropic investigating claims of unauthorised access to a powerful new Claude-based security tool.

Then the heart of it. Natalie wanted to challenge the idea that tech innovation is a young person's game — because the first person in her family to adopt AI (which he called "A1" for ages) was her father, who turned 79 this week. A lifelong songwriter who knew about five chords, he used AI tools to take one of his own songs — his lyrics, his melody, his voice — and enhance it into something broadcast-ready. The episode closes with that song, Skiff Wilson's "Falling in Love," played on the radio for what's probably its only time: the words and melody exactly as Natalie remembers them from childhood, with her dad's own voice, just gently lifted by technology. A proud, lovely moment to end on.

Guest: None — solo host episode (Natalie Haigh). Closes with her father's AI-enhanced original song.

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 24 April 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The heart of this conversation is what changed him. At Christmas 2020, in the middle of lockdown, Mark and his family caught the Delta variant of COVID. They recovered; he "took the more scenic route" — two months in an induced coma, then another two months relearning how to walk, talk, eat and drink. He talks, with striking candour and warmth, about emerging as "Mark 2.0" (his wife prefers this version, and so does he), about the financial cliff-edge of being a contractor with no income and two tiny boys at home, and about how his new perspective made him incompatible with the old way of working. The rejection he met when he brought "off the wall" ideas to traditional consultancies became the fuel for going out on his own.

There's plenty of lighter texture too: a very funny aside about AI's habit of always telling you you're right (and the claim that some models turn miserable after about seven prompts), Mark's ambition to land a TEDx talk, and a genuinely useful thread running underneath it all — that you never get technology change without human change, and nothing works unless the people are bought into it.

Guest: Mark Green, founder, Change Rebellion (changerebellion.com)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 17 April 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Natalie asks the questions many listeners will have. Why not just use ChatGPT? Becky explains how general chatbots can pull you into hours of analysis, while Breezy is structured to nudge you into action. Is it safe to share something so personal? Conversations aren't linked to your account details, therapy recordings are deleted as soon as they've been transcribed, and people in crisis are directed to the right helplines. She also explains why she'd count it as a success if you no longer need the app in a year's time.

Becky shares her own story too: a degree in music industry management, running a heavy metal festival at 21, burnout, ten years in digital marketing, and panic attacks from her mid-twenties that led to a stress-related tremor. Her message is that you don't need to have it all figured out to build something, and there's no single quick fix for mental health, just finding what works for you and sticking with it. Talk to Breezy is running a trial with the University of Southampton and welcomes feedback from users.

Guest: Becky Weatherley, founder, Talk to Breezy

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 10 April 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The conversation ranges into multi-agent reinforcement learning, where AIs cooperate or compete and can learn games of deception like poker and Risk — including the famous tournaments where AI beat world champions at games long thought to be about "reading people." Natalie, a fan of social-deception and collaboration games herself (she's currently into Blood on the Clock Tower), draws out just how impressive and slightly unnerving that is.

But the heart of Tyler's work is sustainability. His PhD — "computationally efficient high-performance reinforcement learning" — is about achieving top results without the enormous power, water and data-centre demands that big, well-funded labs rely on. The aim is twofold: make the technology accessible to far more people, and make it dramatically greener. With AI's energy and water footprint already a growing concern even at today's relatively small user base, Natalie and Tyler agree that work like his could be a genuine game-changer if usage keeps climbing.

Guest: Tyler Clark, reinforcement-learning researcher (PhD: computationally efficient high-performance reinforcement learning)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 20 March 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Her central, liberating point is that falling into a 2am doom-scroll isn't a personal failing — these systems were deliberately engineered to capture attention — but that it is still on us to do something about it. She's careful to position herself as pro-human and pro-AI when used intentionally, not anti-technology. How We Screen offers a guided digital detox: currently an ebook (printable and readable analog, fittingly), with an AI-curated detox program in research and development. The goal is to work with your nervous system, build self-awareness, and create space between you and the compulsion loop so you can ask better questions about your own tech use.

