York’s finest musical export of the 90s, Shed Seven, have brought more to this world than anthemic Smiths-esque songs.

One of the definitive bands of the early 90s and remembered with enduring fondness, Shed Seven are still touring the UK, singer Rick Witter can be seen DJing in his native York and drummer Alan Leach has branched out into app development with huge success.

Speedquizzing – The App

Along with John, his web developer brother, Alan came up with the concept of Speedquizzing around three years ago. He’d been running pub quizzes for just under a decade and had become frustrated with the lack technology incorporated into them, along with the high propensity of teams to cheat using smartphones and Google.

Together they came up with speed quizzing, which uses proprietary software to provide a central database of quiz questions, keeps score for the teams and can be used as a central hub for teams to connect to with their smartphones or mobile devices, enabling them to directly feed their answers into the computer.

How it works

All a quiz master needs is a laptop and a decent internet connection. It’s then as simple as downloading the software onto the computer and the players downloading the app onto their devices and voila, a slick, easy to use and foolproof pub quiz with everything you need.

Success story so far

Although the app was only launched in 2012, it’s been taken up by pubs and bars all around Yorkshire, the UK and Speedquizzing events are even being hosted across the US (so far in Florida, Missouri and Georgia) and in Sydney, Australia. It’s fair to say it’s an idea that has picked up a lot of fans in a short amount of time.

Alan said, when interviewed by the York Press: “I think we are the market leader, which is a nice situation to be in. At the moment we have about 70 quizzes each week, and only about 80% of those are in the UK.”

Between them the brothers have catalogued 10,000 questions in the vast database, ensuring that quizmasters will never pull up the same quiz twice.

Playing for charity

Speedquizzing is also possibly the only event of its kind that has made its debut at a music festival. At this year’s Beacons Festival, the Speedquizzing tent went down an absolute storm with hundreds of festival goers eager for something a bit different.