Latest news with #MelMorris
BBC News
21-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
'No secret' Price is searching for Derby investment
Derby County owner David Clowes' search for new investment has resulted in him working with the man who helped broker his takeover of the Price - founder of Union Rights Management, a company which promotes itself as a sales advisory service for sports business owners - earned £100,000 from the part he played in Clowes taking the club out of administration in the summer of initially worked with Derby's previous owner Mel Morris, who put the club into administration, when he was searching for financial own search for fresh investment, which has been going on for a year, has resulted in Price being involved in board Price's continued presence at Derby was first raised, in late 2023, BBC Radio Derby reported, external that he was there without any attachment to former owner chief executive Stephen Pearce insisted Price is working only in an advisory role and does not influence how the club challenged by BBC Radio Derby about Price reportedly having a say in the decision to sack head coach Paul Warne in February, Pearce replied: "That's absolutely not true."Pearce added: "He has no operational or decision-making power in terms of day-to-day on the football club."Jonathan Price is just an adviser to David and there are no secrets. It's not a mystery figure."Jonathan works for David in terms of (being) his representative in those investment discussions." Pearce said Price has been entrusted by Clowes to lead the search for investors and is "having conversations" with potential financers."I introduced Jonathan initially to Mel when he was struggling in terms of investors," said Pearce. "And Jonathan was the one that effectively got David to the table and managed to sell the football club to David after initially getting him to buy the stadium."So there is no myth or secret. And because of the work he did, and the relationship he built with David, he has continued to represent him in investment discussions that David has had since then."Obviously he has to be across issues that are ongoing and has to be involved to know what's going on because he is that lead person having conversations with investors."
BBC News
06-05-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Derby County: It's time for the Rams to look forward, and up
Mission accomplished for Derby County. Championship survival was a must if the club was to continue the upwards trajectory put on its way owner David Clowes in 2022. A few weeks before the culmination of the season, wing-back Kane Wilson uttered: "It's important we don't waste the hard work done last season" by getting out of League One at the second attempt. For me, this is the moment in time when the club can shake off its damage and rebuild culture brought on by former owner Mel Morris' decision to put it into administration. Staying in the second tier means the club can be recognised as that Championship team, no sprinkling of sugar but a solid recipe for growth. The story of this season has been split into two halves. Perhaps there was an underestimation of the challenges of the Championship and what was needed to finish without a relegation battle. Or perhaps there were bouts of imposter syndrome from the then head coach. Paul Warne's achievements at Derby County will go down in the history books. At times he played exciting, attacking football, he was an infectious personality who you enjoyed being around. But did he really believe he deserved the role as Derby County head coach? He spoke in his first media conference about how proud his father would have been that he was managing the same team as Clough and Taylor. I am not sure he thought he was worthy of that. That run of seven straight defeats brought an end to his tenure. No manager can survive a goal drought and a lack of points. The fans had turned and they let him know. A brave decision was made by David Clowes and chief executive Stephen Pearce to remove Warne and find an alternative. Derby were heading down without it. Former Ram John Eustace had told me years ago during a conversation while we were watching our boys play football, that he always wanted to return to manage Derby one day. This was his moment. Prizing him away from Blackburn took time and money and, with the Rams bottom of the table and seven points a drift on 7 March, the journey was going to be tough. Eventually, with his coaches Matt Gardiner, Keith Downing, Paul Clements and 'football genius' Jake Buxton, the Rams showed signs of recovery. The improvement in each individual was noticeable. Suddenly the mistakes were not being made, the goals were not punishing them and they looked like they could play. Marcus Harness said after the win at Plymouth Argyle: "Some players thrive in chaos, some thrive with structure and information." This insight into his mindset made observers look differently at the players. All of them showed signs of confidence, creativity and understanding. From 7 March, when the club were rock bottom and seven points adrift, Eustace's Rams took 21 points and won away from home three times. The togetherness got the Rams over the line to be able to take that next step. But it isn't a rebuild now, it is a strengthening of the foundations laid in the past three seasons. Derby County should be looking up now, not down, and with investment and a solid summer transfer window there is every possibility.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Can the Candy Crush King's Corpora.ai put British AI on the map?
