01/10/100 – alphr

A F R E S H T A K E O N T E C H N O L O G Y

P R E S E N T E D B Y

THE £6M STARTUPTHE 23-YEAR-OLD CEO WHO’S

RUNNING A £6M COMPANY

SPACE DOGSMEET THE CANINE HEROES OF

THE SOVIET SPACE PROGRAMME

VIRTUAL REALITYWHY VR WILL CHANGE THE

WAY YOU THINK ABOUT VIOLENCE

I N A S S O C I A T I O N W I T H

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Welcome

We created Alphr because the technology market has changed, particularly in business. Not that long ago, business-technology purchasing was driven solely by the IT department, whether it was hardware,

software or services. Today, things are very different. More and more technology

purchase decisions are driven by teams outside IT, from marketing and sales to HR and finance. Not only are they buying services, they’re influencing hardware purchases too.

This kind of audience has very different needs to IT departments. They tend to have broad interests, wanting to know about everything from the technology they use day to day, to social media, to the tech in their cars. Technology is woven through the fabric of their lives, and touches every part of business and home.

That’s why Alphr is a “hybrid” site, straddling the divide between business and consumer sites. This audience is passionate about tech everywhere – they don’t stop being interested in technology when they go home. They want the best tech, all the time. For these kinds of people, you need innovative approaches and to constantly try new things.

That’s why we decided to create this “issue zero” of 01/10/100. First, we wanted to make a physical thing that celebrated the ten years of IT Pro and one year of Alphr so far, something people could lean back and enjoy. Second, we wanted to highlight the fantastic, high-quality content both brands have created over their history. Sometimes, online content has a reputation for low quality – but we have built brands that buck that trend, and we wanted to show it.

And what better place to show it than in a physical product you can hold in your hand, and keep for as long as you like?

Alphr is all about the way that technology is changing our lives – in business, at home, in the car, and everywhere else. But great ideas and brilliant writing can hold their own in any medium. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them on paper, too.

IAN BETTERIDGE,EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, ALPHR.COM

TECHNOLOGY HAS CHANGED, AND ALPHR IS ALL ABOUT THOSE CHANGES

EMAIL [email protected]

TWITTER @IANBETTERIDGE

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Contents8

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26

TREND SPOTTERTHE 23-YEAR-OLD CEO WHO’S

RUNNING A £6M COMPANY

APPLE 27IN iMAC W I T H R E T I N A 5 K D I S P L AY

MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF PIXELS

SPEED DEMONHOW MERCEDES MADE

F1’S BEST HYBRID ENGINE

AHEAD OF THE PACKTHE 5 WOMEN SET TO

SHAKE UP TECH IN 2016

VIRTUAL REALIT YWILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU

THINK ABOUT VIOLENCE

DOGS IN SPACEMEET THE CANINE HEROES OF THE

SOVIET SPACE PROGRAMME

DENNIS TECH

MEDIA INFORMATION 2016

TELETEXT SALVAGERSHOW VHS IS BRINGING TELETEXT

BACK FROM THE DEAD

FOOTBALL SCOUTSUSING BIG DATA TO DISCOVER

THE NEXT LIONEL MESSI


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EDITORIAL DIRECTORIAN BETTERIDGE [email protected]

EDITORDAVID COURT [email protected]

MANAGING EDITORMONICA HORRIDGE [email protected]

REVIEWS EDITORJONATHAN BRAY [email protected]

LIFE & CULTURE EDITORSASHA MULLER [email protected]

SCIENCE EDITORALAN MARTIN [email protected]

SENIOR STAFF WRITERVAUGHN HIGHFIELD [email protected]

STAFF WRITERSTHOMAS MCMULLAN [email protected]

CURTIS MOLDRICH [email protected]

01/10/100 DESIGNBILL BAGNALL BILLBAGNALLDESIGN.COM

01/10/100 SUB-EDITINGSTEVE HAINES

STRATEGIC AD DIRECTORJULIE PRICE [email protected]

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, DIGITALHANNAH DICKINSON [email protected]

HEAD OF DIGITAL, DENNIS TECHNOLOGYPAUL HOOD [email protected]

CHIEF EXECUTIVE, DENNIS PUBLISHINGJAMES TYE

CONTACT USALPHR, 30 CLEVELAND STREET, LONDON W1T 4JD

+44 (0)20 7907 6000TWITTER: @ALPHR

Credits

COPYRIGHT© DENNIS PUBLISHING LIMITED. ALPHR IS A TRADEMARK OF FELIX DENNIS. THIS PUBLICATION MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED OR

TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHERS.


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Before you launch a brand, what you’re selling to advertisers is a dream. You have mock-ups, editorial guidelines, a roster of the names that you’re going to work with. You might have a

manifesto, a statement of what you stand for. You have an outline of what you are going to cover and how you’re going to approach it. But until the moment that the developers press the big red switch which launches the site, you’re still basically selling a dream.

That’s why the partners that you launch with always have something of a special place in your heart. They backed you when all you had were presentations, when what you were selling wasn’t yet a dedicated audience but an aspiration. As a commercial partner, it takes bravery and commitment to back a new site launch.

