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Entrepreneur UK's London 100: Fairy God Mover

Entrepreneur UK's London 100: Fairy God Mover

Entrepreneur18 hours ago

Industry: Property
Fairy Godmover is a simple, user-friendly platform to guide first-time buyers through the home-buying process.
Their personalised checklist adapts to each user's situation – whether they're buying a new build or a Victorian terrace, using a mortgage or shared ownership – and gives them clear, step-by-step guidance on what to do, when to do it, and what it's likely to cost.

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Caravan park homeowners warn of seller's remorse
Caravan park homeowners warn of seller's remorse

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time11 minutes ago

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Caravan park homeowners warn of seller's remorse

When the Reverend Vic Ready bought his first static caravan he was looking for a holiday home on the Norfolk coast that his whole family could enjoy. But Mr Ready, of Sheringham, Norfolk, said his experience of caravan ownership soured as a result of what he claimed was an "unregulated" industry that has left many people "suffering". The caravan park involved rejected any "allegation of wrongdoing" and said it had had a "proud record of extremely satisfied customers". Mr Ready is one of hundreds of caravan owners who have contacted the BBC in the wake of its investigation into the holiday park industry. Mr Ready bought his first caravan in 2013 at Beeston Regis Holiday Park for £26,000 before trading it in, and paying an extra £25,000, for a "nicer caravan in a better position" seven years later. Mr Ready said he then saw his original caravan on sale for £29,000 - a figure that surprised him. Three years later, faced with what he claims were ever-rising ground rents of up to £6,000 per year, the family decided to sell up. He said he was initially offered £8,250 by the park for his caravan. A week later the park agreed to up its offer to £15,000, a sum Mr Ready accepted. But a couple of days later, Mr Ready said he was sent an advert showing the caravan listed for sale by the park at £47,950. "Until you eventually want to sell and leave the site, you don't appreciate how much it's going to cost you and how much you've actually lost," Mr Ready said. "This is a corrupt, unregulated business and it needs to stop," he said. "So many people are suffering." A spokesperson for Beeston Regis Holiday Park said Mr Ready had been a "valued customer" and claimed he was "happy with the deal" when he sold up. The company said the caravan - a Pemberton Abingdon model - eventually sold for £35,000, which included a new 10-year site licence. "Our business, like any other, is subject to constant cost increases, and our pitch fees have to rise to cover these costs," the spokesperson said, adding it strove to "minimise" such rises. "In all businesses which rely on buying and selling, there has to be a profit margin, and – when we buy a caravan, we have to estimate the likely selling price and commit to a purchase price ahead of that," the company said. It added Mr Ready had acquired his second caravan £8,000 below the asking price and said despite having "no obligation to buy the caravan from him" it had done so in "good faith" and had offered "than double the book value". Meet-and-greet users tell of car damage and mystery miles 'My partner can't cope with child abusers on his prison wing' 'Car cloning made me dread the morning post' In 2021, Ipswich-based Paul Burke bought a caravan at the Suffolk Sands site in Felixstowe for £75,000. The caravan was his wife's "happy place", Mr Burke said. But when site fees reached about £7,000 a year, the couple decided to sell up. At first, he tried to sell privately and spoke to an estate agent. "He told me he'd been in the business for 20 years," Mr Burke said. "In that time he'd not sold a single caravan." "Part of the process is the purchasers need to be interviewed by the caravan park," said Mr Burke. "During that process they are persuaded to buy an alternative caravan directly from the park, probably with incentives such as a free year's site fees, or a better location or a slight upgrade." Mr Burke said he felt he had no choice but to sell the caravan directly back to the park for £25,000. "That is a lot of depreciation in three years," he said. "There is pretty much zero protection. This really does need some industry-wide protection." Park Holidays, which owns Suffolk Sands, said it provided buyers with a licence agreement intended to help people make "informed purchasing" decisions. It said the £75,000 purchase price included two years of pitch fees and said those fees were reviewed yearly and "broadly" mirrored the consumer price index. The company said owners can sell privately as long as the prospective buyer passed its "vetting" procedures. It also said while it would seek to "assist" private sales, the park could offer "buying incentives such as favourable finance and free pitch fees" which private sellers could not. A government spokesperson said it was "aware of the difficulties some holiday home owners have experienced and we have strengthened consumer law". Caravan owners felt 'bullied' by holiday parks 'Ripped off' caravan owners start compensation bid Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data