For one of the UK's most successful serial entrepreneurs, Mel Morris, conquering the AI space and putting British AI on the map has become a singular mission. Morris was the primary investor in gaming company King – of Candy Crush fame – which was sold to Activision Blizzard in 2006 for $5.9bn. For the last decade Morris has been working on a new venture, AI research engine biding his time until the right moment to launch. Morris is a veteran tech investor having lived through many hype cycles from selling his dating app to and an internet security company to Webroot. This experience means that he knows a thing or two about timing. While the trajectory of AI development has been steady for the last two decades, Morris notes how OpenAI's ChatGPT took the world by surprise and changed the conversation on AI in November 2022. 'It wasn't its capabilities that took me by surprise. It was their decision to launch it at that point, that was the surprise,' says Morris, adding: 'These guys jumped the gun. They launched too soon and it wasn't quite ready.' In the two and a half years since ChatGPT's launch, GenAI has moved from generating content from prompts to AI with dynamic reasoning abilities. These models require an increasing and indeterminate level financial and energy this is where Morris hopes to step in. is a deep research platform that Morris says can generate comprehensive reports on a broad range of topics at a cost of 6-7 cents and taking around 30-40 seconds to produce – orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than existing capabilities of Big Tech. The company is targeting model vendors, large organisations dealing with complex data, and eventually potentially offering a consumer version as a browser plug-in. The platform is trained on publicly available data but it's the 'peripheral' data that most large model vendors exclude that makes unique and gives it value above its competitors. The platform, is driven by smaller, cheaper AI models like GPT-4.1 nano instead of expensive reasoning models which Morris says gives it the ability to analyse more documents than any other competitor with hundreds - or even thousands - of citations compared to just the 200-300 that Google or OpenAI can provide. What does Morris mean by "peripheral" data? Essentially, finds valuable data hidden in plain sight that its large competitors fail to capture. Morris refers to "peripheral" or "fringe" data as documents that finds at the 'edges of a subject' that can be critically important to add depth and context. This kind of data cannot easily be found by the usual search methods and often contain groundbreaking and specialised knowledge. The output from this new data capture method is in-depth reports on any given topic from obscure medical conditions, academic research on virtually anything and business market reports, to name just a few use cases. While investor sentiment around AI has been frenetic of late, Morris's venture is largely self-funded with Morris only answering to himself. The strength of his conviction that is about to upend the AI space is demonstrated not only by his financial commitment but also by the breadth of his ambition for the startup and his willingness to get into the trenches in founder mode to evangelise about what the product can do. Currently in Beta, Morris will officially launch in in May with an event at the London AI Hub, a statement to the world that he is putting British AI on the map. Just as Google DeepMind, Britain's biggest AI success story, was sold to Google, Morris believes his exit will be another Big Tech buyout or partnership. The technology will enable model vendors to turbo charge their existing AI capacities and drive the overall development and utility of AI beyond where it currently stands. No one is going to start a company today that is going to rival OpenAI or Google in the consumer marketplace, says Morris, explaining how will focus on two aspects. 'One is to focus on the model vendors themselves, the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and saying to these companies producing foundational models that with our technology you could bring to market really deep research offerings, which are highly profitable, but undercut the rest of the market so much you could achieve a dominant position,' says Morris. strategy is finding a partnership with those companies. 'It's likely that we end up with an exclusive with one of those companies.' Morris's other focus is on companies struggling with the vast scale of exponentially increasing amounts of data. The rapid rate of change within these large datasets makes 'AI is a bit of a curse, because it's just too costly to keep retraining, to keep fine tuning, to keep up to date' says Morris. These customers may include investment banks, hedge funds, even companies X and Meta, who are trying to understand what's happening in their user base in real-time. What is costing them a fortune today, could just be opportunity to put British AI out in front of US Big Tech. "Can the Candy Crush King's put British AI on the map?" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. 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