With that in mind, we’d like to thank the companies that backed Alphr.com at the very beginning. We believed from the start that technology had changed, and what people wanted from a technology site had changed too. These companies thought along similar lines, and we’re grateful to them for sharing our vision. Thank you all.

Thank you

HP l IBM l John Lewis l Panasonic l Optum Bullguard l Cisco l Mercedes l Audi l Hiscox

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According to research by Deloitte, fewer than 25% of jobs in IT are held by women, and this gender imbalance is costing the industry $4 billion per year. But there are women out there finding ways

to attract the next generation of women to IT, leading startups, winning investment and pushing tech innovations. We’d like to introduce you to five of them.

1 The prodigy turned educator: Anne-Marie ImafidonAnne-Marie Imafidon was ten years old when she

passed her maths and ICT GCSEs. At 11, she became the youngest girl to get a computing A-level. At university, she was one of three girls in a class of 70. When she moved to a role in the City, the same low numbers of women in IT applied.

To help change this, she launched Stemettes to put girls from five to 21 in contact with women working in tech, to give them access to workshops and hackathons, and to do all sorts of things to keep their interests in the subjects alive.

Why Anne-Marie Imafidon is one to watch in 2016Imafidon’s Stemette graduates will soon have access to OtotheB, an app to keep them networked and informed of future events. “I think you’ll see more companies starting grassroots initiatives to get more women into tech fields, and you’ll see more female tech founders hitting the

mainstream in the non-tech press – publications such as Stylist and Glamour are already cottoning on,” she adds.

2 The gamer for good: Jude Ower MBE“In 2010, Zynga, founders of Farmville, turned an

in-game purchase into a fundraiser for the Haiti Earthquake Appeal and raised $1.5 million in five days,” explains Jude Ower, founder of Playmob, a platform that connects games to social causes. “The fundraiser saw Zynga engage with

their player base on a whole new level, converting non-spenders and increasing play time and lifetime

value. I saw this as a massive opportunity to create a platform that was a win-win.”

Why Jude Ower is one to watch in 2016Delivering social good, as well as a service, is fast

becoming a must-have rather than a nice-to-have, not just for companies but for games. Playmob is working to meet that need: “We’re working strategically with games studios, as they view charity work as not separate to the business but integral to engage with millennial audiences,” Ower says.

3 The designer of wearable tech: Anouk WipprechtWhen Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas needed a pair

of knockout shoes for her performance at the Super Bowl, she asked fashion-tech designer Anouk Wipprecht for help.

Ahead of the pack

THE 5 WOMEN SET TO SHAKE UP TECH IN 2016

Innovative, entrepreneurial and damn good at what they do, these five female techies are making waves in all things STEM

BUSINESS

By Alison Warner

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BUSINESS


Her fibre-optic high-heeled boots not only caused a stir, they put Wipprecht’s designs firmly on the fashion map. “I started combining microcontrollers with fashion design and textiles in 2006. As technology grew closer to the body, I saw this could open up possibilities of electronic fashion,” she says.

Why Anouk Wipprecht is one to watch in 2016Wipprecht is experimenting with a couple of partners to get a first generation of designs to market. “From a fashion-tech perspective, there will be cool new sensors added [in] the second half of 2016 that will change the way we measure wireless biosignals. And getting more of our grip on our emotional data will advance wearable electronics,” she adds.

4 The campaigner and academic: Dr Sue Black OBE“When I was eight years old, I spent my pocket money

on maths puzzle books,” says Dr Sue Black. But the path to her honorary professorship in computer science at UCL wasn’t as linear as you’d expect. She dropped out of school at 16, and headed to university at the age of 26. By then, she was a single mum with three kids. “I loved my degree, but it took me a while – it wasn’t always easy getting to lectures when they were the same time as the school run,” she says.

Black turned this experience into a positive, setting up the first online network for women in computing, BCSWomen, and rallying 1,000 academics to get finance for Bletchley Park.

Why Sue Black is one to watch in 2016Alongside the launch of her book Saving Bletchley Park in March, Black will take up the post of director at the Centre for Women in Technology at the Lucy Cavendish College, which will open its doors later this year. The Centre is currently looking for sponsors, and there’s little doubt she’ll get them.

5 The entrepreneur and engineer: Samantha PayneSamantha Payne used to write about tech startups. Now,

alongside robotics engineer Joel Gibbard, she’s the co-founder of a startup that has James Dyson as one of its biggest fans. Payne and Gibbard’s company, Open Bionics, uses 3D printers to create affordable, bionic prosthetic hands for amputees.

“We wanted to make hands that didn’t cost the same price as a supercar,” says Payne. But it’s not just functionality that’s important. Open Bionics also wants the tech to be “packaged in a unique aesthetic that amputees want to show off”.

Why Samantha Payne is one to watch in 2016“We’re aiming to sell our first bionic hand at the end of this year, so there’s a lot to get done,” says Payne, “and we’re thinking about starting our first round of crowdfunding. We’re also releasing our latest open-source robotic hand for the maker community. We’ve named it ‘Ada’, to celebrate Ada Lovelace’s contribution to programming. We’re hoping makers will enjoy it,” she says.