Natalie, 45 and a computer-science graduate, brings a sharp counterpoint from the other side of the generational divide: her expectation that kids raised on tablets would "know everything" about technology has proved wrong — digital natives intuitively swipe and scroll, but nobody taught them PowerPoint, email or the breadth of real digital skills, so being a native isn't the same as being literate. The conversation moves through Sophia's path into AI policy, governance and tech ethics, what it's like to study a field moving so fast that even the people building the models can't say what happens next month, and into mindfulness, leadership and the case for deliberately slowing down.

Guest: Sophia Dias, founder of How We Screen (intentional technology / digital detox); psychology background

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast March 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The sweet spot for VoiceDart is tradespeople — roofers, electricians, anyone who's up a ladder or on the tools and can't answer the phone. The agent sits on their existing phone line, captures inquiries and books appointments automatically into Google Calendar, Outlook or whatever they use (and if there's no calendar API, VoiceDart integrates it anyway). It works across the UK — geography is no constraint, as you'd expect from tech.

The most interesting claim is emotional intelligence: Noor says Valley reads the words a caller uses during the transcribed conversation, recognises when someone is angry or upset, and acts accordingly — escalating to a human or booking an urgent appointment. Natalie notes it's the first time a guest has described an AI as emotionally intelligent, and presses on how it's done, how much training went into it (it's a self-learning system that improves from its own mistakes), and — importantly — whether there's a human in the loop. The answer: always.

Guest: Noor Khizer, VoiceDart (bespoke AI voice agents; assistant "Valley")

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast March 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The conversation is an honest account of what tech consulting actually looks like in a period of unprecedented change — not the polished LinkedIn version but the rollercoaster reality of a business that's genuinely dynamic. Alex talks about how she approaches working with businesses that have very different ideas of what they want from technology, why the platform landscape shifts so fast that a recommendation made two weeks ago might already need updating, and what she loves about that pace rather than resenting it.

This is a good episode for anyone who works with clients on tech and has felt the anxiety of recommending something that might be obsolete before the ink is dry on the proposal.

Guest: Alex O'Neill, Digitastic

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 27 February 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The practical content covers what CRM implementation actually involves (and why so many businesses have a CRM that nobody uses properly), how automation can eliminate the repetitive workflows that drain people's energy, and what it takes to actually run an AI workshop for a business rather than just talk about AI in general terms.

The closing segment on trust in the AI era is worth the price of admission: when AI can generate convincing text, images and video, what does it mean to trust information? Dan's view is grounded and worth sitting with.

Guest: Dan Sagar

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 20 February 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

LiDAR — the laser-based sensing technology at the heart of most autonomous vehicle systems — gets a proper explanation. Bit-flips are even more interesting: the phenomenon where high-energy cosmic rays can spontaneously flip a bit in memory from 0 to 1 or vice versa, which is usually not a problem on your laptop but becomes genuinely consequential in safety-critical systems. For a driverless car making split-second decisions, a single bit-flip in the wrong register is the kind of edge case that keeps engineers up at night.

The conversation is a good reminder that the physics behind cutting-edge tech is fascinating, and that astrophysics graduates end up thinking about these things in ways that pure software engineers often don't.

Guest: Tim Cordell, astrophysics graduate, Warwick University

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 6 February 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The conversation covers what those rankings actually capture and what they miss, how Natalie immediately pushes back on turnover as the primary measure, and what the Tech & Innovation Awards are looking for — the kinds of organisations and individuals that represent what's really happening in the regional tech scene. Alan's view from running these events gives him an unusual vantage point: he sees a large cross-section of the business community and has a good sense of where momentum is building and where it isn't.

Guest: Alan Lindstrom, Insider Media — insidermedia.com

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 23 January 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The subscription model discussion is where the conversation gets most interesting: wearable devices are increasingly just the hardware, with the real value locked behind recurring data subscriptions. Matt talks through the health data angle (what your smartwatch actually knows about you), the specific research Samsung is doing on detecting early signs of dementia through continuous biometric monitoring, and the form factor debate — why the wrist won the early wearables war and whether that's the right place for health sensors long-term. Strava and the social/platform dynamics of fitness data round out the episode.

Matt also mentions his own podcast — worth following up if you want more.

Guest: Matt Kollat — podcast details in episode

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 9 January 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The conversation covers what good automation looks like (human in the loop for the things that matter, automated for the genuinely repetitive), why most people are still using AI at about 10% of its potential, what's changed since the early ChatGPT days, and the practical steps a business can take to start building workflows that actually reduce the mental overhead of running a company. Luke is clear throughout: this isn't about replacing people, it's about removing the tasks that drain energy without adding value.

