Formula 1 technology aids everyday life

As the roar from Formula 1 racing cars shakes Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix, silent concentration reigns at the futuristic-looking base of one of the leading teams, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes.

This weekend, everything at this unusual car plant in Woking, Surrey, is about winning the race this Sunday, so technicians will be hard at work as usual.
But for one division of the McLaren Group, victory on the racetrack is merely a means to an end.
Meet McLaren Applied Technologies - a department specially dedicated to expanding the home-grown Formula 1 know-how into the non-F1 world.
Sure, other F1 teams also make products that have nothing to do with Grand Prix racing - such as Red Bull's energy drink or Ferrari's roadcars.

McLaren's road car and Venge racing bike are probably the most well-known non-F1 products

But McLaren is focusing more on making money from the application of technologies developed for F1 cars to solve challenges off the racetrack.
McLaren's most famous product, besides its road cars, is probably the ultra-light carbon-fibre racing bike, Venge.
Developed in partnership with US cycling firm Specialized, it is said to be the fastest road-racing bicycle in the world.
"Their expertise in carbon technology and computing systems is exceptional," says Specialized research and development director Eric Edgecombe.
"After spending just a short amount of time together we realised that we shared some very core, deeply held beliefs about winning at the highest level."
The partnership has yielded results.
The first time the bike raced, it won the Milan-San Remo race - which at 298km is the longest professional one-day race.
Advanced telemetry
But there are lesser-known areas of application, too.
One cutting edge technology is McLaren's advanced telemetry system, which uses sensors to monitor data feeds and thus enable real-time strategy and decision making.

“Start Quote

It is a system to allow engineers to design a car - they build a car in the virtual world, then put the driver in the virtual model and validate”

End Quote Geoff McGrath McLaren Applied Technologies

"We've decided to take the aspect of remote condition monitoring of the car, and apply it to monitoring of people," explains Geoff McGrath, the head of the Applied Technologies department.

As he walks along a futuristic transparent walkway, suspended just under the ceiling, Mr McGrath says that the firm has already used this technology on patients undergoing a weight loss programme at a clinic in Norfolk.
The patients had medical sensors hooked up to them, transmitting data to the doctors.
"In the words of the people on the programme, they essentially had their GP with them, in their pocket," Mr McGrath explains.
"They could have continuous monitoring and also continuous interaction and feedback."
If patients are interested in an early warning, athletes might want to make vital improvements in performance.
The technology has already been used to train UK athletes in a number of Olympic disciplines - for instance, in canoeing.
"McLaren's miniature sensors go inside the paddle, so every time an athlete applies force on the water, the sensor measures it and transmits the data back to see how fast the boat is going," explains Scott Downer from UK Sport, a public body for directing the development of sport in the UK.

 

Mobile data experience must be consistent, says Acision

Each week we ask high-profile technology decision-makers three questions.

Marco Wanders has drawers of PDAs, but uses paper

This week it is Marco Wanders, executive vice-president of Acision's Mobile Data Control and Mobile Data Charging business units. Part of his role includes the duties of chief technology officer (CTO).
Acision is a mobile communications network infrastructure company. The global company's real-time mobile data solutions are aimed at helping their customers control, optimise and create revenue from data traffic.
This translates to services like mobile internet browsing, mobile broadband, streaming multimedia services and messaging.
Acision has 230 customers in 100 countries across six continents, including eight out of the top 10 global mobile operators.
They deliver more than one trillion SMS messages every year.

What's your biggest technology problem right now?

The biggest technology problem that we need to solve is ensuring we can help our customers - at this moment in time telecom operators, and the mobile telecom operators particularly - to deliver quality of experience to their end users.
Quality of experience is a broad term - what I mean is that you need to deliver content that is currently going over a network in the best possible way.
There are three certainties at this moment in time.
Firstly that the critical mass of smart devices is getting bigger - this could be a laptop, a PC, basically anything that has a screen. It could even be a television set that operates over a network and has a certain amount of intelligence, is connected and will run over a fixed or mobile network.
The second certainty is that what I call the 'real estate' will continue to get bigger - the real estate meaning especially the screen. If you look at smartphones today they already have resolutions and screen sizes that we didn't see even two years ago.
This means they need a huge amount of data to fill the screen.
The third certainty is that whatever becomes available - people will use it.
So you have an enormous amount of devices, larger screens and more people using them.
It's very simple to see that all networks will be getting a lot of pressure, especially mobile networks.
There is one huge limitation and that is the radio spectrum, the available capacity in a radio network is not endless. On the other hand you have consumers that expect that the content - which could be streaming radio, any type of video, whatever - be carried over the network and be delivered in a certain quality.
In a fixed network that is relatively easy to sustain - in a mobile network it's a lot harder.
I always take the example of video, everyone wants high definition. But if you view that on a mobile device no matter how good your picture looks, if the video stops playing at a certain moment in time it's worthless.
It's not only the quality of the picture it's the flow and continuity of the picture.

What's the next big tech thing in your industry?