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£6 million

HOW MUCH SOCIAL CHAIN IS PROJECTED TO MAKE

IN 2016

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Social Chain is Europe’s largest influencer marketing agency, with access to hundreds of Twitter accounts – so many, in

fact, that it’s difficult to say exactly how many. It controls between 200 and 300, and can post from many more, including celebrities, YouTubers – anyone who falls under that vague category of “influencer”.

How effective is this kind of marketing? According to the company’s 23-year-old founder, Steve Bartlett, it can make a hashtag top of the trends within 30 minutes.

The story of Social Chain is an interesting one. Bartlett dropped out of a business-management course to create Wallpark, a social platform for students. With no initial investment, Bartlett did everything from sleeping rough in London after buying a one- way ticket to attend a meeting through to working in cafés to use the Wi-Fi.

Eventually, he left to do consultancy work for various clients on social media, and it was while doing this that Bartlett conceived of Social Chain.

“We were working with Unii to set up a social platform for students,”

says Bartlett, “and they needed help with social promotion

and influencer engagement. Creating Social Chain seemed like a good idea.”

Initially raising £300,000 in seed funding, the company

is now up to £1 million, with around £6 million in projected

revenue this year. This year will also see the first hires outside the UK as it expands to Berlin, with the aim to become much, much bigger.

Bartlett claims the company is as much a media owner as an agency – and a big one at that. Owning hundreds of accounts gives the company a channel, which allows it scope to come up with big ideas and execute them effectively.

Despite being only 23, Bartlett is a wellspring of good advice for startups. He describes the core principles of his approach to his fast-growing team: “Be nice to people. If you start from there, you’ll end up with a loyal team.”

For those starting their own company, the advice is equally straightforward. “Talk to people as soon as possible to get validation for your idea. Those people shouldn’t be the ones you know will be supportive – so not your mum or your friends. Talk to people in the industry, and listen to their feedback,” he says.

“As an entrepreneur, you need to be a bit delusional. You need to have your idea, really believe in it, and be able to sell it to other people. But you need to understand that you’re delusional, seek out feedback, and take it on board.

“And once you have some validation, don’t go in half-hearted. Being 50% committed is not enough – you need to put everything into your idea and your business if it’s going to succeed.”

Trend spotter

THE 23-YEAR-OLD CEO WHO’S RUNNING A £6M COMPANY

Steve Bartlett is 23, on his second startup and has huge plans. Oh, and his company can make anything trend on Twitter in 30 minutes

BUSINESS

By Ian Betteridge

12 01 I 10 I100

Dogs have been man’s best friend for tens of thousands of years, since their superior tracking

abilities made them invaluable to early hunter-gatherers.

The apex of the bond of friendship between the two species may have come in 1957, when a three-year-old mongrel was picked up on the streets of Moscow. She weighed about six kilograms and was thought to be part-husky and part-terrier. She was given various nicknames, including Kudryavka (“Little Curly”).

Having survived several harsh Russian winters, Laika was the perfect candidate for an experimental programme being run by the Soviet government. A medical scientist working for the space programme, Vladimir Yazdovsky, had launched a number of dogs to altitudes of more than 450km in pressurised rockets, and Laika was chosen to take part.

The dogs were thoroughly trained before their journeys. This included standing still for long periods, wearing spacesuits, being confined to increasingly small boxes for 15 to 20 days at a time, riding in centrifuges to simulate the high acceleration of launch, and being placed in machines that simulated the vibrations and loud noises of a rocket.

The first pair of dogs to travel to space were Dezik and Tsygan (“Gypsy”), who made it to 110km on 22 July 1951 and were recovered, unharmed, the next day. Dezik returned to space in September 1951 with a dog named Lisa, but neither survived. After Dezik’s death, Tsygan was adopted by Anatoli Blagonravov, a doctor who later worked closely with the US at the height of the cold war to promote international co-operation on spaceflight.

They were followed by Smelaya (“Brave”), who defied her name by running away the day before her launch was scheduled. She was found

the next morning, however, and made a successful flight with

Malyshka (“Babe”). Another runaway was Bolik, who successfully escaped a few days before her flight in

September 1951. Her replacement – ignominiously

named ZIB , an acronym for “substitute for missing bolik” – was a street dog found running around the barracks where the tests were being conducted. Despite not being trained, he made a successful flight and returned to Earth unharmed.

In 1957, Soviet scientists were ready to attempt something rather more audacious – an orbital flight. Sputnik was launched on 4 October 1957 in a storm of publicity, sparking a crisis of sorts in the US. This triggered

By Duncan Geere

MEET THE CANINE

HEROES OF THE SOVIET

SPACE PROGRAMME

While the US sent monkeys into the cosmos, the Soviet

Union used dogs. This is what happened to them

SCIENCE


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the space race, and led not only to the creation of NASA, the Apollo programme and the moon landings, but also a vast increase in the funding of science.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in full thaw, decided to increase the pressure on the US, so Sputnik was followed only a month later by Sputnik 2 – a mission to put a living creature into orbit. The Soviets didn’t have time to build the technology to bring the craft back, so it was known from the start that whichever animal was chosen would perish in space.

