an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the sunday telegraph
Business Technology January 2014
12 | Future of electronics
Find us online: business-technology.co.uk
Business World
South Korea
South Korean tech giant Samsung has predicted a fall in its profits for the final quarter of 2014. The firm forecasts an operating profit of 8.3 trillion Won (£4.8bn) for the quarter from October to December – a 6 per cent dip compared with the same period in 2013. Samsung is the world’s biggest maker of smartphones and works on other technology, from cameras and tablets to smart TVs. But its dominance in the smartphone market is coming under threat and profits could also suffer because of its involvement in China, where companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi are offering budget smartphones.
China
ExpertInsight
China’s vast gaming market has opened up to outsiders, after authorities suspended a 14-year ban on the sale of foreign consoles. Chinese authorities introduced the ban in 2000, citing the harmful effects of violent games on users’ mental health. A trial will now see the ban lifted in the country’s Shanghai free trade
zone, an experiment aimed at freeing up a tightly controlled financial sector, which opened in September. China has the world’s third biggest gaming industry in terms of total revenues. But foreign companies will have difficulty penetrating the market, due to unfamiliarity, low wages and the fac that many popular games are currently free.
United States
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Business Technology
Future of electronics | 13
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From 8-bit coder to technology guru, Leo Zancani has seen the industry from its beginnings
“I think software never dies – it’s one of those things” – Leo Zancani, CTO, Ontology Systems
L
eo Zancani divides his time between overseeing the technical functions of his company and musing about a new world awash with data, including all the “moving parts” this involves. But Zancani, who serves as chief technology officer (CTO) at Ontology Systems, a company which links different kinds of data from the world of enterprise, mainly for telecoms and financial services companies, entered the world of computing at a more rudimentary level. “I first got involved with computers quite early,” he says. “I was in that whole 8-bit computer scene that seems to be coming back and being fashionable now. “I trained as a physicist, and that involves a fair bit of computing. My first job was at a company making high-resolution, long-format photography equipment that’s computer-controlled. They needed someone who understood optics and software. Zancani went from writing software in this job to Orchestream, a “tiny start-up” that specialised in software and became one of the UK’s early technology successes. “I was recruited to what was then a tiny start-up,” he says. “There were four or five of us at the time. But it was quite a big success
How the UK can deliver innovation on a world stage echnology has real potential to change lives for the better. However, when designing something new, it is always important to take into account that these technologies must end up in real products which consumers are compelled to buy, and find their lives enriched as a result. Imagination Technologies, a leading UK-based designer of intellectual property (IP) used in multimedia, processor and communications chips, is run on a philosophy that spurring innovation is about looking for discontinuities and spotting trends across multiple markets. This involves a deep understanding of what drives markets and how technology must be designed to address that. Sir Hossein Yassaie (below), CEO, Imagination Technologies says: “The consumer market enables everyone in the supply chain to thrive, provided they are truly end-user focused. This growth can only be sustained through ensuring the best possible user experiences and original, exciting product offerings that make a real difference to consumers. The entire industry must be increasingly aware of what consumers want and need, and focus their engineering towards fulfilling those needs.” Mobile is perhaps the best example of this; when the first smartphones were
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January 2014
Watching over the electro-revolution…
Wearable technology and the so-called Internet of Things generated hype at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The event showcased the latest gadgets earlier this month, from 360-degree camcorders to self-driving cars. The 2014 show reflected an interest in wearable, connected devices, including fitness trackers, smartwatches and Google Glass. With Google Glass yet to be given a mainstream release, smaller firms were given the chance to exhibit their goods. This includes GlassUp, whose glasses show smartphone alerts and updates, Instabeat’s heart rate monitor and Veristride’s shoe insole sensor that provides feedback on the wearer’s movements. On a less positive note, there are already concerns about the security implications of such devices.
