National Electronic design e-legacy awards

I was fortunate to attend the Electronic Product Design e-Legacy awards which were held at the Roof Gardens, Kensington on the afternoon of the 11th September.

The roof gardens in central Kensington are on the 6th floor of building incorporating office, shops and homes.

Pink Flamingos and exotic ducks swim in a pond, trees flourish. A great setting for an awards ceremony.

I attended to present one of the awards on behalf of the Electronics Knowledge Transfer Network. http://www.electronics-ktn.com/

Electronic Yorkshire is the regional partner to the E KTN. http://www.electronicsyorkshire.org.uk/

Caroline Hayes, editor, Electronic Product Design explains how the awards came into being: 'The e-Legacy Awards are a defiant response to reports about the 'wasteful' power-hungry' electronics industry....Yet in my role as editor, I see so many positive things that electronics companies do, that I wanted a vehicle to show this and to demonstrate how we can create a lasting legacy for future generations.'

The awards' categories were unusual in that they asked readers to vote on projects and initiatives that contribute to education, the environment, health and safety. http://www.epdonthenet.net/awards.aspx

The categories being awarded were for
1. Contribution to Sustainability
2. Environmental Design –This was sponsored by Leeds based Farnell.
3. Investment in Training
4. Medical advances
5. Investment in Environment
6. Investment in Education- the category I was presenting.

This was won by Freescale Semiconductor
7. Contribution to security

According to Carolyn Hayes over 6000 readers on EPD voted on the awards.

The category sponsored by the electronic KTN relating to Investment in Education was the most heavily voted category.

I would love to be able to report that a Yorkshire company had won one of the awards but sadly this was not to be.

Hopefully some of our companies were amongst the 80 entries which started the competition.

Pity the Electronic Yorkshire mobile training unit was not in the final selection!
http://www.electronicsyorkshire.org.uk/mtu.htm

For those who do not know, the unique vehicle is fully equipped with the latest electronics training equipment, making access to the industry-specific training we’re famous for easier, simpler and affordable. In its spare time it visits schools to encourage the pupils to consider the electronic industry as a career.

A few days in a Sector Champ life

As with Emma I attend and enjoyed the Melt inspirational event.
In addition to the aspects identified by Emma I was interested in the talk by Tom Savinger of The Future Laboratory http://www.thefuturelaboratory.com/ particularly the discussion on the slash/ slash generation.

From this if found the view that to sell or influence the younger generation, (to be a sector champion you have to be old) you need to build into the way you deliver your sales message the fact that the generation multitask much more than previous generations.

Folks are more likely to be influenced by a popular theme rather than a brand.
So the classic words came out “ To create successful sales be like a band rather than a brand”
Younger users are constantly ‘switched on’ to a range on devices and input .
Peer networks are more likely to influence purchasing than advertising and most sales will take place in the hours from 6am to 10am and 6pm to midnight.

An interesting day.

Friday 5th – September Plastic Electronics

The following day I was attending a workshop on a totally different field- Plastic Electronics.
Over 40 northern companies gathered at Leeds university to consider how to work together to grow current strengths in the north so we can become the key location in the UK and ideally Europe for all Plastic electronic research, development and production.

The Wikipedia definition of Plastic electronics is
Organic electronics, or plastic electronics, is a branch of electronics that deals with conductive polymers, plastics, or small molecules. It is called 'organic' electronics because the polymers and small molecules are carbon-based, like the molecules of living things. This is as opposed to traditional electronics which relies on inorganic conductors such as copper or silicon

ID Techex predict that in 2006, the worldwide printable electronics market was approximately £70 million; this is predicted to grow to £3 billion by 2009 and to £15 to £30 billion by the year 2015.

The North of England is well placed to benefit from this with the strength of work in the university sector, the strong base of Print production companies in Yorkshire and the recently commissioned state-of-the-art plastic electronics prototyping and process development facility, namely, PETeC (Plastic Electronics Technology Centre) located in Sedgefield, Co. Durham. http://www.ukpetec.com/

What sort of application can use printed electronics.