A longlist of ten canine cosmonauts was drawn up, which was then reduced to a shortlist of three. They were Albina , who’d already ejected from 85km; a dog named Mushka (“Little Fly”); and the aforementioned Kudryavka, who had impressed her trainers with her calm, quiet demeanour in the face of simulated stresses.

This even temperament won her the honour of becoming the first animal in orbit, and she was renamed Laika (“Barker”). In the days before launch, she was kept in the module she would fly in , which was padded, had enough room for her to stand up and lie down, and gave her access to a specially designed nutritious jelly that was high in fibre.

ON 3 NOVEMBER 1957, Laika blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and became the first creature to orbit the Earth. The launch went smoothly, and her capsule entered an elliptical orbit, circling the planet at 29,000km/h and completing a full rotation every hour and 42 minutes.

While Laika certainly made it into space alive, it’s not clear how long she lived after that. It was

originally announced that she had been euthanised with poisoned food several days into the mission, but this story was subsequently changed. Apparently, she had died when her oxygen supply ran out on the sixth day of her journey.

However, in October 2008, it was revealed that Laika had most likely perished a few hours after launch due to overheating and stress caused by the failure of a rocket component to separate from the capsule.

Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who worked on the mission, said in 1998 that he regretted sending Laika to her death. “Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak,” he said. “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it… We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”

Nonetheless, the mission was another great success for the Soviets,

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and the space programme continued. One of the most travelled dogs was Otvazhnaya (“Brave One”), who accompanied a dog named Snezhinka (“Snowflake”) into sub-orbital space on 2 July 1959 before making five more successful flights that year.

On 28 July 1960, Bars (“Snow Leopard”) and Lisichka (“Little Fox”) were chosen to follow Laika into orbit, but both perished after their rocket exploded just 28 seconds into the launch sequence. This crash caused considerable uproar within the Soviet space programme, since the problem that had caused the explosion had supposedly been fixed.

Belka (“Squirrel”) and Strelka (“Arrow”) were the next successful orbiters, spending a day in space on 19 August 1960 aboard Sputnik 5, which was a veritable Noah’s ark of animals. The craft contained Belka, Strelka, a grey rabbit, 42 mice, two rats, flies, and several plants and fungi, as well as some slightly creepy strips of human flesh.

All the animals survived the spacecraft’s return to Earth on 20 August, although telemetry showed that one of the dogs had suffered a seizure during the fourth orbit. This led directly to the decision to limit Yuri Gagarin’s legendary flight the following year to three orbits.

On 1 December 1960, tragedy struck. Mushka – who had been shortlisted for Laika’s mission but lost out – finally made it into space aboard Sputnik 6, accompanied by Pchyolka (“Little Bee”) and other animals, plants and insects. They were in good health when the rocket began its re-entry, but a last-minute navigation error meant that the craft was heading to land outside Soviet borders. Fear of foreign agents inspecting the capsule trumped the lives of the animals aboard the spacecraft,

so it was intentionally destroyed, killing everything onboard.

On 22 December 1960, the team tried once more. Damka (“Queen of Checkers”) and Krasavka (“Little Beauty”) were selected from the pool and prepared for launch.

Almost immediately after take-off, however, the rocket encountered difficulties. The upper-stage booster failed, causing the craft to re-enter the atmosphere after reaching a maximum altitude of 214km. The backup plan in this situation was to eject the dogs and self-destruct. However, the ejector seat failed to operate, leaving the dogs stuck in the capsule as the self-destruct sequence ticked down.

Then something incredible happened. The self-destruct module also shorted out , aborting the sequence. The capsule plummeted back to Earth,

SPACE DOGS VETEROK AND UGOLJOK

“The craft contained Belka, Strelka, a grey rabbit, 42 mice, two rats, flies, and several plants and fungi, as well as some slightly creepy strips of human flesh”

22 days

THE LONGEST SPACE FLIGHT BY A DOG (VETOREK AND

UGOLYOK, 1966)


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S P A C E D O G S

landing in deep snow in Siberia. A backup self-destruct timer had been set for 60 hours, so a team scrambled to locate the craft. Once found, as they opened the hatch, they heard barking – Damka and Krasavka were alive. The mice that had accompanied them on the mission were not so fortunate, though – they had frozen to death.

Both dogs survived, and Krasavka went on to have a litter of puppies and live a contented life, dying at home 14 years later.

As the Soviet spaceflight programme ramped up towards its first human launch in 1961, the dogs began to be accompanied by dummy cosmonauts. Chernushka (“Blackie”) flew on Sputnik 9 on 9 March 1961 with a dummy named Ivan Ivanovich, some mice and a guinea pig. To test the spacecraft communications, they

placed a recording of a choir in Ivanovich’s chest, so that any radio stations picking up the signal would understand he wasn’t real. He was ejected at altitude and parachuted to the ground, while Chernushka was recovered unharmed from the capsule.

