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Q&A with Damson Audio
4 Feb 2013 | No Comments | posted by Gary Marshall | in Shortlist
Smart UK Project chats with Damson Audio about its US Navy-based diffusion technology that gives it wireless portable speakers 3D audio
What was the vision behind the company and who was involved in the founding?
James Talbot, Damson’s CEO’s and founder, used to travel the globe on business. In transit he would use headphones to listen to music. These provided really rich acoustics and heavy bass. When James arrived at his hotel he wanted to listen to music without headphones but every portable speaker he bought only delivered tinny or booming sound – not the rich sound provided by the headphones. So James set about creating a small portable speaker that would do the job. Damson was born.
Where did the idea of the innovation itself come from?
The original idea came about accidentally, as many of these things can. On a business trip to China James discovered a “talking table” that was being used to transmit messages to the people sat at the table. Fascinated by how the sound was being transmitted as there was no apparent speaker James embarked on a journey to discover what was happening.
James then spent the next few months researching sound diffusion and discovered a little known technology that had been created by the US Navy to transmit sound via their submarine hulls. James developed the technology and created Incisor diffusion technology – this married the US Navy tech with “teeth” that acted as the speaker’s driver. By adding the shaft and base, the technology “diffused” the sound on almost any surface it is placed upon – from a table top, to a cardboard box, to a packet of crisps, even cars sound great! The result is a perfectly balanced sound throughout the audio frequency range of 50hz to 16khz.
Not settling on just one innovation, Damson has now created two further speakers that both boast potentially disruptive technology within this market sector. The first, Oyster, produces perfect clarity from 60hz to18khz and can produce over 100db of sound, in addition it is the first portable 3D speaker – true room filling sound in a small stunning industrial design. Then there is wireless stereo: think of this as the old 1980’s style speakers in your living room with real left and right channel audio – but without the wires.
In your view, please describe the most important aspect(s) of your innovation?
Headphones and home audio kits have had it all haven’t they? So why should consumers have to settle for tinny poor quality reproduction after you’ve been listening to great music through your headphones? The most important aspect is the full range capability of the audio reproduction. No more shouty, tinny sounds from a palm sized speaker – it’s possible to enjoy your music or audio exactly as the original producer intended. With the wireless stereo we wanted to recreate stereo sound on the move, without the need for wires, perfect for those with smartphones or tablets. It’s truly a stunning innovation, two tiny speakers produce room filling sound when you’re travelling.
Who is your customer and why should/do they buy/use your innovation?
Our customer is pretty much anybody who likes/enjoys music but wants to appreciate music in the quality that the producer intended, yet they don’t want to have to carry around large bulky speakers. It designed for consumers who want to stream their music wirelessly from their smartphone or tablet.
What do you hope to achieve when attending Mobile World Congress 2013?
Damson doesn’t look like it’s a small bootstrap funded start up – that was intended – but it is. So MWC 2013 would give us the platform to demonstrate our products to a huge audience, it will allow us to network with key industry experts and hopefully develop strategies on how we can scale Damson quickly enough to bring these great products to market on a global scale. Perhaps a mobile operator would consider bundling our speakers (which have conference call features) with their mobile phones. Why should headphones get all the glory – after all, no one wants to listen to music through headphones all the time.
Q&A with Truphone
28 Jan 2013 | No Comments | posted by Gary Marshall | in Shortlist
Smart UK Project talks to Truphone about its global network that bridges the gap between GSM and Wi-Fi for seamless communication
What was the vision behind the company and who was involved in the founding?
Truphone’s founder, James Tagg lives on a farm. He was frustrated he could not get a mobile signal from any operator but he did have a Wi-Fi network. With a few friends he set about developing the first mass market VoIP application on mobile phone – the Nokia N95. The positive feedback from the millions who downloaded the app spurred the growing company to look at GSM technology so that they could provide a seamless experience.
To get the best possible customer experience Truphone decided to build itself a GSM core network that would enable people to stay connected to one service globally.
Where did the idea of the innovation itself come from?
The original idea for the innovation came from a chance meeting in a pub in Cambridge. The CTO of a leading Wi-Fi chip company was bemoaning the lack of applications software over a beer with James, our founder. James was simultaneously complaining about the lack of mobile coverage and at that point it became obvious that Wi-Fi could become the solution. James built an initial prototype and demonstrated it at the Voice on Net conference in Stockholm and started ‘Truphone’.
Truphone then needed to track down some of the world experts on VoIP and GSM to bridge the two technologies together. Early on Ed Guy, creator of Free World Dialup, joined the team and then a little later the Truphone Portugal team joined bringing a fully working GSM network into the stack.
In your view, please describe the most important aspect(s) of your innovation?
Seamless communication – this means that for those who suffer coverage issues or who worry about roaming rates there is no hesitation. All they have to do is press call and be connected with the best possible rates and quality.
Who is your customer and why should/do they buy/use your innovation?
