Cambridge high-tech innovation continues as global financial markets unravel
Here at Silicon Fen Business Report we take vicarious pleasure in reporting on and, in this digital age, thereby being associated with the great technological innovations that have and continue to come out of the high-tech region around Cambridge, UK.
There are just so many exciting new gadgets, novel ‘solutions' (we do hate that word!) and biotech developments here. But we confess to being mere reporters, who struggle to sync our mobile phones with our laptops, which explains why the pleasure will always be vicarious.
But, or maybe "So", every now and then, when we see the paper shufflers, market and deal makers stutter (apologies and sympathies to the good folk at Lehman Bros and the Thundering Herd), this pleasure grows exponentially for a short while during the great pain and contortions underway in financial markets.
We fully recognise that without finance and deal makers the great Cambridge technical innovations wouldn't see the light of day. Silicon Fen icon and now Amadeus Capital partner Hermann Hauser, among others, has more than amply demonstrated that.
But the spreading turmoil that started in Wall Street does make one realise how the applied scientists and engineers of Cambridge are pursuing big changes in the real world, and often in areas that will make a real difference to our quality of life.
Long live the Cambridge phenomenon!
Today, we can report on the following technical advances:
CSR plc launched BlueTunes ROM, the world's first ROM-based Bluetooth solution for stereo headsets with an integrated Digital Signal Processor. It is designed to provide end-users with the ability to seamlessly switch between wireless music playback and voice calls.
BlueTunes ROM is based on BlueCore5-Multimedia, which provides audio with an integrated stereo CODEC providing 95dB SNR. Its flexible DSP architecture also allows designers to add additional features to differentiate their end products. It also integrates FastStream, a low latency high-quality music and voice CODEC which reduces the latency of the audio link to avoid "lip-sync" issues. This is particularly useful when watching video images and listening to audio on a headset or speakers. Standard Bluetooth solutions have a latency of up to 200ms, which restricts their use in real-time applications such as gaming, video or mobile TV.
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Autonomy Corporation plc, Silicon Fen's largest company by market capitalisation, said that FRANCE 24, the leading French international news channel broadcast on a 24/7 basis, has selected its Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) and Rich Media Management solution to manage and enhance its video archive. The archive has over 50,000 rich media files, consisting of the channel's daily broadcasts in French, Arabic and English, as well as other programs, and is added to daily. With Autonomy's meaning-based computing technologies, the broadcaster will be able to automatically organize and categorize large volumes of multi-media content, eliminating the cost and time associated with the manual aggregation and meta-tagging of files.
Autonomy also said that its single platform solution for interaction recording and advanced speech analytics enables financial investment firms in the UK to comply with upcoming call recording regulations from the Financial Services Authority. Autonomy's technology provides recording of relevant investment phone conversations coupled with industry-leading hosted archiving services and the only conceptual search solution that can quickly uncover pertinent communication across email, instant messages, documents, audio and video. This unique single vendor approach enables fully auditable compliance management from call acquisition to disposition.
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Alizyme plc said it is to receive a $3m milestone payment from Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd as a result of Takeda's decision to start a phase III clinical trial in Japan of cetilistat for the treatment of obesity.