The following list is not exhaustive :-

E-book
E-newspaper
Mobile phone/handheld equipment
RFID tags
Smart electronic sensors
Smart cards
Retail signage & shelving
Disposable sensors packaging/medical
Digital signage
Printed battery + printed PV
Video, TV, multimedia
Notebook computers
Automotive
Consumer disposables
Wearable electronics/smart clothing

I will report back as this potential project progresses.

Monday 8th –September

White Rose Healthcare Innovation Master Class in Health Application for Wireless Technology.

Details of the series of events can be found at http://www.wrhip.org/

The event attracted about 40 professionals from the healthcare and academic fields.

Interesting day talking about a wide range of different uses for wireless technologies.

Prof Anthony Furness from the European centre of excellence in Automatic Identification and Data Capture Centre in Halifax gave a significant overview of the total global market. http://www.aidcuk.org .


Tuesday 9th September

A more classic day talking to companies with new ideas for research and development. Always fun to see these new idea particularly when they grown ino something big.

The one company I meet on Tuesday I would like to recommend is the work Martin Spence and his colleagues at Xoolon are doing with school children and encouraging them to exercise.

See http://www.xoolon.com/ I suggest you look at the community and perhaps join.

Some useful websites...

I have a few links i've been saving up over the last few days so I want to signpost them all in this post.

First up is KnowledgeRICH:

http://www.knowledgerich.com/

It's a free service for businesses to get in touch with Universities in the region to work on innovative projects. What a great idea!

Next up is the Yorkshire Science and Technology Network:

http://www.ystn.co.uk/

I went to their last event in Leeds, it's free (although invite only so you have to sign up to attend) and gives a good networking opportunity to meet people from quite a variety of organisations. They have a couple of speakers at each event and in the past these have included Tim Berners-Lee and Wayne Hemingway.

Next I wanted to point out Cisco's I-Prize:

http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/iprize/index.html

This is a competition to create an idea that Cisco will then fund anything up to $10 million! The really cool part to it is that when you enter you basically register into a community and then can get ideas from other people and create a team from within that community. A very cool way to encourage collaboration...

Finally, 4mations:

http://www.4mations.tv/

This site allows you to upload your own animated movies and games with the most popular each month winning a cash prize! The site isn't the most user-friendly i've ever come across, but if you get stuck you can click 'help' at the top right of the page to get to a fairly useful FAQ.

Melt 2008

Yesterday I was in Sheffield for the Melt 2008 Inspiration Session, and very inspiring it was too! Melt gives R&D awards to artistic, media and technical talent to explore the creative and economic possibilities of innovative content exploitation - basically they invest in cool, new things :-) They also do a lot of mentoring and giving of advice to help the projects make progress.

Personally my favourite part of the afternoon was the Melt Show and Tell where we saw short 10 minute presentations from 5 Melt projects. I loved them all! :

Healthy Island - an interactive game for teachers to encourage healthy behaviour in their pupils. A great way to bring more modern technology into the classroom without using a whiteboard!
http://www.lovemelt.com/past-awardees/7-earth-heart.html

Call of the Wild - a sound controlled game using animal noises. The added value with this one has got to be the whole 'all the family' can play factor.
http://www.lovemelt.com/past-awardees/13-call-of-the-wild.html

Piefighter - a mobile game using bluetooth and involving throwing pies at friends using your mobile and gaining free beer! Surely a winner with students.
http://www.lovemelt.com/past-awardees/16-blueface.html

Lost Angels - another mobile game, this time in a tamagochi / virtual pet stylie using real world info (i.e. news sources). You can really see this being picked up by the increasingly younger mobile market.
http://www.lovemelt.com/past-awardees/10-lost-angels.html

Wizard Academy - interactive 3D / 4D (think water being sprayed at you in 4D!) game for use in theme parks and visitor attractions. This one I thought was particularly commercially attractive, you can see it being used in lots of places.
http://www.lovemelt.com/past-awardees/14-wizard-academy.html

I shall try to keep my eye on the progress of all of them...