Martin Wickham on Building Trust with CheckItsReal

What is your background briefly?

40 years’ experience working in tech companies like Apple, British Telecom and Gateway where I served on the leadership team with responsibility for IT strategy and operations.

As a change agent, I developed a strong track record for innovation and questioning the status quo. In the early part of my career, I wrote the digital encryption algorithms used in online tax systems.  At Apple France, the most successful subsidiary outside the US, I introduced a new digital exchange and developed a management visual dashboard system before this approach was popular. At British Telecom, I was an early adopter of storage area networks and virtualisation and helped develop a product offering which was a precursor to Cloud.

Along the way, I learnt the value of underpinning my innovation efforts with robust business cases and I have developed a strong commercial acumen which has helped guide choices towards technology choices with strong financial benefits. At Apple France, where I worked for eight years, I was a member of the team which won the “general manager of the year award” when we managed the business for a year without a general manager. As a member of the management team, I contributed as a business stakeholder to strategy development, operational planning and implementation.

At BT, I built and managed teams which were supported by a €150 million turnaround and had the lowest cost of operation across BT global services operations in eight countries. I led the systems integration of six companies which were acquired by the business before being bought by BT.

In the last few years, I have worked as an advisor to large companies across the world from the US to India and Europe assessing their ability to leverage IT for business value and making recommendations to align IT investment and organisational development plans with strategic business goals.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

My time at Apple taught me the value of seeing beyond the technology to how it can change the world in which we work, live and play. Blockchain represents an opportunity to enhance many of the business processes we use on a daily basis and develop a host of new ones by building trust in the cloud. My deep technical roots (I wrote assembly language in my early days) as well as my broad experience of business management put me in a great position to build good business models based on this new technology. I bring the philosophy of reliability, dependability and scalability by leveraging system and human capabilities to creating this new business. We all know that a good idea is just that. What makes the difference is being able to execute and work with a team of committed individuals and stakeholders who share a common passion and vision. I am happy to be part of that team and that vision.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

• Why did you get involved with this ICO?

We live in a world that is increasingly hard to trust and we hear all the time about fake products, fake news, fake facts. At Apple, the belief that we were changing the world for good was a powerful motivator for me and many others. CheckItsReal provides an opportunity to tackle counterfeit products and our first target is the medical domain where counterfeit or misleading products are causing a million deaths per year. I want to be part of fixing that.

• Why do you think this is such a powerful idea?

Nearly all great ideas are simple. CheckItsReal and VerifyMyMeds provides a simple and safe solution that leverages next generation technology to save lives and build trust in the world. It is simple for manufacturers to implement and even simpler for end users to use.

There are many opportunities to use the solution including medical, fashion, food traceability and engineering parts. The solution has legs as they say.

• How can people find out more about the ICO?

The best way to find out more about the ICO is via the www.checkitsreal.io and www.checkitsreal.com websites. 

The company has an initial coin offer which starts with an invite only round on the 6th of April 2018. 

• How can people find out more about you and your work?

LinkedIn. 

How can people contact you and learn more about you?

I can be contacted via LinkedIn or at martin.wickham@checkitsreal.com. 

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