5 top FTSE 100 stocks offering plenty of global growth for an ISA
5 top FTSE 100 stocks offering plenty of global growth for an ISA

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time17 minutes ago

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5 top FTSE 100 stocks offering plenty of global growth for an ISA

The FTSE 100 is made up of the largest companies listed in London. But this doesn't mean that most stocks are UK-focused, far from it. In fact, it's quite straightforward to build a Stocks and Shares ISA portfolio of FTSE 100 shares that offer truly global exposure. Here are five that would certainly do the job. Let's start with the largest stock by market cap in the Footsie today: AstraZeneca (LSE: AZN). This healthcare giant has truly global operations, spanning the areas of oncology, respiratory and immunology, rare diseases, and more. This year, the firm is expected to rake in $57.5bn in revenue, with a net profit of about $14bn. And it generates this from nearly everywhere, including China and Japan. Region % of total revenue (2024) US 40% Europe 16% China 12% UK 9% Japan 6% Rest of world 17% As we can see, investors in AstraZeneca are getting diversified exposure to the whole of the developed world. The reason the US is such a sizeable part is because it has the largest healthcare system of them all. The stock has fallen 17.5% since the end of August, putting it on a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 15.5. For a profitable firm of this calibre, which also offers a 2.3% dividend yield, I think that's very attractive. Turning to another FTSE 100 giant now, we have HSBC (LSE: HSBA). The bank is increasingly focused on Asia these days, as that's where most of the world's growth is expected to come from in future. Indeed, according to the Asian Development Bank, Asia's middle class is set to swell to roughly 3bn people by 2050. With HSBC increasingly focused on wealth management in the region, the long-term growth story looks very promising. This year, the bank is expected to earn around $23bn on revenue of almost $67bn. The stock is offering an attractive 5.8% dividend yield. The third stock is Airtel Africa. As the name implies, the firm's operations extend across Africa. Specifically, Airtel is a provider of telecommunications and mobile money services to 166m people in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The share price has been on a tear, surging 55% this year alone. However, it still looks decent value to me, trading at 12.5 times next year's forecast earnings. There's also a well-supported 2.8% dividend yield. Finally, for even more global portfolio exposure, investors could consider Coca Cola HBC and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. These are both bottling partners for the US beverage giant, selling brands like Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, and Monster. The former's markets include Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. The other's portfolio is more weighted toward emerging and developing markets, including Poland, Romania, Nigeria, and Egypt. Naturally, none of these five stocks are totally risk-free. The Coca-Cola bottlers could suffer during a severe global economic downturn, as this would put pressure on consumer spending. Meanwhile, HSBC and AstraZeneca may fall foul of regulatory changes in China, especially if trade tensions with the US worsen at some point. Finally, most of Airtel Africa's revenue is collected in local African currencies, but it's reported in US dollars, exposing the company to currency risk. Nevertheless, adding these stocks to an ISA would make it truly global, with vast exposure to Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. The post 5 top FTSE 100 stocks offering plenty of global growth for an ISA appeared first on The Motley Fool UK. More reading 5 Stocks For Trying To Build Wealth After 50 One Top Growth Stock from the Motley Fool HSBC Holdings is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Ben McPoland has positions in AstraZeneca Plc, Coca-Cola Hbc Ag, and HSBC Holdings. The Motley Fool UK has recommended Airtel Africa Plc, AstraZeneca Plc, and HSBC Holdings. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Motley Fool UK 2025 Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

Meet the Briton who helped teach Alexa how to talk
Meet the Briton who helped teach Alexa how to talk

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timean hour ago

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Meet the Briton who helped teach Alexa how to talk

