Mark Needham

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Chairman, Widget UK

Career so far I was a software engineer at Psion, then a freelance journalist. I then founded Widget with the aid of the enterprise allowance.

If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be? A credit insurer. They get away with murder.

What will next year’s most overhyped industry buzzword be? NFC.

Has 2012 been a good, bad or ugly year? It has been a year of recovery. We have made progress.

What would you have as your last meal? Steak and chips, washed down with a fine red wine.

What keeps you awake at night? Thinking how I can keep both our vendors and our customers satisfied. Many businesses exist by keeping their customers happy but being beastly to their suppliers. In distribution you have got to keep both sides happy.

What piece of technology could you not be without? A FitBit activity monitor.

Have any of your predictions come true this year? Yes, that the fleet tracking business for GPS and mapping manufacturers such as TomTom would continue to grow.

What is the best partner/customer trip you have ever been on? A Turkish Airlines trip to Istanbul. They selected several hundred people running businesses in the south east at random and sent them all invites to a weekend trip, whether or not they had ever used the airline. Most people could not believe that they had received an invite to a free trip and binned the invite, but those who were curious enough to follow it up were interesting people.

What do you see as the channel’s biggest challenge in 2013? Finding the categories which will grow in sales value next year.

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