This really leads on from the previous answer.
How can you monetise the technology mobile operators are using to deliver quality content?
Being able to deliver reliable, dependable content is of interest to both sides.
To the the end user who may be prepared to pay for that level of quality - but also as a content provider, there's value in knowing that the content you're producing is going to be delivered to the end user in a reliable and predictable way.

WH Smith reveals 4% fall in sales

Sales at book and stationery retailer WH Smith have fallen, with both its High Street stores and its Travel stores seeing a drop.

Like-for-like sales, which strip out changes in store space, in the 18 weeks to 2 July were down 4% on a year ago.
But WH Smith said gross profit margins were continuing to grow and said it was confident about its full-year results.
It added that it had returned £44.9m to shareholders of the £50m share buy-back programme announced last year.
WH Smith currently operates over 1,000 stores, primarily in the UK, comprising 581 High Street stores and 532 Travel outlets at airports, train stations, hospitals, workplaces and motorway service areas.
Book retailers have faced increasing competition from online retailers and from the rising popularity of e-books.
Source: BBC News

China raises interest rates to try to tackle inflation

China has increased its main interest rates for the third time this year to try to curb inflation.

The Chinese central bank, the People's Bank of China, said its one-year lending rate would rise to 6.56% from 6.31% and its one-year deposit rate to 3.5% from 3.25%.
The country's consumer price measure of inflation hit 5.5% in May, the highest rate for almost three years.
The higher interest rates will take effect from Thursday.
The government has made tackling inflation its top priority. Food prices are of particular concern as they are rising much faster than general prices.
"Stabilising the general level of consumer prices remains the top priority of our macroeconomic regulation," said Premier Wen Jiabao on Tuesday.
The price of pork has risen by more than 50% in the year to the end of May. This has been blamed on supply problems and the rising cost of feed.
Speaking on a visit to a market over the weekend, Premier Wen promised that pork prices would begin to fall in the coming months.
"With the implementation of government measures, price rises will be curbed effectively," he said.
Last rise?
Most economists had expected the central bank to increase rates this month and some think this may be the last move for some time.
"China's inflation battle is almost at an end," said Frederic Neumann, from HSBC in Hong Kong.
"Already, there are signs that price pressures are coming off. Today's rate hike may therefore have been the last in the cycle," he said.
However, others think inflation will continue to worsen, necessitating further rate rises.
"I think this will not flag an end of the tightening measures and the central bank could raise interest rates once more for the remainder of the year," said Qiao Yongyuan, an analyst at research firm CEBM in Shanghai, who thinks that June's inflation rate will be more than 6%.
Those inflation figures will be released next week.
A report from China's CCBIS bank released earlier suggested that inflation would peak at 6.2% in June.
Source: BBC News

Palestinian Authority faces budget crisis

The Palestinian Authority has had to cut salaries paid to its civil servants by half as it faces a major budget shortfall.

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad called on "donors and our Arab brothers" to come to their aid, saying that international donors - notably Arab countries - had failed to deliver promised funding.
Donors had provided only $330m of a total $970 commitment for the year.
The authority has been relying on bank loans to tide it over until now.
However, in a recent report the World Bank noted that Palestinian borrowing was "unsustainable" - it was nearing its borrowing limit.
"Today is a day of crisis," said the prime minister in Ramallah on Sunday.
Foreign donations account for just over a quarter of the total Palestinian budget of $3.7bn.
Source: BBC News

Ratings agencies criticised by European Commission

The European Commission has strongly criticised international credit ratings agencies following the downgrade of Portugal by Moody's.

The Commission said the timing of the downgrade was "questionable" and raised the issue of the "appropriateness of behaviour" of the agencies in general.
Earlier, Greek Foreign Minister Stavros Lambrinidis said the agencies' actions in the debt crisis had been "madness".
Ratings agencies have downgraded Greece and Portugal many times recently.
The three main agencies are Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a news conference that he wanted to "break the oligopoly of the ratings agencies" and limit their influence.
'Speculation'
On Tuesday, Moody's downgraded Portugal's debt to "junk" status, citing worries that the country may need a second bail-out.
"The timing of Moody's decision is not only questionable, but also based on absolutely hypothetical scenarios which are not in line at all with implementation," said Commission spokesman Amadeu Altafaj.
"This is an unfortunate episode and it raises once more the issue of the appropriateness of behaviour of credit rating agencies."
Commission President Manuel Barroso added that the move by Moody's "added another speculative element to the situation".
He also said it was strange that none of the ratings agencies were based in Europe.
"[This] shows there may be some bias in the markets when it comes to the evaluation of specific issues of Europe," he said.
'Self-fulfilling prophecy'
Earlier, Mr Lambridinis told a conference in Berlin that the agencies had exacerbated an already difficult situation.
He told the conference that Moody's decision to downgrade Portugal's rating was not based on any failure to implement economic reforms.
He said Moody's made an "assumption that Portugal would need a second bail-out", a move that had "the wonderful madness of self-fulfilling prophecy" - because it made it harder for Portugal to borrow to keep afloat.
Portugal's downgrade has led to the yield on its 10-year bonds exceeding 11%. German 10-year bonds - deemed the safest in the eurozone - have a yield of about 3%.
Avoiding default
Greece and Portugal - with the Irish Republic - are the eurozone countries whose finances are so weak that they have received assistance from the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Greece is currently in the process of negotiating a second bail-out. Rating agencies are watching this closely, as commercial lenders are discussing how they can contribute to the bail-out.
Later on Wednesday, senior executives from European lenders will hold a meeting to discuss how to agree repayment terms which would fulfil both their need for repayment and Greece's need to access funds.
The agencies have voiced doubts that this can be done without them declaring that Greece has defaulted on its debts.
That would spark a round of write-downs of Greek debts held by state and commercial banks, potentially causing mayhem on the financial markets.

