When is a startup not a startup? When it is a spinout with hundreds of employees and a full product line, revenues of E450m and the second largest fabless semiconductor company in Europe.Continue reading "Lantiq taps venture capital for investment" »
Bristol startup Silicon Basis is developing a test chip for its innovative FPGA architecture that has potential to reduce the size, cost and power of a reconfigurable array to a quarter of today's devices.Continue reading "Startup aims at high performance computing tools " »
Continue reading "Zinwave secures backing to expand manufacturing" »
Nanotech material developer Peratech has signed a $1.4m licensing deal with one of the world's largest manufacturers of touch screen technology. Continue reading "Nanotech startup signs $1.4m 3D touchscreen deal " »
Continue reading "FlatFrog raises €12.5m to commercialise its optics-based multi-touch technology" »
Continue reading "Foreign firms overtake US in patent battle" »
This year's Consumer Electronics show has seen the emergence of the first products from some of the UK's longest running startups. Plastic Logic and Light Blue Optics (LBO), both in Cambridge, have raised substantial sums of money to get to this point of launching, if not shipping, products. 
Continue reading "London Technology Fund Competition 2009 winners announced" »
When I first saw the headline on this blog posting: "SkyMap for Android", my immediate reaction was that Google had created the computer that took over the World in the Terminator movies. However, it turns out that that was Skynet, so I guess we're safe for now. (Google will do it one day! Just wait and see!)
SkyMap on Android measures the location of the phone using GPS and also senses its orientation in 3-dimensions using a magnetometer and accelerometer. Based on the direction the phone is pointing it then shows a map of the sky, showing the stars that you are looking at. This is pretty cool, but will it inspire a new generation of budding astronomers? Probably not ... it's another cool toy for us to play with for a while until we get bored and move on to the next one.
Continue reading "GPS Applications #6: SkyMap for Android" »
After my story last week about cycling through
Continue reading "GPS Applications #5 (again): Geotagging" »
Last week I stayed in a hotel in Fairfax,
It's an innocuous town, but wandering about the place I had a strange sense of deja-vu. It took me a little while to realize, but I had been there before, almost 20 years previously.
In 1990 I set off on a bicycle from Capitol Hill with a group of my fellow students, and just over six weeks later arrived at the Golden Gate Bridge, (unrecognisably fitter and more tanned than I will ever be again. I can't believe the photo's are really me!)
There are already some pretty sophisticated location-based gaming concepts, and this is an area that will undoubtedly get a lot more sophisticated, so I expect I'll be posting more about this in future. In the meantime, here is a really simple example.
Last night I downloaded "Flight Control" from the App Store on my iPod Touch. This is a very simple, but oddly compelling game. (Even so, I can't say I'd recommend it for whiling away the hours on a long-haul flight ... every game inevitably ends with a plane crash!)
Continue reading "GPS Applications #4: Location-enhanced high-scores" »
BBC Radio 4's "In Business" programme with Peter Day spot-lit the industry emerging around location technologies this week. In 30 minutes the programme could not hope to cover every angle, but it's a pretty good cross-section and worth a listen if you're interested in Location. It should be available here for many weeks.
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