Mark Newby, Managing Director, 24
Since he was in High School, Mark has been an entrepreneur at heart. He would quite often have ideas for charity promotions and events, but often these were too costly to run on a schools budget / too disruptive and far-fetched to be done on a normal school day. During college, Mark became fascinated with web programming, and spent the next two years self-teaching himself PHP. He was given the role of Webmaster for The Lancashire Music Collective, a non-profit organisation who ran music events in West Lancashire.
Mark massively modified a PHP-Nuke installation for the collective as he continued to learn his trade, and became heavily interested in business; largely thanks to BBC TV’s Dragons Den bringing terms like ‘net profit’ and ‘equity stake’ into his knowledge. In 2004 he started a three year course in Multimedia and Interenet Technology at University Of Salford. Mark enjoyed the social side of this course but found that the learning side of the course was done at too slow a pace. In the summer between his second and third years, Mark was given an summer internship at BBDM – a creative agency based in Manchester. He worked there throughout the summer and showed a flair for business and creativity.
September came and Mark tried to return to University for his third year and worked part-time at the agency but found that the juxtaposition of university life and agency work too hard. In late September 2006, Mark joined BBDM full time and in December 2006 was made Operations Manager.
Seeking fresh challenges, Mark left BBDM in late 2007 and joined owners of Kiss, Kerrang and Magic FM Bauer Radio as Group Web Developer. Whilst there, Mark worked on projects for companies such as Vodafone, BT, The Trafford Centre, Grants Whiskey, Mars, BAA and many more blue chip companies. Commenting on the partnership with Matthew Ross to form Camiloo, Mark noted “My web development and graphic design work only access the tips of the market – to really push the boundaries you need to be able to expand into other platforms such as the iPhone. Matt has been a true catalyst in allowing us to enter new markets such as this”.
Matthew Ross, Technical Director, 25
Matt first became interested in programming when he was age 10, writing simple games on an old 2nd hand Amstrad computer. since then computer programming has always been a hobby for him, mainly using Windows on the PC before recently switching to Apple Mac.
Matt studied mathematics and computing at college before doing a Masters degree in computer science at university. His Masters project saw him design, plan and implement an interactive library information display which could be controlled by students over Bluetooth.
Matt’s determination, from a young age and throughout college and university has helped him be where he is today – helping to run a successful development company. Matt’s interests include music and playing keyboards, and he enjoys attending film festivals, such as the Commonwealth Film Festival in Manchester.
Matt comments on his business partnership with Mark Newby, “Although my programming skills are well developed, you need more that this to be successful overall with software development. Partnering with Mark brings our company great design and creative skills, as well as the all important business know how”. Matt also comments on Apple iPhone technology and Camiloo’s offerings in this area, “The App Store for iPhones is a great platform allowing easy entry into the market, not just for amateur developers but for companies like us too.”
