In October, the Blueprint Awards will again celebrate the best spin-outs emerging from the region's universities. John Hill looks at a few of the technological ideas rising from the five seats of learning.
A FEW years back, researchers in Sunderland came up with an idea that could help with a problem that plagues people who work with smartphones these days.
Although, when they first discovered it, that problem wasn’t really a huge issue yet.
It was 2007, and Adrian Gordon and Lynne Hall had just developed a service that could translate digital content on to a range of different devices. The service was named Device Independent Media Platform for Location Enhancement, or DIMPLE.
“Some of the things that come out of research are very interesting, but not necessarily useful at the time”, says Lynne Hall, the principal lecturer at Sunderland University’s Department of Computing, Engineering and Technology.
“Adrian developed it in 2007, but not many people had smartphones then. Now everyone’s got a phone with a screen.
“The problem at the moment with mobiles is that things won’t work on every device. If you write an iPhone app you also have to write an Android app. Every month bits of technology come out that have a different way of optimising what’s available.”
DIMPLE basically acts as a content management system. Various different files can be uploaded and stored in the cloud, and are sent out to requesting devices based on their specific quirks. For example, if it’s interacting with an iPhone, it sends videos in Quicktime format, but will send Flash files to a Nokia and mp4 files to Android.
Hall says: “DIMPLE is an aggregation of lots of different open-source components dealing with different sorts of filetypes, with some code included alongside it. What it does is recognise if the device is an iPad or an Android phone, and translates the content in a way that’s optimised for that device.”
The people behind DIMPLE make up one of the 29 teams shortlisted for the final of the Blueprint Awards, which aims to promote and celebrate the innovation that goes on at universities, while giving it a bit of an entrepreneurial spark. This year’s event has backing from venture capital firm Rivers Capital Partners, which has set aside £60,000 to invest in suitable winners and runners up.
Previous participants in the awards - which gathers the talent from the region’s five universities - include NETPark X-ray imaging firm Kromek, Durham Graphene Science and last year’s winner Charbrew. DIMPLE is listed in the Knowledge Transfer category this year.
Hall said: “This kind of thing works well in North East universities. We think clever thoughts at universities but we’re not very focused on making money.
“If you want to make the North East a place to which people are drawn, all the universities have to be creating intellectual property that companies find attractive. It’s also good for students that you do this because it lets them know there’s another route. You’ve got to see people doing it to know it can happen. And if you’re a middle-aged academic, it can quite hard to come round to the idea that you need to give something like this a lot of your time. A win here would be a stamp of potential, and allow us to be more gung-ho about it.”
The DIMPLE programme first came out of the lab recently for the INSTINCT TD3 programme, a government-led initiative looking at the use of augmented reality in security and counter terrorism. The team is currently trialling a variant of DIMPLE with the Ministry of Defence called DIMPLE for Incident Response Enhancement (or DIRE), which provides information in real-time to those responding to emergencies.
DIMPLE itself will initially be pitched at the arts and tourism sector, but Hall is interested to see if any other markets develop. Meanwhile, Gordon is giving up full-time university employment to focus on the project.
She says: “That sector seems keen to engage with the technology. But, honestly, we don’t really know for sure what the best sector will be. The technology is disruptive, so it’s hard to aim.
“Once Blueprint is finished, we’ve got a marketing campaign ready to kick off. We’re going to target content providers and after Christmas we’re really going to push the subscription model.
“Other than through things like this, I honestly don’t see any harmonisation of mobile devices coming soon. It might help app developers, but it would be of no benefit to people like Nokia or Apple. Apple says that if you haven’t got an iPhone, you haven’t got an iPhone, and that’s absolutely true. It does things that other devices can’t. This type of device sells itself on its functionality.
“It would be of no benefit to Apple if an app could be used on Android. It reduces the attractiveness of the device.”