Read the latest update from CSR sponsored Stephen Phillips who heads off around the world on 18th February 2012.
“What on earth for?! What’s the point?! You’re being ridiculous! It will never happen! Don’t be silly”.
How many of us have heard those statements from friends, family and work colleagues?
Continue reading “Global Cycle Challenge 2012 – Nearly Off!” »
The CSR Powered initiative, helping consumers understand how CSR’s technology enhances and enriches consumers’ lives, started in earnest in December, with the launch of a new CSR consumer website www.csr.com/freedom, in line with the launch of a wave of planned retail activity.
Mark Aubin from the Home group has been working with key retailers and their suppliers to deliver a marketing campaign to help consumers understand the role CSR plays in today’s wirelessly connected world. Mark said he is please to be able to announce the initial launch of the campaign with Tesco, across all the Tesco Extra stores. The planned launch in December was the first in a number retail opportunities planned for 2012 and beyond.
Bluechipworld are one of Mark’s key suppliers and well known and respected across some of the UK’s leading retailers, including Tesco. Bluechipworld are proud to announce the launch of a new range of CSR enabled products. The Icandy Freedom 180 headphones are the first in a range of Freedom products from Bluechipworld which went on sale across all Tesco Extra stores in December. Freedom 180s are to be found in prime promotional locations in Extra stores and feature a free audio book from Audible.co.uk. They go on sale at £24.99. In addition, both Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse in Ireland have launched the product throughout their stores.
John Barton, Executive Director of Bluechipworld said, “ Working with CSR is helping us to develop our product range by assisting us in delivering both innovation and technical excellence. Our major retail customers such as Tesco, Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse, and their customers in turn, are all benefitting from this added value with the great offers in stores.
We are now looking ahead to further development of our range, which will include aptX, and anticipate that 2012 will be a strong year for the Bluechipworld and CSR partnership across the retail sector.”
Mark went on to say that he is also working with leading companies such as Audible.co.uk, part of the Amazon group, in order to add further value to the consumers when they purchase specific CSR powered promotional products. Please keep an eye on the CSR freedom website to keep ahead of further retail promotions and partnerships.
For the past two weeks, CSR has been exhibiting at the highly prestigious Business, Innovation and Skills Electronics Showcase in London. The show featured the cream of UK cutting edge technology and we showed a range of our products from headsets to navigation devices and some of our latest handsets.
On Wednesday this week, the Minister for Business Mark Prisk visited the exhibition and met with CSR’s representative Liam Jacklin from our UK PR Company Rocket.
It is 87 days from now until the start of the global bicycle race, or two months, 26 days, 2088 hours, 125,280 minutes, 2088 hours, 7,516,800 seconds (minus a few as I type). You can see me getting some practice in at my sponsor’s Cambridge headquarters.
Location has evolved into a life-enhancing, immersive experience offering safety, convenience, productivity, and enjoyment to consumers and enterprises alike. This year, attendees gathered once again to discuss the location industry and the innovations, challenges and issues, and potential applications and services of the future.
Introductory Remarks
Introductory remarks from Joep Van Buerden, CEO of CSR, and emcee Marc Prioleau, principal at Prioleu Advisors, observed that the purpose of the Summit was especially the “Beyond” element of Locations and Beyond, in that what needs to be examined, debated and addressed is what comes “beyond” today. It was a call to the industry to work together to meet the future needs of consumers and enterprises in a way that enhances their lives by delivering convenience, safety, enjoyment and productivity, while also recognizing and addressing the important issues of privacy and safety inherent in location services.
Opening Keynote
The opening keynote address was delivered by Michael Liebhold, senior researcher and distinguished fellow, Institute for the Future, who shared with the audience his thoughts for the future of location in technology, and in peoples’ lives.
Here are the highlights:
• We’re in the early stages of mobile augmented reality (MAR): it is currently useful, fun and creative, but we will evolve from movement from the web to the page, to the real world.
• We’ll begin to see everything richly annotated – cultural, economic, historical, and social information – all precisely tagged to a base map. Imagine you walk around the world and can see all the invisible information – architectural drawings behind a wall, probability of a crime at an intersection, social network affiliations of your friends, etc. – all this will happen within about 9 years.
• Other applications for MAR include street games…if you can overlay factual info on real world, you can also put fictional info there so you can turn any real place into a play space. And augmented reality for tourism would be a boon for travelers, who could now look up at a gargoyle on the Notre Dame and find out why it’s there, and the history behind it.
• Two interesting vehicle applications include precise road analysis for proactive control -if the road is icy, the car will know to readjust using proactive contextual mapping. And smart side windows in which passengers see annotations and information on the window itself explaining what they are seeing
• Video and see-through head-mounted displays are pretty clunky and frankly even nauseating today, but by 2015 we think someone like Oakley or Apple will make a more viable HMD, and by 2020, we’ll see glasses on the market that offer new views of the geospatial web – and even contact lens, by 2025, containing WiFi, location, and Google-enabled, bearing a 16 megapixel camera!
• We’re seeing prototypes for personal robotics – we think we’re on the cusp of an explosion in applications for personal robotics, which require SLAM (simultaneous location and mapping).
