Great tech isn’t just maths it’s an art form, says top entrepreneur

A technology entrepreneur has urged teenagers not to feel that they must excel at maths or science to be successful in the digital industry.

Imogen Wethered shunned maths in favour of art at school but went on to co-invent Qudini, a successful digital solution to that very British irritant queuing, which is now going global.

She is among London developers shortlisted for the Techpreneurs Awards for Women, a red carpet event at the House of Commons tonight.

Ms Wethered, who employs 17 people at Qudini in Hoxton, said: “I think people should be shown more about the creativity side of tech. That’s probably what gets lost if you think it’s just about science and maths. It’s very easy to lose confidence if you think you can’t do maths that well.

“I didn’t do maths or anything technical. I was more about art and creativity. Great tech is about combining art and tech. My co-founder does the coding, I come up with the product idea, what they are going to look like and all the interface stuff. It’s about making it possible and implementing the big vision and scoping what something will look like.

“I think at a lot of these coding courses you just go and write code, but why not start with coming up with an idea, planning out what it looks like and then start to learn the code so you can do what you want?” Ms Wethered, 27, hopes Qudini will become the “Uber of queuing”. She said: “If people go to, for example, a restaurant that’s busy and the tables are tied up, they can be added to a digital queue on an iPad or tablet and they get a text telling them the estimated time they will be seen at and when to come back.

“Waiting times are calculated for them so the customer doesn’t have to guess it themselves.”

She met Qudini’s co-founder Fraser Hardy at a hackathon in 2012 when she was 23. They set out to solve the problem of queuing at theme parks and won the event. The pair applied for the backing of Wayra, the start-up accelerator of Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica, which is helping Qudini push into Spain and South America.

Their software is being used in Spanish mobile phone shops where “instead of those little paper tickets it’s much more personalised, calls you by name and tells you the name of your adviser and when it’s your turn”.

Tonight there will be an awards cere-mony, and firms will pitch to expert judges and first-time investors with the hope of securing at least £50,000.

Seven companies are shortlisted including GiveVision, based in Bloomsbury, which produces sofware for “smart glasses” that improve the independence of blind and partially-sighted people.