Guest: Luke Cleall — LinkedIn: search Luke Cleall

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast January 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Now he runs Download Learning, a company that uses neuroscience research to design learning experiences that stick. The central argument is straightforward but uncomfortable for a lot of organisations: traditional training (sitting in a room, watching slides, taking a quiz) doesn't create lasting behaviour change. The brain doesn't work that way. Simon talks through what does work, and introduces the concept of "wicked problems" — complex, system-level challenges that resist conventional solution approaches and require a different kind of thinking to navigate.

Guest: Simon Strong, Download Learning

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 19 December 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The conversation covers the specific risks that AI has introduced — voice cloning, fake urgency, social engineering that sounds like it comes from a real person — and what actually works to protect against them. Two-factor authentication and password managers get a full explanation because, as Dolapo points out, knowing these tools exist is different from knowing why they matter and how to use them. The digital exclusion angle runs through everything: good security advice has to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were.

Guest: Dolapo Agu

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 12 December 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The conversation makes a connection most people haven't made: the GPU infrastructure behind high-end visual effects and virtual production is the same infrastructure behind AI model training. That creates an interesting dynamic — the same shortage of compute that's driving up AI development costs is also affecting the film and games industries. Jake's take on AI and jobs in the creative sector is nuanced: it's not replacement, it's change, and the question is what skills remain distinctly human when the generative tools keep improving.

Guest: Jake Hawkins

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 5 December 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The conversation covers deep fakes and voice cloning — the technology that lets scammers impersonate a CEO or a family member with audio or video that sounds and looks real. Raymond explains how scam labs operate: organised groups that systematically test attack methods, share successful approaches, and iterate faster than most IT teams can update their defences. The LinkedIn angle is particularly sharp — recruitment-style scams that exploit the fact that people are conditioned to accept connection requests and respond to job opportunities, making the platform a reliable entry point.

The practical advice is grounded: what to look for, how to verify a request that feels off, and why the most important layer of defence is still human awareness rather than any particular piece of software.

Guest: Raymond Akpan, Parry Technologies

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

The conversation takes a more philosophical turn in the final segment, covering AI adoption, imposter syndrome (the feeling that you're not technical enough to have an opinion on the tools reshaping your industry), and the specific importance of getting more female voices into the rooms where AI systems are being designed. Sam's point: the people who use technology shape what it becomes, and if whole demographics are absent from that conversation, the systems built will reflect that absence.

Guest: Sam Acton, Domestic Angels

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

The conversation covers what the bootcamp was actually like, what a hackathon win feels like when you hadn't expected it, and then takes a harder turn: the experience of having someone try to take credit for her work, and what that taught her about navigating the industry. Victoria talks about how she uses LinkedIn as a resource for finding mentors and building visibility, and what she'd tell someone just starting out — particularly women thinking about whether cybersecurity is a space for them.

Guest: Victoria Oke

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

The conversation covers what good AI strategy looks like for a business that isn't Google, how to build a team around an AI project (and when not to), and the company's origins including the student partnerships that helped shape what Smart Elephant became. James is particularly interesting on the chatbot question — how long it actually takes to build one that doesn't hallucinate or send customers to the wrong place, and why the quality of the underlying data is almost always the real issue.

Guest: James Southgate, Smart Elephant

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

The conversation covers what's actually changed in the threat landscape and why human error remains the primary attack vector despite all the technical controls organisations put in place. Security Awareness Training (SAT) is the response: getting staff to recognise phishing attempts, social engineering and the patterns that precede a breach. Steve talks through what SAT programmes look like in practice, how to make the business case for the cost, and the compliance frameworks (like Cyber Essentials) that increasingly require it.

He also shares his personal journey — from CTO work in the NHS to founding a company that's now 17 years old — and what's sustained it through the changes that have reshaped the industry multiple times.

Guest: Steve Groom, Vissensa — https://www.vissensa.com/

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

His PhD research is on deep learning interpretability — the question of why an AI made a particular decision. He gives a striking example: an X-ray analysis model that appeared to correctly identify pathologies, but was actually picking up on the position of pacemakers in the images (because patients with pacemakers are more likely to have certain conditions). The model was right for the wrong reasons. That's the black-box problem in miniature, and Damian is working on attribution methods that make the reasoning visible. He draws on a Malcolm Gladwell analogy to explain why explainability matters even when performance is good.

