IN the rain-soaked car park on a leafy West Country science campus, Phil
Stenton is collecting a treasure trove of old coins on a trip around the
Caribbean.
Stenton, a scientist of 22 years’ standing, is guided only by a hand-held
computer and the technology he has devised - a system that overlays a
virtual landscape on to a game player’s own surroundings.
It is cutting-edge stuff and part of a drive by Hewlett-Packard, the Silicon
Valley giant best known for its ink-jet printers, to achieve the next
technology breakthrough at its research laboratory just outside Bristol.
“Our work is not about bubbling test tubes hidden away from everyone. We want
to involve as many people as possible,” said Stenton.
His is just the sort of activity that Gordon Brown is desperate to keep in
Britain’s so-called knowledge economy. Mark Hurd, chief executive of HP, is
also a fan but has told his researchers to sharpen up their act.
The Bristol base, which houses 150 boffins - a quarter of the total workforce
of the research arm, HP Labs - was set up in 1985 alongside a
computer-peripherals facility that made disk drives. The manufacturing has
gone but the ideas factory remains, one of seven centres HP funds globally.
Now Hurd is slimming down the work from 150 small projects to no more than 30
larger ones. He wants more bang from the bucks he is spending - more
commercial hits from his annual £90m stipend.
If that budget sounds small for a business that had net earnings of £3.6
billion last year, that’s because it is. The other 95% of HP’s £1.8 billion
research pot goes on souping up existing products, such as the next
generation of printers and personal computers, of which it makes more than
anyone else.
Inside the research centre, Alice is whispering secrets into Bob’s ear. But
they are not canoo-dling workers. “Alice”, who is the size of a cigarette
packet, and “Bob”, who is as big as a large tub of margarine, are black
boxes at the forefront of an advanced cryptography programme, which is
searching for better ways to outwit credit-card and mail-order fraudsters.
Their “dialogue” consists of 30m photons (light particles) being transmitted
in 0.6 seconds from four sources on Alice, which could eventually be shrunk
and fitted into a mobile phone. They carry 21,000 “secrets”, or pieces of
computer code. That is enough to top up Bob, playing the part of a
hole-in-the-wall machine, with a list of 1,000 Pin codes. Instead of relying
on the same Pin every time, Alice and Bob store a matching list of codes
that are used only once and then erased, making fraud much harder.
In the future, consumers should be able to draw out cash or open the door of
their office by simply pressing a button on their mobile phone. Government
departments are already using HP’s “shared secrets” to encrypt information.
Right now, Alice and Bob cost £100,000 for the pair. The researchers’ job is
to drive down the price closer to £5 so the technology can be put into
phones and cashpoints and marketed to banks in about a year.
Things are looking up at HP. It has shaken off the boardroom spying scandal
that claimed the scalp of Patricia Dunn, the chairman, and sales have been
rising. They were up 14% last year to £51.6 billion, exceeding the sales of
archrival IBM two years running. Part of that has come from a shift from its
hardware roots into software and internet services, aided by a string of
dot-com acquisitions.
Now Hurd wants HP Labs to have more of a venture-capital approach, zeroing in
on commercial potential sooner.
John Manley, director of HP Labs at Bristol, believes his operation already
runs along such lines. “You don’t have successful start-ups unless there is
a vision behind what you are doing,” he said. “From that perspective, it is
not really that different.” Like any blue-chip boss, Hurd has a tightrope to
tread. Some projects might go on for 10 to 15 years, and right now they
might not look like moneyspinners. However, the technology giants are
paranoid they will miss a trick, just like Xerox, whose early work on
personal computers was commercialised to great effect by Apple.
Bristol plays home to five of HP’s 23 labs, second only to the 13 in Palo
Alto, California.
For the past eight years, Manley’s baby has been developing in one of them.
The latest buzz phrase, “cloud computing”, is the notion that eventually
computer users will go online to access everything from storage capacity to
applications, instead of saving their information locally on a hard drive.
Manley challenged 422 South, a local Bristol animator, to knit together online
the different strands of a film project - the models, colour textures and
lighting. HP’s “cloud” technology effectively tripled the computer
horsepower that 422 had at its disposal. The resulting short film, The
Painter, secured HP a role in the production of Dream-works’ Shrek 2 movie.
The level of detail the technology can provide can be seen in Madagascar,
another film from the same studio, in which Alex the lion had 50,000 moving
hairs in his mane.
The same “flexible” computing services that require huge but temporary amounts
of memory and capability are now being used in the City to predict what
would happen if a tranche of shares in a company were placed on the market.
This is all very impressive, but when does HP know to stop tinkering with new
ideas and start bringing in the customers?
“The most important thing is the business judgment of the people involved,”
said Manley. “This world [cloud computing] was going to happen. We just
couldn’t tell you which year, but it was always going to happen.”
Stenton, meanwhile, creates his virtual worlds using GPS tracking or sensors
embedded in trees, lamp posts or Beefeaters. His Mscapes technology has been
tested at the Tower of London. It was used to develop a game for children to
help imaginary prisoners escape, teaching them something about history as
well. Now Hampton Court is working on a similar project.
Stenton also used it to design another game in which people dodge snipers as
they walk down a street in Bristol.
Alistair Darling, the chancellor, cut the ribbon last month on Bristol’s
Pervasive Media Studio, through which HP hopes to go into partnership with
television producers and designers interested in developing the technology
further. The Mscapes software has already been down-loaded 10,000 times from
HP’s website.
“Nintendo’s Wii got people off the couch. We are trying to get people out of
the house,” said Stenton. And in the same way, HP wants its new technologies
to begin stretching their legs.
TECH CITY
BRISTOL has been associated with the BBC’s natural-history programming for
almost as long as Sir David Attenborough has been clambering through the
undergrowth. It still hosts Wildscreen, an annual wildlife film festival.
However, the city is fertile ground for a host of other technology and media
companies. Chief among these is Aardman Animations, home of the
Oscar-winning plasticine characters Wallace and Gromit, which signed a
three-picture deal with Sony last year.
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), a giant online reference tool founded by
local Colin Needham, is still run from the city, although it is now owned by
Amazon.
So it is no surprise that Bristol was singled out last month by culture
minister Andy Burnham as a hotspot for the creative industries. The city’s
media centre, Watershed, plays a key role.
“It is Bristol’s ambition to remain at the forefront of creative development,”
said Clare Reddington, director of the local investment agency iShed. She
reckons that some 6,000 people are members of local creative bodies.