FOLLOWING GAGARIN’S triumphant mission on 12 April 1961, the Soviets slowly dismantled their now-redundant dogs-in-space programme. Its final flight, the Cosmos 110 mission, came five years later, on 22 February 1966. It carried two dogs – Veterok (“Light Breeze”) and Ugolyok (“Coal”), who spent a record-breaking 22 days in orbit, testing whether life could survive for longer durations in orbit. As well as

Veterok and Ugolyok, it carried yeast cells, blood cells and live bacteria.

Without their contributions, the Soviet Union would never have been able to launch Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin in 1961, and the space race may never have taken off. Their heroism and bravery fuelled the earliest space- exploration missions, paving the way for humans to later follow.

So, to Dezik and Tsygan, Smelaya, Malyshka, ZIB, Ryzhik, Albina and Tsyganka, Mushka, Otvazhnaya, and Snezhunka, Bars and Lisichka, Belka and Strelka, Pushok, Pchyolka, Damka and Krasavka, Chernushka, Zvyozdochka, Veterok and Ugolyok, Dymka, Modnitsa, Kozyavka and, most of all, Laika – thank you for everything you’ve done for mankind.

Хорошая собака – or, as we say in the West, good dog.

ABOVE: LAIKA ON A ROMANIAN POSTAGE STAMP LEFT: SPUTNIK 3 IN THE TSIOLKOVSKY STATE MUSEUM


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10,000 20W lightbulbs

COULD BE LIT BY THE ENERGY STORED IN A MERCEDES

F1 CAR’S BATTERY


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In 2015 Mercedes dominated Formula 1, winning 16 out of 19 races, with its drivers Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg finishing the season in first and second

place. But how did it do this? Part of the answer lies with its world-class drivers and sophisticated chassis, but the hybrid engine powering it is also a big contributor to the team’s success.

Designed in response to changes in engine rules, the Mercedes Hybrid PU106 is the fruit of a concentrated period of research, development and learning. Powered by a synergy of turbo, electric motor and internal combustion technology, it’s the most complex, efficient and powerful engine Mercedes has ever made.

To discover more about the engine, I sat down with Andy Cowell, the managing director of Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, and the mastermind behind the best engine in F1.

Brixworth is just a short drive from Milton Keynes, in an area known as Motorsport Valley. It’s also the home of Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains.

It’s here in the UK – not Germany – that Mercedes first began working on the most advanced power unit it’s ever developed.

In 2014, F1’s governing body, the FIA, decided to make the sport more eco-friendly

by adding two basic but extremely effective rules: engines could use no more than

100kg of fuel for a race distance, and they weren’t allowed to consume fuel at more than 100kg an hour. “The competitive challenge is how do you [extract] the most energy

out of that fuel quantity and propel the car along,” adds Cowell. F1 had

become an efficiency race.

THE BIGGEST CHANGE came with the size of the engine: 2.4-litre V8s were out, and smaller 1.6-litre V6 litre units were in. To compensate for the reduction in engine capacity, the FIA gave engine manufacturers access to a new box of tricks.

“Technologies that were previously not permissible were permitted; so direct injection, a turbocompressor assembly [and]

SP E E D DEMON

HOW MERCEDES MADE F1’S BEST HYBRID ENGINE

We spoke to Andy Cowell, managing director of Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, to find out more

CARS

By Curtis Moldrich


18 01 I 10 I100

a larger hybrid system [were allowed],” explains Cowell. Engines now had 120kW of electric boost on tap – twice the power of the old kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) first seen in 2009 – and they could also use an electric machine to recover waste heat energy and boost the turbo.

While this presented a new set of challenges for F1’s engineers, it also meant that, for the first time in years, F1’s goals were aligned with the wider automotive industry. To produce the best engine, teams would have to push for efficiency – exactly what we want from our road cars.

Mercedes was able to claw back a lot of horsepower thanks to the addition of a turbocharger. An effective way to boost power and efficiency, turbos work by capturing waste exhaust gases and using them to turn a compressor attached to the engine. The result? More air is forced into the engine, increasing power and efficiency.

Mercedes had no experience with a turbo – after all, the last time they were used in F1 pre-dated the team – so they relied on knowledge from elsewhere in the Daimler company. Mercedes uses turbos in its road cars, but it was Daimler’s truck division that proved most useful to Cowell and his team: the huge amounts of power involved in the F1 engine meant they were a better fit.

But Mercedes still had a problem – the problem of “turbo lag”, where it takes time for the turbo to kick in and

add extra power. While turbo lag might be fine for road cars, it poses a potentially catastrophic problem for a race car. Drivers rely on smooth, controlled power to get the most out of a car, and turbo lag would reduce both driver confidence and overall lap time.

The solution was an electric motor that could spin up the turbo early, before the exhaust gas arrived. “As you press the accelerator pedal, the electric machine with its instant response and its low speed torque capability can spin the compressor up and feed the engine with air before the exhaust system is energised with exhaust gas,” explains

Cowell. And to save space, Mercedes split the turbine and compressor, and integrated the motor generator unit in the middle of the two assemblies.

