way up to Mars
Soon it will be filled
with parking cars
I watch it for a little while
I love to watch things on TV
This week we heard about the Galileo Masters competition, which gives out prizes of €100,000 for technical concepts that exploit the greater positional accuracy (1m vs 5m with GPS today) and better reliability (the system warns when it is about to go down) for this new European satellite system. EADS Astrium, GRACE, and Scott & York cited examples of the kinds of safety of life (e.g. search & rescue), mass market (e.g. mobile location) and professional (e.g. oil & gas) applications, like the 2008 winner from Suffolk with their system for locating a crew member overboard.
The discussion among an audience including Analysys Mason, Harwell, Marshall, Shell, TTP, Ubisense, and the new UK Space Agency turned around risks and long-term defensibility. Big location brands have been built up from UK origins (e.g. Tom Tom, whose founding team included a CEO and CTO from Psion) or have now been acquired by Cambridge companies (e.g. SiRF, now part of CSR). As these applications become more central to consumers, you need scale to stay in the game, as illustrated by the recent suits and countersuits triggered by Apple declining to pay license fees in the Smartphone wars. Space is a market where the UK already has 6-9% global market share - it is good to see local companies participating in competitions like this and seeking their place in the next wave of applications.
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