The final segment is about improv comedy — how Natalie and Damian met — and the "yes, and" principle. The idea that you never block a scene partner's offer, you accept it and build on it, turns out to be a remarkably good model for psychological safety in technical teams. Both are better when people feel their ideas won't be dismissed before they've had a chance to develop.

Guest: Damian Smith, SSTL/Airbus FPGA engineer and PhD researcher in AI interpretability

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 19 September 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Damian is candid about his own career. After a computer science degree, a master's and a year in industry at IBM, he nearly gave up on software development altogether because he was spreading himself across too many languages and frameworks. Specialising (in Python and JavaScript) brought the passion back. He and Natalie talk about whether AI will replace developers, why cutting graduate hiring is a mistake, why code that nobody understands can't be maintained, and why the skills that get you promoted include knowing when to say no.

He also shares his side projects: organising Make, an evening of six-minute talks on creative technology with the RSA's Southern Creative Catalyst, a 3D-printed model of Southampton he built from scratch, and an immersive art project involving an AI self-checkout machine that hates you.

Guest: Damian Bemben, senior software developer, AdaMode

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 29 August 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Rob explains open source in plain English, why Windows 10 reaching end of support is a moment to think about your options, and his honest take on Linux: it's only free if you don't value your time. He and Natalie discuss what it means that AI models learn from code developers share publicly on GitHub, whether developers' jobs are at risk, and why this may be another turn of the cycle, like the printing press or the dotcom bubble. They also touch on promising uses such as AI-suggested antibiotics and early cancer detection, and the University of Southampton's public workshops on AI in the city.

Then it's retro computing. Rob hands Natalie her first Raspberry Pi, explains its link to Acorn and the ARM chip, and shares his excitement about the revival of Commodore. He finishes with a round-up of local communities worth joining.

Guest: Rob Davis, software developer

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 22 August 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Chris explains how the game works. There's no single right way through: you choose which feline friend to bring, whether it's the world's smartest cat to solve a puzzle or a sneaky spy to slip through a vent, so children can compare strategies in the playground. It's rated PEGI 3, yet its biggest audience turned out to be women aged 18 to 34, who told him they love that it's relaxing and non-toxic.

He also shares the reality of indie game development on a budget of around £400: teaching himself, editing images pixel by pixel, being careful with AI-generated art because of copyright, hiring a freelance Android developer, and integrating with Steam and Google Play. His advice for aspiring game designers? Start with story and character, not code, because players need a reason to care.

Guest: Christopher Merrifield, co-creator of Kenix and the Cat King (on Steam, Google Play and itch.io)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 8 August 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

The heart of the conversation is his team's AI-City project, which asks what AI should mean for Southampton, not according to billionaires, but according to the people who live here. They ran participatory workshops across the area, recruiting through Facebook and Reddit as well as business and community networks. The early findings? People were broadly hopeful but far from uncritical. They'd like AI to help with big sticky problems such as traffic congestion, pollution and the endless digging up of pavements, and they worry about 'computer says no' public services and who is accountable when decisions are handed to AI.

Richard also talks about the challenge AI poses for universities (some academics hide instructions in white text in coursework, which has accessibility downsides for students using screen readers), why AI output often reads as generic, and his idea of humans as the glue that combines the best of AI with the best of ourselves.

Guest: Richard Gomer, lecturer in computer science, University of Southampton (ai-city.uk)

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

Ian also shares stories from his six years running technology at McLaren from 2002, when getting live data from the trackside back to the factory was radical. The team even analysed competitors' engine sounds to work out their gear ratios, and timed rival pit stops to predict their fuel strategy. And he didn't study computing at all. His degree was in agriculture, and he fell into tech because he had a computer for his coursework.

The second half focuses on Canary Care, which uses discreet home sensors (no cameras) to reassure families and care workers that a vulnerable person is up, moving and warm, and which is used by around 150 local authorities. Ian explains how the next generation will link with smart home devices, why keeping someone warm can prevent a hospital stay costing around £500 a night, how energy data used with consent can flag when something isn't right, and why local authorities and the NHS need to stop arguing over who pays for tech-enabled care.

