Briefs: Top 3 Silicon Fenners go well; global RFID orders going gangbusters; Prism delivers pizzaz to Soho’s Inamo
The top three companies by market capitalisation HQed in the Cambridge Cluster of high tech companies had a good day on the stock market.
Second ranked ARM Holdings gained 5% to be now valued at £1.48 billion; top ranked Autonomy Corporation was up 3.5% to be worth £2.35 billion; and third placed AVEVA Group increased 2.5% to reach a market cap of £963m.
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Autonomy Corporation plc, infrastructure software for the enterprise specialists, has entered into a multi-million dollar license agreement with AT&T to license Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer software.
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Contract electronics maker Prism Electronics Ltd said it has helped Cambridge Micro Engineering deliver an innovative automated menu ordering system to a new London restaurant.
Inamo is an Oriental fusion restaurant and bar in Soho, central London, where control of the dining experience is placed in the hands of the diner. At the core of this experience is an interactive ordering system. Diners place orders from an illustrated food and drinks menu projected on to their table surface. Diners customise the mood of their table by changing lighting or choose from a selection of animated appearance settings to create a virtual tablecloth.
Prism Electronics made the printed circuit boards for the interface between a wireless electronic POS device and touchpad. Each table in the 60-seat restaurant has its own projector housed in a differently designed cocoon.
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While the RFID orders for $500m grab the headlines, RFID is prospering at all levels, according to IDTechEx Chairman Peter Harrop.
He said one should consider the flood of orders at the $1m level, spread across the world. On Track Innovations has just supplied 1.5m RFID cards to the Warsaw Transport Department in Poland. VeriFone has just taken an order for 20,000 readers for the Australian Cabcharge taxi payment cards. Digital Angel has also received this level of order but for readers in US rivers to monitor fish. Vuance has taken a $6.2m service contract for its RFID secure access in a European airport. The list goes on and the breadth of application is "truly remarkable".
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Dolomite released the Mitos Syringe Pump, an intelligent pump system that enables the future development of complex and powerful microfluidic systems.
Microfluidics, a technology also known as ‘lab on a chip', is a new field of science and engineering that enables very small-scale fluid control and analysis, allowing instrument manufacturers to develop smaller, more cost-effective and more powerful systems. With lab-on-a-chip technology, entire complex chemical management and analysis systems are created in a microfluidic chip and interfaced with, for example, electronic and optical detection systems. 'Lab on a chip' technology is impacting a broad range of application areas; accelerating drug discovery, providing better point of care systems and enabling more responsive and portable environmental testing systems to be realised.