Panel Discussions
The first panel, Intelligence, was moderated by Marc Prioleau, principal of Prioleau Advisors and panelists Cisco, Vodafone, PARC, PlaceIQ and Huawei Device USA, focused how to empower people and enterprises through context-aware location.
Integration was the subject of the second panel, moderated by Brian Modoff, senior Telecommunications Technology analyst of Deutsche Bank Securities. Participants from LOC-AID, General Motors, NAVTEQ, STMicroelectronics and CSR explored how location industry players can integrate all the elements necessary to create and support a ubiquitous location ecosystem.
Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, moderated the final panel, entitled Impact, in which panelists from Stanford University, Placecast, Verizon Wireless, Yahoo!, and NextNav debated how always-on location awareness and connectivity impacts peoples’ daily lives. A lively discussion revolved around the issues of privacy and security, and how the industry can collaborate and cooperate to address these issues to protect consumers while offering the best possible services.
The most popular event at this and previous CSR Locations and Beyond Summits, the FastPitch sessions featured lively 5-minute presentations from 6 of the most innovative companies and applications, offering location-based offerings, chosen from several dozen applicants. The audience noted afterward that these are among the most interesting FastPitch sessions thus far in the history of the Summit, and illuminated how far the industry has come in just the past year in terms of delivering truly useful information based on contextual location data to users.
Presentations by DoubleDutch, Grabio, Localmind, Moblitz, Inc., Sonar and Tagwhat
had the audience fully engaged as they demonstrated everything from a social, location-aware mobile app designed to help workers stay connected, log their activity, and get work done with their mobile devices to a multimedia location guide that reveals videos, photos, narratives, and audio about users’ customized interests such as art, food, music, movies, history, sports and books.
A panel of investors voted and select the top winner for the Investor’s Choice Award. The Investor panel included Dan Levine, Accel Partners; John Malloy, Blue Run Ventures; and Rakesh Sood, DOCOMO Capital.
Congratulations to this year’s People’s Choice Award winner Tagwhat, runner-up, DoubleDutch, and the Investor’s Choice Award winner, Localmind.
CSR Takes Location to the Next Level with Offerings Enabling Indoor Location and Premium In-Vehicle Infotainment for Mainstream.
Kanwar Chadha, CMO and board member of CSR and founder of SiRF, announces CSR’s two new platforms
Today we at CSR are very proud to announce new products that will take location to the next level and enable exciting new applications that significantly improve the user experience. The products are SiRFstarV with SiRFusion – an end-to-end location platform – and SiRFprimaII, a complete auto infotainment platform.
Distribution of information is changing profoundly. Until recently, PCs held the content and applications for information delivery, we are moving to a cloud-connected world. This will have a major impact on how we use products and location technologies.
Location has traditionally been associated with navigation, but is now becoming a fundamental contextual element for delivering relevant information from the cloud to people on the go. Regardless of where people are – indoors or outdoors, in their cars, or walking – more accurate and reliable location is essential to enhance the consumer experience with a broad range of applications. That fundamental shift – from auto navigation to location with you all the time – needs to work seamlessly from outdoors to indoors.
In launching SiRFstarV, our new location platform, we are fusing multiple technologies together to enable true indoor location. It supports signals from multiple satellites – not just GPS, but Russia’s Glonass, China’s Compass and Europe’s Galileo – and will also support multiple radio signals including Wi-Fi, cellular and other signals to make indoor location better. We are also taking data from various sensors such as gyros to augment location accuracy. This combination of satellite, radio and sensor signals will give consumers a better location experience.
We’ve also greatly improved power management: when you switch on your navigation/location, your battery is compromised significantly. To address that, we have employed very sophisticated power management – looking at location as a whole and managing power depending on needs of each individual application.
The second product we’re introducing today is SiRFprimaII, a complete, connected auto infotainment system platform. SiRFprimaII has more than location in it – it also provides complete visualisation capability to bring a next-generation experience. It’s like augmented reality: you can see not only maps but the buildings around it and other things beyond your visual range, which makes the navigation experience much better, and boosts safety because you have a better idea of your environment as you drive around.
Our goal is to bring this down to a few hundred dollars to ensure widespread consumer adoption.
CSR’s radio star, Will Gardiner, CFO, interviewed by Emma Howgego about CSR’s commitment to Social Responsibility
Gone are the days when chip makers just made chips. Today’s increasingly sophisticated consumer electronics products, like flat panel internet-connected 3D TVs and location-aware digital cameras, are now integrally linked to the exponentially growing digital entertainment ecosystem.
Continue reading “CSR Speaks on Two Panels at Digital Hollywood Conference” »
It is now three months and 29 days (73 working days) before I turn the pedals for the first time on the around the world cycle challenge and race. That’s not long away but the closer it gets the more I seem to need to do.
Last month saw the dynamo generated power supply sorted and fitted. I’m pleased to say that it works. Phil Smith at my sponsor CSR will now reduce the unit down in size before it will be permanently attached to the cycle frame. This will be used to power the Samsung Galaxy smart phone and Panasonic Lumix digital camera given to me by CSR as well as the GPS mapping and HD video camera.
Continue reading “Three Months and 29 Days until Stephen Phillips Hits the Pedals” »
