Public Funding for Xigxag Limited

At xigxag, we're making books more accessible, more social and more sustainable with the most technologically-advanced book platform ever imagined. We're keeping young people engaged with books and shaping the way people will consume them in the future. A key aspect of our customer value proposition and our core product innovation today is a gamified pricing model, which rewards individual customers with better prices the more they buy during the year. We have built an incredibly sophisticated dynamic pricing engine that powers our mobile app, monitoring customer purchase history at the individual level and serving up the correct price points to the customer dynamically based on their progress in the year. The engine identifies and asserts the territorial rights for each book in our catalogue and then differentiates between full-price purchases, discount purchases, gifted books and any offers, rewards or pre-paid vouchers the user owns or has applied. This dynamic pricing engine is a critical differentiator and unique selling point (USP) for the business. Today, our dynamic pricing engine is only optimised for UK audiences. We have customers in 30 countries, despite only marketing in the UK. We are mispriced internationally because we haven't developed an international pricing model, which holds us back from marketing internationally and growing our audience beyond the UK. The focus of this project is to build a 'quantum' version of our dynamic pricing engine that will enable us to serve international customers and commercialise xigxag on a global scale. These include the following objectives: * Develop the intelligence to build parallel gamified pricing models for priority international markets * Develop the 'quantum' version of our dynamic pricing engine to handle dynamic pricing for all customers across geographies, currencies, time zones, whilst incorporating all the sophistication of our existing model * Implement dynamic localisation on web and app to determine the location of a user and serve up the corresponding pricing model on a territory-by-territory basis * Build the user experience to deliver this optimised pricing for international customers on web and app.

At xigxag, we want everyone to enjoy more books. We are creating a radical new version of a digital book, which indexes a traditional audiobook to the corresponding e-book, offering users a market-leading integrated listening/reading experience. We are disrupting the traditional model of siloed content consumption, where users must choose to read or listen. We offer users the ability to listen when they are 'on the go' and read when they are at home -- or to do both simultaneously. This enables far more efficient reading (driving book consumption) and improves comprehension and retention. Indexing human narration to the associated text dramatically improves the experience of listening: users can see illustrations, figures and tables, visualise dialogue and sentence structure, lookup words and save quotes. We have global ambitions, but support for British publishing, British content and British-narrated content are core to our positioning and differentiation. Users can download a free working prototype of the app at https://xigxag.co.uk. The focus of this project is to develop the unified backend services that will enable us to commercialise the opportunity. These include the following objectives: * Innovate novel DRM techniques to protect the rights of authors and publishers while enabling more flexible user consumption * Innovate our first generation audio-text alignment engine to operate at scale * Develop a scalable content processing system to securely and efficiently ingest, convert, process and deliver thousands of titles per week * Develop a multimedia advertising platform that integrates third party promotional content * Build out a scalable reporting infrastructure that satisfies content supplier standards and enables cost effective customer acquisition * Develop a robust user management model to enable user management, subscription, payments and invoicing.