Although the 1.6L V6 and turbo are more sophisticated than anything you’d see on the road, it’s the Energy Recovery System (ERS) that’s the killer app of F1’s new engines. Mercedes is developing technology directly related to today’s plug-in hybrid vehicles.

The ERS can be broken down into several parts – power, storage and recovery – which work as one to get the maximum energy available.

The engine’s batteries are stowed low in the car for handling reasons, and can store around a massive four megajoules of energy – enough to light 10,000 20W lightbulbs. This power is fed to a 120kW motor connected to the car’s rear axle, and that system alone is worth a staggering 160hp – around the same as a family car. When slowing down, the 120kW motor acts like a dynamo, putting unused energy back into the car’s batteries. The electric motor used to prevent turbo lag can recover energy too, creating an efficient compounding loop.

Each component of the engine is heavily optimised, but it takes sophisticated software to get it all working together. “That’s the glue at the end of it all, to make sure the amazing individual bits of technology sing well together,” explains

Cowell. “It’s a bit like the bandmaster bringing it all together so that it’s a beautiful harmonious sound.”

Cars have to take on two very different tasks in Formula 1, and it’s up to the software to manage the engine in both scenarios.

Qualifying demands pure speed, so cars carry little fuel, and engines are able to use all four megajoules of battery power in one lap. To optimise lap times, teams use sophisticated software to work out the best places to unleash the car’s full potential. “On shorter straights, we won’t use

“If it’s going to make the car quicker, chase it, and if it doesn’t, don’t”


M E R C E D E S F 1 M E R C E D E S F 1

M E R C E D E S F 1

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M E R C E D E S F 1

the K [the electric motor connected to the rear wheels] on its full power level, or use it for the whole length of the straight – to make sure there’s enough energy left for a longer, more significant straight,” explains Cowell.

“On race day, cars have to balance endurance and speed, and the software has to account for a countless chain of unpredictable events in each race. Over half of the season’s races require energy saving, so it’s up to the software to decide when to conserve electricity. The driver still has ultimate control of the car, but it’s the software’s job to make sure they have maximum power at their disposal at any given time.”

“Sometimes you get caught in traffic; other times you get free air; sometimes there’s a safety car; sometimes the tyres degrade; sometimes you’ve got softer tyres on and you’ve got more grip, more full-throttle time. You need the

software to be able to optimise around that and make sure that the energy deployed is done intelligently.”

IN 2015 MERCEDES somehow eclipsed the success of its 2014 season, citing increased reliability as the reason for another year of dominance. But there were warnings over what 2016 might hold. Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari was faster than ever, and with the Italian marque developing its engine even more aggressively, Cowell knows it will be even harder to stay on top in 2016.

“Everybody is motivated, working hard and determined to beat Ferrari,” he says. “But Honda’s improvement has been tremendous. Look at the analysis of what they’ve done in terms of performance improvement, very strong. And Renault as well, they can pull it all back together and improve as well.”

But Mercedes aren’t chasing their rivals. Leading from the front after two epic years, and with minimal rule changes for 2016, Mercedes is chasing efficiency – and that’s where Cowell sees even more benefits for road cars.

“That’s exactly what the road car world’s doing,” he adds. “We’re there chasing all those little technologies, tweaks and bits of optimisation.

“There’s approximately 1,240W maximum potential in the fuel flow rate, so if we got 100% thermal efficiency we’d be breaking some of the laws of thermodynamics, but theoretically that’s the maximum you could get out of that fuel energy,” Cowell explains.

“We’re some way from this goal, but the fact that everybody in this building focuses on that means we are chasing every single energy conversion stage and trying to get it close as possible to 100%. Every time energy is flowing, whether it’s electricity along a cable or through a connector or a terminal, we’re focusing on that being as efficient as possible.”

The result? Last year’s engine produced around 45% efficiency, and this year’s is already up to 47% – it’s now hitting over 900hp.

In 2016, Mercedes’ quest for continued dominance will draw it ever closer to the goals of mainstream automotive energy. Efficiency is power, and the more car-makers such as Mercedes push for victory, the more they advance our understanding of low-emission, super-efficient power-trains. According to Cowell, technology from the 2014 hybrid engine will be in cars “in the next two or three years”, and there’s much more to come.

RIGHT: ANDY COWELL, THE MASTERMIND BEHIND THE BEST ENGINE IN F1 FAR RIGHT: THE TECHNOLOGY USED IN F1 CARS WILL BENEFIT ROAD CARS IN THE FUTUREBELOW: SOPHISTICATED SOFTWARE HELPS POWER THE CARS DURING A RACE


22 01 I 10 I100

Sit down with a game controller and violence happens automatically, absent-mindedly, mathematically. Killing mushrooms, aliens, orcs and soldiers has less to do with murder and more to do with gameplay.

Even calling it murder sounds ridiculous – something a slapstick vicar might say, monocle popping at the sight of Mortal Kombat.

