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Technology innovations@ Olympics
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 13 August 2008, 16:19 IST
Bangalore: As the whole world is looking at the extravaganza of Beijing Olympics, the IT companies are all set to take its advantage. Olympics is always considered as a global platform to showcase the products of different companies for the first time to the world. And Beijing Olympic is not an exception. Various IT firms are ready with their new products to catch the eyes of the global viewers.
India has something to boast about, as Huawei Technologies' R&D center in Bangalore is responsible for the new data management system to cater to higher data transfer load in the Olympics. The R&D Team in Bangalore has worked for three months to upgrade the new software. Veer Kamesh, AVP, Huawei Technologies said that data and voice traffic is expected to go up by three times during the games.
GE has also joined the bandwagon. General Electric Healthcare has introduced its compact ultrasound machine, the LOGIQ i which can produce detailed images of even the tiniest tears in the ligament. This device can benefit the players who get hurt in their ligament while playing. GE deployed an earlier version of the LOGIQ i at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin. "The Olympics are a huge marketing opportunity for GE," says Peter Foss, GE's Olympics sponsorship chief.
Different sports companies consider Olympics as a great platform to launch their products. In Beijing Games, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James will sport Nike's Hyperdunk basketball shoes, which feature a webbing of liquid-crystal fibers that are five times stronger than steel. Swimmer Michael Phelps is wearing a sleek pair of goggles from Speedo.
Companies of various kinds from architecture, technology to food production use this international platform to showcase their innovations. At the 1960 Squaw Valley Winter Olympics, the first to feature computerized scoring, IBM exhibited its mainframes behind a glass wall, hoping to impress business customers. Four years later, at the Winter Games in Innsbruck, Xerox showed off five of its newest photocopiers, which were used to run off copies of score sheets at the torrid pace of seven pages per minute.
Omega is the official timekeeper of Olympic since 1932. In 1964, for example, Omega unveiled a system for superimposing athletes' times on a TV screen. In Beijing, the company has introduced motion sensors (to spot false starts) and global positioning satellite systems (to track rowers). Omega says that showing off inventions from its R&D labs at the Games boosts its reputation for precision. "Timing a prestigious sporting event gives real credibility to our brand," says Stephen Urquhart, president of Omega Worldwide. French-Chinese tech company ASK-TongFang has developed radio-frequency-identification chips for the Games which would help to make tickets with tiny computer chips. These chips can include various information as well.
There are many new technologies which are introduced in the Beijing Olympics. The main stadium of Beijing games in the shape of a bird's nest by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron features an unorthodox steel structure. The National Aquatics Center, nicknamed the Water Cube, is clad in a shimmering blue plastic coating that looks like bubbles. It traps 90 percent of the solar energy that hits the structure to keep the building warm, so the facility uses less energy to heat its five pools. At the basketball stadium, an aluminum alloy skin reflects most of the sun's rays, so the gym's cooling system will use less than half the energy of a more conventional structure. Nestle has come up with a new, user-friendly package for an energy liquid that Nestle says can boost cyclists' speeds.
GE has built a 16,500-square-foot "Imagination Center" with displays of new products such as the ultrasound machine and a selection of the company's 400 other Olympics-related projects. These include rainwater-recycling at the National Stadium, wind turbines for powering the games, and a small, energy-efficient MRI machine at the Olympic Village hospital. GE said, "the Olympics are a commercial laboratory for us to prove how we can do a better job for customers."
