March 4, 2010

Lantiq taps venture capital for investment

Christian_Wolff.jpgWhen 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.

But even spinouts need to raise capital, and Infineon-spinout Lantiq has turned to the venture capital company of Deutsche Telekom, T-Ventures, for a capital investment and strategic advice.

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February 23, 2010

Silicon Basis heads for FPGA test chip

silicon basis logo.jpgBristol 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.

The Soft Gate Array (SGA) uses a time factor to reuse each look up table in the array and the interconnect up to eight times a cycle, dramatically reducing the size of the array and so reducing the cost to well under 25% of current FPGAs.

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February 12, 2010

Startup aims at high performance computing tools

Bristol startup Petapath is aiming to build a software tools company to exploit the move to high performance add-in cards to create compact supercomputers in offices and datacentres.

Multicore chip technologies such as Nvidia's CUDA and AMD's ATI chips are providing supercomputer levels of performance but the tools are not available to make the most of these systems, says CEO and co-founder Michal Harasimiuk, and the company has this month won a grant from the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA) for a market study to identify and assess key areas of system architecture and software methodology for such systems.

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February 9, 2010

Zinwave secures backing to expand manufacturing

Cambridge startup Zinwave has raised an additional round of funding for its wideband in-building antenna system.

The investment, from Catapult Venture Managers, joins a syndicate of SEB Venture Capital, Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity Partners, and will be used to boost manufacturing throughput following the successful expansion into the US and Asia during 2009 with a rapid growth rate and uptake in these regions.

Zinwave will continue to expand sales in these regions, as well as gaining market penetration in the key area of Middle East.

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January 26, 2010

Nanotech startup signs $1.4m 3D touchscreen deal

qtc_particle_image 175.jpgNanotech material developer Peratech has signed a $1.4m licensing deal with one of the world's largest manufacturers of touch screen technology.

The licensing agreement gives Nissha of Japan exclusive worldwide rights to use Peratech's Quantum Tunnelling Composites (QTC) for touch screens with 3D input on mobile phones and portable electronic devices for an initial period of 1 year.

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January 20, 2010

FlatFrog raises €12.5m to commercialise its optics-based multi-touch technology

FlatFrog Laboratories, a startup in Lund, Sweden, developing optics-based multi-touch kits and subsystems, has raised $18m to commercialise its technology with the backing of a UK company.

This investment round was co-led by Blackburn-based Promethean, a specialist in the rapidly growing global market for interactive learning technologies, and Invus, an international equity investor. They join existing Copenhagen-based venture capital investor Sunstone Capital.

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January 19, 2010

Foreign firms overtake US in patent battle

Foreign companies are filing more patents in the US than home-grown companies, according to the latest figures from IFI Patent Intelligence. This is only the second time that this has happened, with 51% of applications in 2009 coming form outside the US.

Semiconductors and communications hardware remain the driving force in US patents, with 15,000 applications last year out of a total up 6% to 167,350. Bio drugs and biotechnology are relatively small, with 2,700 patents issued, up 17 percent and 1 percent respectively over the previous year.

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January 11, 2010

The return of Plessey

The stalwart of the UK chip industry, Plessey Semiconductors, has been resurrected as a startup by a team of engineers from Swindon and Plymouth on the back of the existing fab plant, acquired from German company X-Fab.

The semiconductor manufacturing facility in Roborough currently produces eight-inch wafers for external customers in a foundry business model on 0.35-micron CMOS process technologies.

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January 8, 2010

UK startups shine at CES

CES shot.jpgThis 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.  

Plastic Logic was founded in 2000 out of the Cavendish labs at Cambridge, and has raised over $200m over the last decade to develop plastic screen technology and build the factory for it in Dresden. The QUE proReader, one of the many e-readers launched at CES this year will ship in April, at a relatively high cost of $649 to $799, but should be lighter and more robust than other readers.

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November 6, 2009

London Technology Fund Competition 2009 winners announced

ltfc.jpg
The winners of this year's London Technology Fund Competition have been announced.

The competition is an opportunity for "young London-based technology companies" to win a share of up to £1m of investment and over £100,000 worth of training and advice, and have the opportunity to meet major technology corporates.

Headlines are that Trojantec won the Grand Prix, Juice Technology and BView for won sector awards, and Novacem won the Environment Award.

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June 11, 2009

GPS Applications #6: SkyMap for Android

  starmap.pngWhen 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. 

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June 4, 2009

GPS Applications #5 (again): Geotagging

After my story last week about cycling through Fairfax, Virginia (here) somebody commented that they thought it particularly sad that I carry around scans of photos from 19 years ago on my laptop.

 

Well, the truth is actually a lot worse than that! I am building a complete digital database of photos from the day I was born. Most of my photos from 1998 onwards have been taken on a digital camera (I'm an early-adopter); the preceding 29 years, however, are something of a larger project, involving scanning photos in different formats from multiple different sources. I gave up doing the actual scanning myself pretty quickly - discovering that there are perfectly reasonable services available that do it for you - but simply collecting the photos is proving a bigger task than I'd anticipated.

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May 28, 2009

GPS Applications #5: Geotagging

Fairfax fire department.jpg Last week I stayed in a hotel in Fairfax, Virginia, about 15 miles out of Washington DC.

 

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!) Fairfax was our first stop out of DC, and the local fire department had laid-on refreshments in anticipation of our arrival.

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May 21, 2009

GPS Applications #4: Location-enhanced high-scores

flight control.png

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!)

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May 17, 2009

Air On Air

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.

 

Needless to say, Air gets a mention! Listen-out for my contribution starting about 12 minutes into the broadcast. Apart from some description of the business, I'm glad they also edited-in my comments about the role of marketing in innovation, which is a theme I first picked-up on this blog, here.

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