About Geniusin
Geniusin did not begin as a prototype studio.
It began in 2011 as a technology and innovation company, founded by Paul Tombs to continue a long-standing focus on building simple, effective technological solutions to real-world problems.
From the outset, the emphasis was not on technology for its own sake, but on practical systems that improved performance, decision-making, and customer experience in demanding commercial environments.
A Foundation in Real Engineering
Long before Geniusin existed, Paul was one of the early pioneers of electronic customer counting and performance tracking systems in the UK retail sector. In the 1990s, at a time when store managers had little visibility of footfall or conversion, his work helped introduce some of the first infrared counting systems into high street retail.
Those early systems — adapted from missile guidance technology — allowed retailers to understand how customers actually moved through stores, how products performed, and how changes to layout or design affected behaviour. Over time, these systems were deployed at scale, analysing more than a billion customer visits per year for major global brands.
This work later became part of Synovate Retail Performance, which was acquired in 2011 by Ipsos, now one of the world’s largest market research organisations, monitoring billions of visits annually across dozens of countries.
While serving as Managing and Technical Director at Synovate Retail Performance, Paul led large-scale European technology rollouts and was recognised as one of the top 0.5% of UK business leaders in 2009 and 2010. The experience was not only technical, but deeply operational — working with real systems, real constraints, and real commercial consequences.
From Platforms to Products
Geniusin’s early years reflected this background.
The company developed and launched getWaiter, a waiter-calling and customer feedback application designed to give hospitality businesses immediate insight into service performance. The focus was practical: allowing teams to spot problems early, respond quickly, and understand customer experience as it happened.
As digital transformation gathered pace, the underlying capabilities of getWaiter were expanded and adapted for use in other sectors facing similar operational pressures. This led to the creation of Buzz2Get — a broader suite of offline-to-online customer engagement and performance tools.
Buzz2Get went on to support businesses across automotive retail, hospitality, retail, real estate, and transport — helping organisations operate more effectively in increasingly complex and disrupted markets.
A Deliberate Evolution
Over time, however, it became clear that the work Paul and the team found most meaningful — and most impactful — was not the scaling of platforms, but the act of building.
- Designing electronics.
- Solving hard technical problems.
- Taking ideas from uncertainty to something that physically works.
Prototyping had always been the foundation beneath everything Geniusin had done. It was simply not the focus.
Today, Geniusin has evolved into a boutique electronics innovation practice — deliberately smaller, more focused, and centred on the type of work that has always mattered most: incubating electronic ideas and turning them into reliable, working prototypes.
Geniusin Today
Led by Paul, Geniusin now brings together a close-knit network of trusted engineering specialists, assembled as needed around each project. Every engagement is guided by experience, sound judgement, and a belief that ideas deserve to be built properly — not rushed, guessed at, or over-engineered.
The focus is clear:
- Electronics design and prototyping
- Debugging and stabilisation
- Validation and preparation for real-world use
This evolution is not a departure from Geniusin’s past, but a return to its core.
The tools may have changed.
The focus has sharpened.
But the intent remains the same: practical innovation, grounded in real engineering, applied where it matters.