Brad Kieser, director of SMS-Speedway, in Carlisle tells us about his love of Kung Fu

He says: "I was born near Cape Town in South Africa and I was always into computers from a very young age. I actually taught myself programming by looking through computer magazines before I'd ever touched a machine. I'd get the magazines and read the description of what the programme was meant to be doing and then look at the source code, which they published with it. After I'd seen enough I could start to work out what various bits of code did.

I spent about three years fundraising to buy our first school computer. I used to show movies every Friday night and raised enough money to buy a Sinclair Spectrum. I had a group of friends who also wanted to learn so we shared knowledge with each other and I went on to study computer science at the University of Cape Town.

I was lucky enough to study Kung Fu under a hereditary grandmaster. That gave me the right to go and train in the Shaolin Temple in central China. However, an old school friend from Britain had moved back here to start a business and was having trouble with a point-of-sale system. He kept asking me to come over and help him sort it out and I said ‘Well, you’ve got at most six months and then I’m off to China’. I moved over to London to help him and I’m still in the UK nearly 32 years later.

Through word-of-mouth I started doing more and more consulting and I began to collaborate with Psion, who produced the personal digital assistants. I began linking that up with the web hosting I was doing for companies and it was at the time when mobile phones and SMS were just becoming popular. I thought ‘I’ll tell you what would be really, really useful, if I could just get appointment reminders, but by SMS’. I set up a system which enabled companies to communicate by doing just that and that was the world’s first commercial text messaging service.

We now have an established business where we’ve got a big footprint in the property sector, driven by things like appointment reminders, the need to communicate around buying or selling or listing properties. We also have a significant and growing presence in financial services, whether it’s getting text messages from banks confirming transactions or receiving fraud alerts. We've substantially moved on from just text messaging now. We communicate on WhatsApp, we've also got text-to-voice, where messages can be delivered to landlines. We've had quite a big capability for pushing communication on Twitter for many years now and we can also do it via Facebook Messenger. Any scenario where a company wants to automatically communicate with its customers or employees we can develop a system for doing it.

I am lucky with my business that I can work from anywhere and when our daughters came along we decided to move out of the city. We wanted to move to Cumbria and we stayed with a friend up in Carlisle and ended up settling up here. All three of my daughters have Cumbria as their home.

Over the last two years we’ve turned our attention to various ways we can help people communicate with each other during the pandemic. We developed a national system for helping coordinate volunteer networks, then we worked with organisations helping them research mental health. This came back to SMS because people might not be able to speak openly about how they’re feeling over the phone, but they will respond via text message, possibly in a situation where they’re with family but don’t want them to know what stress they are under. In the coming year we are going to be focusing very much on developing artificial intelligence so that people can communicate with bots online, for example for setting up a bank account, but with very sophisticated capabilities for detecting fraud. We’re also developing systems to help renewable power sources communicate with devices like boilers or batteries so they can charge or power them automatically at times to fit in with people’s lifestyles and their movements, but it’s very much a work in progress.

If I have time I’d also like to get back into Kung Fu and find more time for hiking. I used to do quite a lot of running so I really want to get some of that fitness back. I also like to write songs and compose music so I’d love to get back to that if I can."