INDUSTRY VIEW
an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the sunday telegraph
launched, even industry insiders were wondering whether there was any future for these devices in the context of portable electronics. Since then, smartphones have become everyone’s main computing device – in part due to the powerful but low-power PowerVR graphics technologies that Imagination has pioneered. Everything will need to be smart, so most devices will need a CPU with low power credentials for the next wave of wearable devices. Imagination’s latest MIPS processors, for example, are designed to be extremely small and efficient, enabling products that do amazing things, yet can run for weeks or even months without recharging the battery. However the only way to optimise the power, performance and cost of a product is to integrate everything on the same chip. Imagination was a pioneer of this everything-on-the-SoC trend many years ago, when most were convinced graphics would never end up on the same chip as the CPU. The result: making smartphones possible. So their latest Ensigma RPU (radio processing unit) technology is set to ruffle a few more feathers. For years, including key functions such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the SoC (system-on-chip) has been a hot topic among silicon design engineers. By incorporating an RPU into the SoC, future generations of devices can deliver a compelling combination of ubiquitous connectivity as well as world TV and radio reception if needed – ideal for the myriad low-cost, battery-powered
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story in the UK, in the first internet wave of the mid-1990s. “I was there for a while and ended up running the engineering department. We had an Initial Public Offering (IPO) which was quite successful.” Orchestream was later acquired by another company, which was in turn bought by technology giant Oracle. Zancani says he still comes across old Orchestream software from time to time. “Occasionally with clients, you get into an operations centre and see something that we wrote (at Orchestream) in 1998. I think software never dies – it’s one of those things.” In 2005 he and another former Orchestream employee noticed early issues around data, and founded Ontology Systems to fill the niche. “My co-founder was the CTO of Orchestream. We spotted a lot of problems, mostly with data,” he says. “What was going on in telecoms was an industry that had started out doing their own equipment and writing their own software. “But gradually the pieces of them that made equipment got split off, and in the late 1980s or early 1990s, there was this explosion of equipment and software vendors. “That brought in lots of moving parts, and there was a great deal more data and a lot more different types of data involved in the process of making a call, knowing who made that call and how to bill it. “It caused problems in the network, so we worked on getting that data to link up.” As CTO, Zancani focuses partly on overseeing the technical functions within the company and delivering products to customers. But he also looks
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products that will define the Internet of Things. Continues Yassaie: “Two out of the top three silicon IP companies are UK-based. The rest of the UK tech sector should capitalise on these innovative home-grown chip technologies and the software and applications built on top of them, all designed and implemented here in the UK. There is still great opportunity and potential for UK companies to be successful on a global stage if we do the right things and have the right policies implemented.” Imagination strongly believes the UK needs to ensure that we have a technology and industrial strategy that takes the current environment, industry trends, and expertise and skillsets into account – and actively steers the UK towards a strong and vital position for the future. “There are positive signs but all these efforts need to be part of a larger strategy co-ordinated between industry and government,” concludes Yassaie, “and we need this happening yesterday.”
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at strategy, which has him thinking about the new explosion of data and its effect on both consumers and the technology industry. “What we have seen since founding the company is that data has exploded beyond anyone’s imagination. That data growth we were seeing in telecoms has now exploded into the public domain,” he says. “There’s more and more data. People now realise they have a data footprint which increases every time they use a bank card or make a phone call. “There’s a combination of more things generating data. If you look at consumers, we went from smartphones to smartwatches to health-monitoring devices.” And while he thinks the growth of data offers opportunities for companies like his, Zancani also believes it has put strain on the technology industry. “As a buzzword, I think ‘big data’ has come and hit the tech industry really hard and really fast,” he says. “There’s a knee-jerk reaction (from companies) to do something about big data. “People call up saying ‘My boss has told me I need to do something about big data.’ It’s interesting, because a lot of industries have always dealt with big data.” He now believes that, in order to use data in a ‘smart’ way, more people are needed who can properly understand it. “I think there’s something of a knee-jerk reaction going on, but there’s also a shortage of people who understand data,” he says. “And there are problems when you have people who don’t understand data and want to do something about it. “The term ‘data scientist’ is being bandied around, but we need more people who can actually interpret the data. Once we manage that, we can start doing more smart things with the results.”
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