Virtual reality, with the sense of presence it provides, has the potential to completely change all of this; bringing potency and upending the fundamental incongruence between button mashing and the basic physicality of violent acts.

“In a normal game, there’s an enormous amount of dissonance between what’s happening onscreen and what you’re experiencing,” says George Kelion, communications manager for VR studio nDreams. “You’re not really in the experience, you’re witnessing the experience – it’s secondhand almost. I think violence is entertaining when you can highlight that disconnect.”

“The idea of putting a bullet in the back of somebody’s head in VR [is] far less entertaining and induces much more of an emotional reaction,” he adds.

nDreams is currently working on The Assembly, a virtual-reality game that tells the story of a

secret organisation experimenting outside of governmental or moral restrictions. Kelion walks me through a demo scene where you see a scientist at a banquet table. You enter. The lights go out. When the lights return, the

scientist – you later discover it’s a mannequin – has two knives sticking out of his back.

Kelion impresses on me that The Assembly is not a violent game, but that scene is nevertheless shocking. What would be little more than a minor set-piece decoration in a “flat-screen” game becomes an affecting crescendo in VR. Immersed in the scene, the dissonance between what you’re seeing onscreen and what you’re experiencing is reduced. You have a physical reaction.

LIFE & CULTURE

VIRTUAL REALITY WILL CHANGE THE WAY

YOU THINK ABOUT

The sense of presence that VR provides has the potential to fundamentally change the relationship

games have with violence

By Thomas McMullan


01 I 10 I100 23

The Stanley Milgram obedience experiment, originally carried out in the 1960s, examined the conditions in which a subject could be encouraged by an authority figure to harm another human being. In its most famous configuration, the subject would be under the impression they were testing a “learner’s” ability to memorise and recite word pairs. If the learner – hidden behind a screen – got the answer wrong, the subject would be told to administer an electric shock.

The voltage would be increased with each wrong answer. As the shocks became more powerful, the learner would complain and eventually urge the subject to stop. An “experimenter”, seemingly in charge of the proceedings, would tell the subject to continue. In reality, there were no shocks and the learner was an actor. Rather than memory, the experiment was set up to test whether people would perform acts that went against their conscience, when ordered to do so by an authority figure. It turned out that a very high proportion of people were prepared to obey.

In 2006, researchers from UCL and the University of Barcelona replicated the Milgram experiment within a virtual-reality environment. The purpose of this version was, as the researchers explain, “to use the paradigm to explore the extent to which people would exhibit signs of realistic response, in particular stress at giving the shocks to a virtual character”.

THE EXPERIMENT WAS conducted in a CAVE-like system – essentially a room with projections on three walls and the floor – with the use of 3D glasses and head-tracking. Importantly, the subjects were to feel immersed in the scene. Unlike the original experiment, the subjects were split into two groups: the “visible” group, who sat face to face with a virtual “learner”, and a “hidden” group, who largely interacted with the virtual “learner” via text. Analysing the skin conductance, heart rate and


24 01 I 10 I100

V R A N D V I O L E N C E

heart-rate variability of the subjects, the researchers observed that “the results showed that those in the visible group became more physically aroused and with greater stress than those in the hidden group”.

While the researchers avoid making premature conclusions based on one experiment, they do attest to the strength of the subjects’ emotional reaction despite the low-quality VR: they say that the virtual learner “did not look like a realistic human, and did not behave like one” but that, nevertheless, “the physiological and emotional responses to the situation were strong”.

THERE ARE ETHICAL questions to consider when shifting the player emphasis from a passive to an active role. What happens if the player takes a more active role? What if the knife is in their hand?

“I’m expecting to see Fox News go a little wild with this at some point,” Dan Page, VR consultant for Opposable Games, tells me. “Virtual reality has been used to treat PTSD sufferers by bringing them back to difficult and violent situations from their past, and to help people out with drug problems via repeated exposure to drug-filled virtual parties, [so] there’s no denying that the sense of presence is convincing enough to have some effect on a user.”

Indeed, there’s a lot of guesswork about the psychological impact of virtual reality, and for an industry teetering on the mass commercial release of its hardware, it’s an understandably sensitive issue. But the fact VR can set off bodily reactions in its players, tricking the brain with a low latency and a wide field of view, is an enormous benefit to developers. From a director’s point of view, it means you can do much more with much less, teasing out strong emotional reactions from subtle environmental detail as much as from combat.

“In some ways, the VR headset allows us to get at certain instinctive feelings,” games writer Rob Morgan tells me. “In a flat-screen game, you have to work really hard and create a whole atmosphere to get to that moment the hair prickles on your neck. You can get to that stuff much more easily in a VR headset, in the same way that a real-life haunted house can creep you out even if it’s less convincing than a horror film. You feel more present and it has closer access to your body’s chemistry.”

Morgan, who has worked on a number of VR titles including nDreams’ The Assembly, tells me that immersion is also about the absence of other stimulation. “We’re seeing games that actually don’t have violence as their central premise, and part of the reason is that violence in VR does feel different,” Morgan tells me. “Violence is never what games were. It’s just that when you have a controller and TV in front of you, that lends itself to action, to competitiveness.”