Guest: Ian Burgess, CTO, ProCode (and Canary Care)

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

After years of rejections she signed a six-book deal with a traditional publisher, sparked by tripping over a mysterious metal object on a walk. It led her to the true story of a secret army of around 300 hand-picked women trained during the Second World War to watch for invaders from hidden bunkers on the British coast. The Resistance Girls is the first in the series, researched at the Imperial War Museum and the Signals Museum.

Alice and Natalie discuss why her publisher's contract rules out AI (she even turned Copilot off in Word), how it felt to discover her earlier novel had been scraped to train AI within hours of publication, and why building trust with a reader is surprisingly like good user experience design in software.

Guest: Alice G. May, author of The Resistance Girls (alicegmay.com)

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

Susan starts by unpacking what 'mental health' really means, using the World Health Organization's definition of health as physical, mental and social wellbeing, and the three foundations that support it: sleep, nutrition and physical activity. Her advert-break challenge is a highlight: stand up, then walk around the coffee table, and see how far you can build it.

Then the big question: are you in control of your technology, or is it in control of you? She and Natalie discuss notifications, the pressure of social media on young people (and Australia's move to ban it for under-16s), and fitness apps that encourage rather than judge. They also celebrate the good side: online CBT that cuts waiting lists, repeat prescriptions on your phone, technology that suits many autistic people, learning a new craft from YouTube (which is how Natalie learned to sew), and using video calls to check in on remote colleagues' wellbeing.

Guest: Susan Hayward, Hayward Hub and chair of trustees, Southampton Mental Health Network

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

Inclusion is built in from the start: 20 per cent of tickets go free to students, 'pay it forward' tickets support people from underrepresented groups, and volunteers can earn a place. Natalie asks about a recent London conference that turned away a parent with a baby. Seemin, a mother of two, explains how re:connect has a quiet room for exactly that, and why the event achieved an even gender split in its first year without setting targets.

Seemin argues that the real word isn't diversity but belonging, and that making people feel they belong is the organisation's responsibility from the moment they walk through the door. She introduces her Luminary Framework, a people-first approach to tech leadership built on four pillars, and her plan to mentor one aspiring leader for free each year.

Guest: Seemin Suleri, VP of engineering at Prima and co-founder of re:connect (reconnectconference.co.uk)

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

The conversation that follows is candid and wide-ranging. Both guests are tackling the same underlying problem from different angles: a "broken" digital-skills pipeline where businesses can't find people, young people don't know the routes in, and the education system is still catching up with how fast the technology moves — particularly with the arrival of AI. Matt describes the challenge of getting competing colleges and universities to put aside their differences and design curriculum in genuine partnership with industry. Phil talks about what TechSolent is trying to do as a connector — not just a networking group but a deliberate bridge between the business community and the education ecosystem.

There is real optimism here too, alongside the honesty about the gaps. The South Coast has a strong education base, strong employers and genuine appetite for collaboration — the question is whether the joins can be made to stick. Both guests are clear that the region shouldn't have to import its talent indefinitely, and that keeping graduates local after they qualify is just as important as getting them into the system in the first place.

Guests: Phil Clark, TechSolent (community interest company); Matt Johnson, South Coast Institute of Technology

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 20 June 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Jen shares examples from her time at BT, translating a huge legacy technology stack into simple modern experiences, and at KFC, where the team built the app and then took the same platform into the in-store kiosks, refining both through analytics, user testing and simply watching customers in store. Natalie describes her own habit of co-creating software with the teams who'll use it, and they agree that workarounds (the extra spreadsheets in the bottom drawer) are often the fastest route to understanding what a system really needs to do.

They also talk about why Jen, now a qualified executive coach, is allergic to the word 'managing'. She builds purpose-driven, remote-first autonomous teams and sees her role as clearing blockers and advocating for them. They discuss the return-to-office debate and why the agile mindset matters more than the agile framework. Her advice for anyone starting in tech: stay curious and open-minded, shape the job you want, and when choosing a technology partner, start with the problem, not the solution.

