Week 487

Hello folks!

Some fantastic news arrived at the end of the week as Chris and his partner Amy welcomed their new baby into the world. We’re all really happy and excited here at Go Free Range. Congratulations!

This week we got the go-ahead to spend a couple more weeks working for BBC R&D on their “talking with machines” project. In particular the team were happy with the new features we’d added to Orator (which is used to author voice experiences) and wanted us to continue refactoring and documenting it in order to make it easier for other teams to use and maintain. We’ve really enjoyed having some creative freedom to make these changes and it’s great to work with a client who gives us a problem to solve and is excited to learn more about how we’ve gone about solving it. It was great to have Sean and Ant from BBC R&D in our offices on Wednesday morning to work with them on the next steps.

In the meantime we’ve continued talking to prospective clients and meeting with old friends to learn more about what they’re working on and where we might be able to help.

We signed off our annual accounts after Dawn, our accountant, sent us the final version. Dawn also helpfully prepared the accounts in two formats - FRS102 and FRS105. The former is the longer-form version of the accounts that we have submitted in previous years. The latter is a newer, abbreviated version designed to make filing easier for “micro” companies. We’ve decided to submit the longer version but seeing both versions side-by-side really helped us to understand the difference.

We’ve also asked Dawn to look into whether any of our work might qualify for R&D Tax Credit relief. We need to provide some more information about what we’ve been working on and how we tackle problems.

A couple of weeks ago we decided to pay for a listing in the London Tech Week programme to promote CoTech - the network of worker co-ops that Go Free Range belongs to. The Goodnight Disruption event is now listed and we’re looking forward to meeting a lot of people at the party on the 15th June.

Wishing you a great weekend.