Truphone sells to heavy mobile users who travel, make international calls or need to bridge GSM and VoIP. Our early adopters tend to do all three; for example, a bank present in London and New York and needs to integrate their service to a call recording service for regulatory reasons.
We do, however, have a lot of consumers who have found our service despite that fact we don’t currently advertise. Truphone+ adds to the benefits we offer our customers by allowing them to freely use Wi-Fi as the bearer. This helps by reduce the cost of calling internationally or when roaming by routing calls the most efficient way– be that over Wi-Fi or our GSM network.
Truphone+ removes coverage issues for those with weak signal at home or in the office and enables them to stay connected wherever they are. This is all done seamlessly, Truphone+ replaces the standard phone app meaning the user can make all calls as they would normally and forget about juggling between apps and SIMs to access the lowest rates or take advantage of their Wi-Fi coverage.
What do you hope to achieve when attending Mobile World Congress 2013?
Truphone has been quietly building for the last two years and we think we have something special to announce. There is nowhere we would rather unveil Truphone+ than at MWC, we know the audience will be as excited as we are.
Wood & Douglas – keeping floods at bay
28 Jan 2013 | No Comments | posted by Gary Marshall | in Shortlist
The Smart UK Project talks to Wood & Douglas about the creation of a complete remote monitoring, management and response platform for early warning of flood and environmental threats.
What was the vision behind the company and who was involved in the founding?
The company grew from Managing Director Alan Wood’s interest in radio hobbyists, creating self build kits that helped grow amateur radio beyond the technically gifted, to a wider audience and set the standard for quality and professionalism in the market.
In the early 90’s Wood & Douglas’ Scanlink range of products provided the utilities market with the first integrated wireless communications solution, instantly increasing reliability and, at the same time, reducing cost. Today, Wood & Douglas Ltd serves the wireless data, voice and video markets, both as an original manufacturer and end user supplier.
Where did the idea of the innovation itself come from?
The company’s experiences in providing environmental, industrial and utilities monitoring had shown that there was a demand for a scalable, flexible system that could be easily installed to respond to changing physical conditions that could affect property or life. The threat from annual flooding spurred the team to create a simple, easy to deploy, cost effective response to improve monitoring and management of waterways and flood defences.
Wood & Douglas decided to design a high standard rugged, flexible GSM communications module which, with telemetry and serial I/O, that could be used in a wide variety of demanding environmental applications requiring monitoring and control where no fixed local communications infrastructure is available.
Collating and sending data was only half the story. There remained a poor approach to extracting value from the collected data. Ultima2 GSM module and Remote-DNA was therefore conceived to provide a complete management and response platform for remote monitoring of tidal and river systems.
In your view, please describe the most important aspect(s) of your innovation?
Wood & Douglas Ultima2 and Remote-DNA provides a complete remote monitoring, management and response platform for environmental control.
Ultima2 is a robust GSM module for applications needing river monitoring and flood control. Wherever mobile network coverage is available, Ultima2 can monitor and communicate critical data. Operating for more than a year on a single battery pack, Ultima2 can be configured to issue regular updates or raise an alert via SMS to multiple numbers in emergency scenarios.
Remote Data Network Analysis (Remote-DNA) is a Cloud-based toolkit that collates and interprets the telemetry application data from Ultima2 for real-time insight. Monitoring data is collated from sites along the shore and along river systems, formatted and then displayed in tables or a graphical report. Easy to export, analyse and share, data can be used to improve decision making and allocation of resources for tidal tracking, reservoir management and flood control.
Who is your customer and why should they use your innovation?
With the global roll out of machine to machine (M2M) systems Ultima2 and Remote-DNA offers environmental protection agencies a ready made network for remote monitoring.
The rugged natures and ease of installation, tied with flexibility for adding a range of physical sensors makes Ultima2 the perfect module for deployment in any area with GSM coverage, no matter the extremes of environmental condition. This system is also extremely cost effective.
The rugged and instant nature of the system makes it perfect for large scale environmental monitoring and response. Of particular interest to the team is the application of the technology for the monitoring or wind, tide and water levels as a means of predicting and responding to threat of flood, which costs the UK alone £1bn a year in flood protection, and a further £1bn to £3bn in insurance payouts depending on annual severity.
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Testimonials
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At last year's Mobile World Congress UKTI provided Antix with a fantastic platform to display the value of our product and services, to promote to the media and business, and to improve our political access.
- Francis Charig, CEO, Antix Labs
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The UKTI pre-Mobile World Congress press event did an excellent job of introducing us to the media and press.
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Co-founder & President,
Novauris Technologies -
The UKTI pre-MWC media event was attended by the key UK tech journalists/bloggers. It gave us the opportunity to talk directly about our plans for MWC and helped ensure we got good press coverage around MWC. Without the event it would be much harder to get our message across given the number of big launches that take place at MWC.
- Jonathan Reynolds,
Founder, Swiftkey X
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