Big questions for News International

The first is whether he sacrificed a business, and the career prospects of the News of the World's staff, to protect a particularly valued employee: Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International.
Presumably, no-one will think that he did that in a conscious, deliberate way.
But the sharpest critics of the malpractices at the News of the World, such as the Labour leader Ed Miliband, have been calling for her head.
None of those critics, to my knowledge, were demanding that the News of the World should be shut.
So it is at least plausible that if Rebekah Brooks had resigned in the past 24 hours, some of the popular and political fury towards News International and the News of the World would have been assuaged.
The second question is whether the closure of the News of the World will be seen by the media regulator, Ofcom, as making News Corporation, parent company of News International, a more or less fit-and-proper owner of British Sky Broadcasting, the UK's biggest television business (it is Ofcom's statutory duty to adjudicate on that important issue).
On the one hand, James Murdoch can say that the rot within his organisation has tonight been cut out.
On the other hand, he has admitted in a remarkable statement that he and his father Rupert Murdoch failed to identify that the News of the World's newsroom was out of control for many years.
And even when evidence started to emerge in 2006 that the News of the World was obtaining stories in illicit ways, it took four more years for News International to identify the extent of what went wrong.
So some will say that this long inability to get to grips with the malaise at the News of the World means that News Corporation, a sprawling global empire, needs to demonstrate that it can exercise rather closer and more diligent control over a business, British Sky Broadcasting, that is vastly bigger and more important to the cultural life of the UK than the News of the World.

Cookie: monster? How will business cope with new laws

By any yardstick the implementation of the EU's Privacy and Communications Directive by its member states has been poor.

This is the 'cookie law' that governs what information a web site can collect on its visitors without explicitly asking them if it's ok.
When the deadline to implement it passed in May only Estonia, Denmark and the UK had taken steps to bring it into law.
Denmark has decided now decided to puts it draft rules on ice indefinitely and the UK has given firms a year to comply.
To give the UK's Information Commissioner's Office its due, its guidance on the law is probably the most comprehensive of any member state so far.
Internet stalking

This Directive was born of consumer concerns upon finding adverts for a particular product they had previously looked at mysteriously appearing on subsequent sites they visited.

This led to an outcry as people realised they were basically being stalked around the internet.
And who was this sneaky perpetrator? Cookies.
Most cookies perform basic functional tasks like storing your login details or personal preferences.
The perceived villain of the piece was 'third party cookies'; the ones that enable companies to work out what you like and what you might want to buy, thus allowing them to tailor their marketing to you.
So the Directive was drawn up which divided cookies into those which are 'strictly necessary' for a service being provided and others, which will require consent from users.
Confusion
This has caused uproar, particularly among Europe's marketing community, who are thoroughly confused.

Matt Isaacs, CEO of Essence, says there's confusion in the marketing community about the new laws

Matt Isaacs is CEO of Essence, which develops and places online advertising for brands such as Google, eBay, eHarmony and YouTube.
"Some are suggesting that it means nothing more than making users aware of the standard security options within their browsers, while others believe it means users need to be proactively alerted of each and every cookie ever placed on their machine," he says.
The problem is the definition of 'strictly necessary' is very narrow, says Ben Allgrove, partner at the international law firm, Baker & McKenzie.
He believes the term would cover a cookie that enables an online shopping basket to function, but it would not cover a cookie that remembers you prefer your website in English rather than French
"This law can't be complied with in any sensible way," Mr Allgrove says.
"If you had full compliance you'd have pop ups coming up all the time asking for consent; consumers hate that and most web browsers automatically block the pop ups anyway."
Lifeblood
Marketing professionals argue cookies are misunderstood and most actually enhance the consumer experience, allowing people, for example, to be directed to a Hilton hotel rather than Paris Hilton. (Or indeed, vice versa.)
Paul Carysforth is a partner at Amaze, which runs online marketing campaigns for companies like Unilever, Lexus, Toyota, Coca-Cola and Dyson.
He says cookies are the lifeblood of an online business and restricting them will do more than just interrupt consumers' while they are online.

"Cookies are the primary means by which all online businesses determine the return on their investment," he says.

"Without cookies it would be almost impossible for companies to understand their ROI and in particular isolate which strategies are delivering a positive return, and which would hamper investment and innovation."
Slightly more optimistic is Ben Cooper from Tullo Marshall Warren, which has created online campaigns for the likes of Lynx, Guinness, Nissan and Sony Ericsson.