Guest: Jen Wright, technology leader and executive coach

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 6 June 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

Olivia Parks is the founder of ITOMS — a B2B platform that powers fashion retailers with AI recommendations based on a consumer's existing wardrobe, their unique style (captured via "style ontology" — the rules that govern how people dress), and the retailer's own inventory. Olivia started in brand marketing and consultancy, not tech. She talks candidly about building a manual MVP stitched together from Notion, Tally, PowerPoint and soon Calendly, while fundraising to build the real product. She has a sharp take on why non-tech founders often build better products — they have no bias about which stack to use and stay relentlessly focused on the customer problem.

Lauren Murphy is the co-founder of Friday Initiatives, a data law and data mapping consultancy. With a background in data law at firms with clients like Ford and Amazon, Lauren noticed that 90% of data projects fail — and traced it back to the basics: companies simply don't know what data they have. Friday Initiatives cut data mapping from four years to two weeks using a people-first approach (map jobs and workflows, not metadata) combined with AI tools. Lauren's story includes pivoting a first dashboard product that was too advanced for the market, and building law firm partnerships as their primary growth channel.

Guests: Olivia Parks, ITOMS | Lauren Murphy, Friday Initiatives — https://www.fridayinitiatives.com/

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 8 November 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

First up, Catherine Ann Reid is the founder of DOQIT (doqit.io) — an app coming to iOS and Android that gives you one secure place for all your household paperwork, reminders, expiry dates, and important numbers. Catherine Anne's story starts with a divorce, a daughter with complex additional needs, three years of missed tax returns, and a £100 fine she couldn't afford. She couldn't find anything that solved the problem, so she built it herself — with DVLA API integration that tells you when your MOT is due, biometric security, S3-encrypted document storage, and a roadmap for a machine learning copilot. Her daughter Chloe, who was told she might never walk or talk, has been her inspiration throughout.

Then Keith Broni, editor-in-chief of Emojipedia, joins Natalie to talk about why most people only use four emojis a day, why the skull emoji now means laughter for Gen Z, and the polite-giggle-vs-shock disaster that happens when the same emoji looks completely different on Android versus Apple. Keith is working with 3UK on their Mind, Body and Scroll social fitness events.

Guests: Catherine Ann Reid, DOQIT — doqit.io | Keith Broni — emojipedia.org

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

She covers the CV-uploading trap (sending your full CV to ChatGPT hands your address, phone number and entire work history to a public model), the case against reusing passwords across sites, and how to fix it without memorising dozens of unique credentials — including a free option in KeePass and a business-grade one in Keeper. She explains social engineering through the Facebook quiz example (those "what was your first pet's name?" posts are literally mining your security answers), breaks down how phishing emails work, and reveals the counterintuitive reason why the scammers deliberately leave spelling mistakes in.

The episode ends with a practical summary: change your shared passwords, get a vault, stop filling in random quizzes, and if something looks too good to be true — Oasis tickets at a bargain price included — trust your gut.

Mentioned: KeePass (free, open source) — keepass.info | Keeper — keepersecurity.com

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 25 October 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Then Natalie gets into the five tools she recommends to small business owners right now. Zoom Pro's AI meeting summaries (around £13/month) save you from note-taking while staying present in the call. Canva handles your graphics and marketing materials with a generous free tier. ChatGPT is genuinely useful for writing website bios and pitches — just tell it your audience, the format, and the word count, then edit the output yourself. MailChimp goes beyond newsletters: it can automate birthday emails, purchase anniversaries, and client touchpoints you'd otherwise forget. And if you're paying monthly for Calendly, Tidy Cow does the same thing for a one-off £20.

All five are available free or cheaply, and none of them require a developer.

Mentioned: Canva — canva.com | MailChimp — mailchimp.com | Tidy Cal (Tidy Cow) — tidycal.com | Calendly — calendly.com

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 18 October 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Alex explains how Adobe Audition works for audio editing — specifically what "peaking" means and why it matters if your audience has to work hard to hear you — and how Final Cut Pro handles video, from the timeline to the rough cut, and why you always need a second pair of eyes. She also has a clear-eyed take on AI: it's made her job harder, not easier, because deep fakes mean you can no longer take a clip at face value. Verifying that a famous person actually said what they appear to have said is now a genuine part of the workflow.

