UP CLOSE & PERSONAL
We met with an impressive group of these partner and spinoff companies during our trip, including:
- DSP Valley, which is an IMEC spinoff networking organization that launched about 10 years ago in association with the University of Leuven and Philips. It now has 55 member organizations and 5,000 qualified experts in DSP design. It is a private organization that focuses on creative engineering in embedded systems for signal processing, including analog and mixed signal. DSP Valley is also part of ELAT, an international technology triangle for Eindhoven, Holland, Leuven Belgium, and Aachen Germany—a region that specializes in low-power applications. ELAT focuses on partnering between members to solve complex projects.
- ICity is somewhat of a living laboratory in the cities of Hasselt and Leuven for testing mobile Internet applications and exploring how mobile technologies will change people’s lifestyles. Local citizens sign up to be test-users and thereby get a free smart phone (and service) loaded with test applications, allowing for iterative product development. Developers can get feedback on functionality, look and feel, and can gather information from interviews with users. Test periods are broken into 13-week cycles of iterative testing. Currently there are 1,000 test users, but the program’s goal is to have 4,000 users this year, according to Guido van der Mulleen, director of the living lab. The communications network includes RFID, WiFi, WiMax, cellular transmissions for 3G (or higher) networks, and it typically switches between RF technologies to best enable a given application.
ICity, currently running on Windows Mobile platform, includes such domains as healthcare, mobility, tourism and culture, e-government, logistics, e-learning, food, and retail. Applications we saw included:
- I-MME, an interactive multimedia experience where NFC technology combined with WiFi allows information from artists about artwork to be available throughout the city;
- Promo Butler, which serves ads and special offers when a user is in proximity of a given business;
- and iPark which offers information on open parking places and allows drivers to reserve a space.
Other apps in development include a “friend finder” for physically locating other mobile users and a “photo up-loader” which ties into both a citizen journalist application as well as a local government complaint desk.
The Interdisciplinary Institute for Broad Band Technology (IBBT) is a strategic research and development institute founded by the Flemish government to promote information and communication technology. At IBBT we had a chance to meet some of Belgium’s up-and-coming companies including: kpiware.com, who is working on next generation Web-based tools for analysis and reporting of research data; Humantics who focuses on user-interface analysis for software, hardware, services, and prototyping; Mobixx, provides automatic translation of Web sites for hand-held and mobile viewing; Vodtec, who is offering online and mobile video solutions like WebVideo (for automated transcoding of video to allow upload from anywhere in any format); AdVideo, allowing personalized video advertising; and MobVideo, which optimizes video for mobile phones and devices; and Aventiv, maker of Noma Desk, which provides online collaborative workspace software.
In addition to these new companies, we also had a chance to meet some better-established Flemish corporations:
- Septentrio is an IMEC spinoff making high-end GPS and Galileo-receiver technology. The company focuses on design and manufacturing of complete GPS receiver boards. With a focus on precision and reliability, the company targets applications like aviation and commercial navigation, engineering, and UAVs. CEO Peter Grognard is a big supporter of extending the rollout of the European Galileo system. He sees GPS and Galileo systems as compatible and interoperable, and with the possibility of 30 visible satellites rather than 15, they’ll offer richer data, error correction, and more frequencies.
- Another company we met, Tele Atlas, is the Belgian company hogging most of the technology news these days. The digital-map data company is the foundation for many navigation and Internet mapping applications and has been the subject of a bidding war of late between Garmin and TomTom, with TomTom offering $4.3 billion.
Tele Atlas CEO and co-founder Alain De Taeye says the future will embed GPS into everything and offer more dynamic content based on the massive databases that are the foundation of the Tele Atlas maps. The database continues to expand daily, and currently has 4.59-billion images corresponding to 22.4-million km across 65 countries. The database includes 1.6-billion listings/addresses and more than 22-million points-of-interest, which can be added collaboratively by businesses and users via the Internet. In fact, data is updated daily, via consumer generated updates. Still the database is growing daily, expanding for Asian markets as well as for pedestrian applications, so it will include paths in parks as well as information on public transportation routes. So whoever buys Tele Atlas is certainly going to get plenty of data for their billions!
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