British AI entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe has always been 'motivated by impact'. He started pushing the boundaries on what's possible with machines as a 13-year-old schoolboy, while Tunstall-Pedoe secretly helped create and launch Amazon's (AMZN) Alexa over a decade ago. In between, his anagram technology was used by author Dan Brown for the Da Vinci Code and he even identified the most boring date in history. The first keyboard seeds were sown at Dundee High School in Scotland where he was able to venture to the technical college next door before classes and during breaks to write computer software on its mainframe. There were financial rewards, too. His computer science teacher, Michael Ryan, had a software business which sold by mail order. However there was no taking advantage of the pupils, says Tunstall-Pedoe, with very generous royalties and a decent income on offer. Read More: Meet Britain's 'king of billboards' who sold his business for £1bn 'I kind of very arrogantly set out to try and solve this problem of using language to control machines,' he tells Yahoo Finance UK, 'to automatically answer questions, change the user experience you have when you interact with search engines, when you interact with computer software, and kind of invented some technology to tackle that.' It is 20 years since he started his search and voice recognition company True Knowledge, later called Evi Technologies. Tunstall-Pedoe charts the company as a "10-year adventure", seven as a venture-backed independent start-up before being sold to Amazon in 2012 for a reported £21m and its CEO staying on for over three years. 'When we launched, we were trying to solve the problem of basically using computers by speaking to them or with language,' he recalls. 'When you look at science fiction I watched as a child, Star Trek or Blake's 7, all the computers you just have a chat to. It understands you and is the most natural interface. This is how we interact with people. 'But when you used a computer back then, you select from a menu, click a button or you guess keywords and browse links that come back from the keyword search. So we were tackling the problem of how to use language to interact with machines, which of course is incredibly topical now because large language models (LLMs) have essentially cracked that. But we were doing this way back.' In the mid 2000s, Tunstall-Pedoe would demo his software on conversational search and recalls being told by Google (GOOG) that not only was this a worse customer experience but that keyword search was infinitely better. 'That's definitely not the case now,' says Tunstall-Pedoe, who lives in London and Cambridge, the latter a 'crazy converted church' where Spitting Image was also created. Read More: 'Why we set up a sustainable mobile operator to save people money' Evi pivoted several times as a start-up, from a search engine that answered questions to producing a voice assistant, launching at the same time as Apple's Siri. The 30-strong Cambridge outfit had multiple acquisition offers before working on a secret project for Amazon, now known as Alexa, which went to market in late 2014. He later spent a period as an angel investor backing over 100 tech start-ups before his latest venture, Unlikely AI, came into focus. The British venture, which raised nearly £15m following a seed round in 2023, is currently developing technology that combines LLMs with symbolic methods to make AI safer for companies in sectors such as healthcare to provide verifiable insights. 'How do you enable systems built with modern AI to be fully explainable, auditable, not get you into trouble with regulators, and not lead you to making business decisions that cost you lots of money?' says Tunstall-Pedoe. 'We're tackling some of the biggest problems in AI, which is how to make it completely trustworthy and how to ensure the answer is always accurate.' With the advent of ChatGPT, the inventor has admitted that most companies aren't succeeding when it comes to implementing LLMs, which learns to predict the next word, into workflows. He says: 'If you're making a business decision based on the result of an LLM and your private data, and it gives you a wrong answer, that can be really expensive financially and to your brand. If you're in a regulated industry it can get you fined. You can even get the CEO in jail in extreme cases if you break regulation really badly and this is a fundamental problem.' Read More: We sold a hand cream every 36 seconds after appearing on This Morning Thus Unlikely AI, he adds, was born to not only earn trust but to solve complex issues with its deep learning software. 'That means making it accurate, so when it gives you a result, you can trust it,' says Tunstall-Pedoe. 'Sometimes it may tell you it doesn't know rather than guess and it also means explainability and auditability, to fully explain in a very clear way how the result was created. 'Ultimately, it's also about the customer or business being in control and that's the kind of experience that we're shooting for. We're still relatively early, but we're looking to be very successful and become a very big company.' How I identified the most boring day I built this huge database of millions of facts about the world, where the system could make sense and reason with them. I thought it would be interesting to do an analysis of all the facts that the system knew, and in particular with the goal of finding what the least interesting date in history was — 11 April 1954. The story went so viral that it got told and retold and it's had new life ever since. There was a play in Germany that was kind of themed on it and all sorts of crazy things that have happened as a result of that. Entrepreneurship One of the things I love is that you can have a very significant impact as an individual if you've got an idea and you pursue it. If you build a software product that does something valuable and different, it can scale like no other product can. You can have 100 million users within a couple of months if you create a really successful piece of software, which is kind of almost impossible in almost any other industry. That's what's exciting about it, that potential for big impact if you're developing technology in the software world that really hits home. Read more: The boss who has found 'nature's answer to plastic' Meet the company that finds 'must-haves' to make everyday life easier Impossibrew CEO says Dragons' Den failure sparked alcohol-free brand's riseSign in to access your portfolio

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