They also get into gaming (Alex is a Sims 2 loyalist), and Natalie's handbag-sewing hobby leads to a genuinely useful conversation about time-lapses, tripods, and when a phone is actually better than a professional camera — which, it turns out, is in low light situations where phone sensors adapt and cameras don't.

Guest: Alex, journalism student, University of Winchester

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 11 October 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

They get into how technology can help and hinder. Natalie Mayer makes the case for digital calendars as the foundation of any productivity system, explains why turning off all notifications by default (and only adding back the ones that matter) reclaims your focus, and walks through the app landscape — Google Keep, Notion, Asana, Trello, ClickUp, Monday.com — like a washing machine where most people use two or three of the sixteen settings, just different ones.

There's also a frank conversation about procrastination. Natalie Mayer distinguishes between boring tasks (reconnect to the why), uncomfortable conversations (practice arguing without arguing), and fear of doing it wrong (just start). Her advice: treat your calendar like an exam paper — spend ten minutes at the beginning figuring out what's actually relevant before you write anything down.

There's also a lovely moment where Natalie Mayer reveals her daughter is studying astrophysics at A Level, and shares the quietly depressing story of a company STEM visit where the only woman visible was working in the kitchen.

Guest: Natalie Mayer, All In Good Time — find her on LinkedIn (search Natalie Meyer M-E-Y-E-R)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 4 October 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

What followed was thirteen years of learning on the job, being the only woman in the room more often than not, and eventually going on maternity leave — and launching a business. Sam is refreshingly honest about the loneliness of being in a male-dominated field, the subtle challenges of being talked over, and how those experiences made her more determined rather than less.

They also get into the practical: how to break into a data career without formal qualifications (start with W3Schools, search job descriptions for required skills, and look beyond "data scientist" to analyst, engineer, governance and business partner roles). Sam talks about building visibility through panels and self-nomination for awards — something she admits she didn't know was even allowed — and why fractional support, whether IT directors or PR managers, is the secret weapon of small business owners.

Guest: Sam Gaskell, DataFit — https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sam-gaskell (free introductory call available)
Next Tech Girls — nexttechgirls.com
Women in Tech Hampshire — search on LinkedIn

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 27 September 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Lauren shares what she's seeing on the ground: hiring is picking up, salaries are holding steady, and AI is the skill everyone is suddenly asking for. Not to replace people, but because — as one IT director put it to Natalie — "AI won't replace you, but people who know how to use AI will." They get into which roles are growing (machine learning, LLMs, data), how to dust off a CV that hasn't moved in years, and why an interactive CV with animation might impress a developer but fall flat if someone prints it.

They also talk about the website rebrand project Lauren led at Spectrum — eight months of layouts, content reviews, URL redirects and SEO — and what it really feels like to press "go live" as a self-described perfectionist. And Lauren explains how she and colleague Amy Lee spotted a gap in Hampshire's tech community and built Women in Tech Hampshire from scratch, which now runs events every other month at the Southampton Science Park.

Guest: Lauren James, Spectrum IT Recruitment — spectrumit.co.uk
Women in Tech Hampshire events — search Women in Tech Hampshire on LinkedIn

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

Emma's route into game development wasn't through a computer science degree — she started as an artist. She shares how she taught herself to code by breaking problems into tiny pieces, finding YouTube tutorials, and refusing to be stopped by not knowing the answer yet. Her advice for anyone who wants to build a game: just start.

They also get into the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated industry, why Emma finds the "I'm an artist, not a programmer" mindset more limiting than gender ever was, and what it really takes to test your idea with an audience beyond family and friends.

Guest: Emma May, Immersed Studios Limited — Go Quirk available on iOS, Android and Steam

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 9 August 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Keith explains how the same emoji can be drawn differently on Android and Apple devices, so a polite giggle can arrive as a shocked stare, and how meanings shift over time: for Gen Z the skull now means 'I'm dying laughing' and the baseball cap means 'you're capping', or lying. Natalie wonders whether the green being-sick face might one day mean something cool. Keith isn't convinced yet.

He also talks about 'social fitness' (using the digital tools in our pockets to build stronger connections with friends, family and colleagues) and the Mind, Body and Scroll event he took part in with Three UK in London.

Guest: Keith Broni, editor-in-chief, Emojipedia (emojipedia.org)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 2 August 2024. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk