Bath firms Zynstra and Genius Digital will be among 14 West of England tech innovators taking centre stage next week when the San Francisco-inspired OpenCo festival is staged in the region.
The free event will showcase leading technology businesses and organisations from Bristol and Bath, putting the cities at the heart of the UK’s tech sector. 
Taking place on October 2, the festival is described by its founders as a mash-up of an open studio tour and a tech conference with the vibe of a music festival.
It is broken down into one-hour segments where participants share their stories and their vision as well as any new projects or developments they are working on.
Zynstra, a pioneer in cloud-managed server appliances, and audience analytics experts Genius Digital will take part in open sessions at Bristol & Bath Science Park along with independent Bristol-based film ideas accelerator Wildseed Studios and modelling and simulation centre CFMS.
The Science Park is joining leading business incubator hubs to act as showcases for OpenCo, including Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio, Engine Shed and Games Hub.
The Pervasive Media Studio, based at Bristol’s Watershed and with projects spanning gaming, projections, music, connected objects, robotics, digital displays and more, will embrace topics as wide-ranging as personal space travel and the future of musical instruments during its OpenCo session.
Bristol Games Hub, the UK’s largest independent co-working hub for games developers, will highlight the work of five innovative games developers. The hub is being used as a blueprint for similar centres in London, Brighton, Manchester and Leeds.
OpenCo will kick off with an opening evening drinks reception at the Science Park next Wednesday, before the main festival gets underway the following day.
A closing reception, sponsored by inward investment agency Invest Bristol & Bath, will be held at Bristol’s Engine Shed, that evening.
OpenCo – known outside the UK as NewCo – now takes place in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Boulder, Los Angeles, London and Amsterdam. It has attracted more than 10,000 attendees over the past two years and has involved many of the world’s most-inspiring and forward-thinking business leaders.
OpenCo UK has this year taken the concept nationwide for the first time, with the backing of Tech City UK. Other English cities taking part are Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Liverpool.
It is staged as the Bristol and Bath area emerge as one of the UK’s fastest-growing hi-tech hubs. The area was highlighted recently in an influential report by Centre for Cities/McKinsey & Co as the only “globally-significant”, “high-growth” UK cluster of its kind outside of London.
The full list of the 14 companies and organisations involved in OpenCo is: Zynstra; Genius Digital; CFMS Services Ltd; Wildseed Studios; XMOS; Coull; Bristol Games Hub; Pervasive Media Studio; Sift; Money Hub; Mubaloo; Yogscast; Toshiba; Engine Shed.
To build a bespoke schedule of companies to visit: http://uk.openco.us/bath-bristol/
