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Five promising Ulster students are part of three all-Ireland teams in the UK and Ireland final of a design scheme aimed at attracting more girls into engineering.
The Green Design Challenge 2004 hopes to attract girls aged 16 and 17 into engineering through the design and building of working wind turbines.
On Wednesday the teams from across Ireland will battle it out in London against the regional winners from Northern, Southern England & Wales, and Scotland at Imperial College.
The Ulster girls making the trip are Deirdre Murray from Dominican College, Belfast; Alison Edgar from Friends School, Lisburn; Catherine McGinnity from Mount Lourdes Grammar School, Enniskillen; Jill McMahon and Janine McKnight from Victoria College, Belfast; and Aileen Ryan from Our Lady and St Patrick's College, Belfast.
The budding young female engineers had to win through the Belfast heat of 60 entrants, split up into teams of four on the day, to win places in the final.
The grand prize is a week-long Earthwatch expedition to the Arctic Circle or Czech Republic involving research into climate change and the environmental issues.
The challenge was developed by the Imperial College London in partnership with Shell UK and Irish Shell in response to the low numbers of young women joining engineering undergraduate studies in the UK and
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The first Windows Mobile based Portable Media Centres are now available to preorder on Amazon.com, good news for Microsoft who have been waiting to get into the portable media market for some time now.
The first devices to be shipped will be the Creative Zen Portable Media Center and the Samsung Yepp YH-999. No release date is currently given on Amazon, just the statement that the items will be shipped when they arrive. Microsoft state that the Creative device will be available in late August and the Samsung in late September.
Not a great deal of competition for these devices exists in the marketplace at the moment. Archos are among the only manufacturers in the world to offer a portable media player, although none of their AV products is based on the Windows Mobile platform.
How popular the new devices will be is currently unknown for although the portable audio market is highly lucrative for manufacturers such as Apple, portable video is an entirely different offering, it not being something you can just plug into and listen to. Microsoft clearly think that the market exists and is just waiting to be tapped into, how keen the rest of the world will be is something we'll be keeping an eye on. We'll keep you posted.
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Electronic News sat down with Phil Bishop, CEO of Celoxica; Kathryn Kranen, CEO of Jasper Design Automation; Scott Sanders, CEO of Nova Softwares; and Gerhard Scherer, president of ProDesign, to discuss the economics of innovation in the design chain. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.
Electronic News: To what extent are the Big Three EDA players driving the design chain these days?
Sanders: Our industry has always been driven by emerging needs. Those needs are filled, somewhat opportunistically, by niche players or start-ups. The big guys rarely invest where there is no market.
Bishop: In some cases, the big guys absorb or purchase the smaller players to fill out their product lines.
Sanders: As the design process matures, holes open up in the big guys' product lines because they didn't build that.
Scherer: Smaller companies have to be profitable from the beginning. We cannot be thinking about something that might be there in two years. We have to get something to the customer on time to fill their needs. The big companies are watching at all times.
Electronic News: Then who's driving the innovation?
Kranen: I think it's the customer who drives it. That's why all of the innovation comes smaller companies. The big guys do not have the kind of customer intimacy that the smaller companies do.
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Designer Philippe Starck has teamed up with Microsoft to produce the firm's first designer mouse, modestly described as "an innovative marriage of performance and art".
The hardware represents the fruits of a collaboration established between Microsoft and Starck nearly two years ago.
Starck said that he provided the inspiration and overall product vision, and worked closely with Microsoft engineers and designers to ensure that the mouse was not only eye-catching but comfortable and easy to use.
The couture input device, dubbed Optical Mouse by S+ARCK, is joined by new special edition mice with original finishes: the Wireless Optical Mouse in Mood Ring and Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer in Cobalt Basin and Crimson Fire.
"People are doing such amazing things with their computers," said Starck in a statement. "However, too often the importance of the link between man and machine is underestimated."
"The PC and what we use it for is an extension of us. It defines us just as much as the clothes we wear or the music we listen to. With this in mind, I set out to design an artistic bridge that would help people connect with the technology they use every day."
The S+ARCK Optical Mouse features a hemisphere shape design and shimmering finish, with two buttons extending the length of the mouse separated by a distinct li
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Upstart Cellon has a business model that puts it at the heart of the handset value chain. What comes after cell phones?
Kitchen appliances turned Haier into a household name in China. Its refrigerators sold so well that in 2003 the Haier Group leveraged its newfound brand equity to move into mobile phones.
Today Haier-branded handsets are selling briskly on the mainland. But the company has no mobile-phone division. Its handsets are conceived and prototyped by Cellon International, an independent design house. Cellon contracts with Haier and sends the design, along with a negotiated bill of materials, to a contract manufacturer. Then Haier's sales, marketing and distribution turbines start churning.
Order the phones, slap on the brand name and pour them into the channels. It's not exactly that easy yet, but Cellon represents a giant step in that direction. Indeed, the company is positioned at the center of the global product value chain--both design and supply chains--and, as such, it is reshaping the way products are designed, made and sold.
Cellon is the largest design house in the handset business, but others are emulating the model, including Finland's Elektrobit Group plc, Korea's Bellwave Co. Ltd. and Israel's AlphaCell Wireless. And while design outsourcing has been used primarily for mass-producing cell p
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