London School of Economics. A failed delivery of tickets to Queen’s tennis provoked them to examine the same-day courier market. They founded eCourier.co.uk because they believed that the courier market was very inefficient and ripe for change.

eCourier.co.uk worked with Operational Research academics to build the company’s patented intelligent despatch algorithm "Larry" (previously called AIBA for Advanced Information Based Allocation system). Larry is responsible for distributing orders to couriers in real time based on courier location, traffic, weather, and demand factors.

Larry takes the overhead out of what is normally a very infrastructure intensive industry, reducing transactions costs and making the business far more scalable than conventional operators.

Clients place orders online with little or no advance notice requesting immediate transport of articles or documents. Couriers are tracked via GPS, and customers are able to watch their eCouriers in real-time as a delivery progresses.

The company warehouses the historical GPS positions of its couriers, and donates this information to OpenStreetMap, an open source project with the aim of producing a royalty-free GIS suite. This information is also offered to the public via an API under a Creative Commons license. As of October 2008, their data set included over 252 million historical positions.

In 2007, eCourier.co.uk was voted the Evening Standard’s Most Inspirational Business and won £100,000 of advertising space. In 2008, eCourier was chosen as one of six firms chosen to carry out deliveries for government departments under a £150 million four-year framework agreement with the Office of Government Commerce.

Awards: -Evening Standard: London’s Most Inspirational Business, 2007 -Growing Business: Top Gun, 2007- Tom Allason -British Computing Society: Business Achievement Flagship, 2006 -CNET Networks: Mobile Product or Initiative of the Year, 2006 -Effective IT Awards: Most Innovative Use of IT, 2006 -Effective IT Awards: Most Effective Use of Communications Technologies, 2006 -Effective IT Awards: Most Effective Use of IT in Mfg and Logistics, 2006 -Growing Business: Essence of the Entrepreneur, 2006 -National Customer Service Awards: eCommerce Award, 2005 -Department of Trade and Industry: Innovator’s Award for Transport,2005 -Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport: Excellence in Information Management, 2005 -NatWest Startups Awards: Best Use of Technology, 2005 -British Computer Society: President’s Award for Mobile Computing, 2005 -O2 / Real Business, Top 50 to Watch in Mobile, 2005