It’s pleasing to think of VR as a different bottle, a different

shape for play to take, and yet I’d argue that

violence should be a part of the palette used by VR developers, just as it’s a crucial part

of games such as Everybody’s Gone

to the Rapture and Firewatch. Just because

these games emphasise narrative and environment over action doesn’t mean they’re non-violent.

Violence is a part of human nature, not to mention human drama. It’s not a matter of avoiding it, therefore, but deepening our approach to it. If violent acts are unsettling in VR, then developers need to learn how to handle its weight; how to direct it, humanise it. Because by bringing our bodies into play, virtual reality has an opportunity to facilitate games that put people under the microscope, not just at the end of a crosshair.

HOVER JUNKERS BY STRESS LEVELZERO

200 million

THE NUMBER OF VR HEADSETS TRACTICA ESTIMATE WILL

BE SOLD BY 2020


01 I 10 I10026 I N A S S O C I AT I O N W I T H

01 I 10 I100 27

L ong before the “information superhighway”, we had teletext. The first teletext service, Ceefax, launched on BBC channels in 1974 and

was quickly followed by a competing service (first Oracle, then simply Teletext) on ITV and Channel 4.

Teletext was hugely successful and widely used. In the early 1980s the average user checked the service 77 times per week, spending nine minutes browsing every day. By the 1990s, 20 million were checking teletext services at least once a week.

At the time, broadcasters were required to keep everything they broadcast (including teletext) archived for 90 days, but despite the system’s popularity, the archived pages appear to have almost disappeared without a trace. How can it be that there is no remaining trace of a service that was relied on by 20 million people?

Neither Teletext Ltd nor the BBC routinely kept every page produced. In many cases, it appears that when text pages were updated they were simply written into the system directly over the top of the previous page, so there wasn’t a file system as we might understand it being used. The BBC, which you might expect to be more diligent about archiving than its commercial competitors, contains only a

limited number of screenshots and other material in its archive, mostly from the early days of Ceefax, or the late 1990s when it must have been clear that time was running out for the technology.

For the viewing public, the only traces of this once-mighty beast remain in a relatively meagre number of screenshots and video captures of “Pages

from Ceefax”, which used to be shown overnight when BBC One and Two weren’t broadcasting.

But perhaps there is a solution, thanks to a handful of dedicated archaeologists who are digging through the digital dirt.

The most obvious place to begin is old videotapes. Teletext was transmitted

using unused bandwidth in analogue TV signals, with the data encoded into hidden

“lines” in the TV pictures. The problem is that VHS tapes are not well suited to storing this extra information: VHS stores images at lower quality than they were broadcast, meaning that the information stored has degraded.

In 2011, coder Alistair Buxton found a pile of old VHS tapes in his attic, and having previously messed around with open-source DVR app MythTV, he started to wonder if he could extract teletext data from the dusty tapes.

“You can think of teletext like a barcode, but one pixel high – a series of black-and-white lines,”

HOW VHS IS BRINGING TELETEXT BACK FROM THE DEAD

Teletext died on 23 October 2012. Now, digital archaeologists are digging through VHS tapes to get it back

By James O'Malley

LIFE & CULTURE


28 01 I 10 I100

T H E T E L E T E X T S A L V A G E R S

Alistair told me. Unfortunately, it’s not stored on the tape so simply. “After I captured some, I could immediately see that it wasn’t just black or white any more. Instead of solid lines, everything was blurred together.”

It was at this point that Alistair had a moment of genius, and realised that separating the signal from the noise is the same problem barcode readers in smartphones have when the camera isn’t focused correctly. So to clean up the captured data, he was able to run it through a deblurring algorithm.

THE RESULTING DATA was better, but there were still lots of errors and problems with the data. Because the algorithm has to make so many guesses, sometimes it guesses incorrectly – meaning it can pick out the wrong letters.

So, how to mitigate this? Brilliantly, thanks to the way teletext works, there’s an almost built-in checking system: simply recording for longer.

Teletext was encoded into the broadcast TV signal, and under perfect circumstances you may need only five minutes of footage to capture every page, as five minutes should allow for inclusion of every subpage on carousel pages. Carousels were articles that spanned multiple pages, which teletext fans could spot from the page numbers (“3/5”) in the corner. You had to wait what seemed like a lifetime for the pages to switch.

The reason you had to wait was because the data for each page was embedded in the live TV image and changed at regular intervals. When page one switched to page two, you’d have to wait for every single subpage to be broadcast in turn before you’d get back to page one.

As we know, VHS recordings are of a much lower quality than the original broadcasts. And this is where a clever method of error correction comes in.

Jason Robertson, another hobbyist who has built upon Alistair’s software, tells me that he tends to capture 20-45 minutes of footage.

This means that when the data is crunched by his computer, each text page is captured a number of times, which enables a form of error correction. Just as the last digit in the barcode is a check digit, making it possible to fill in any missing blanks, Alistair’s software compares the different versions of the semi-complete

pages to fill in the blanks. Alistair has also created

software that will turn a Raspberry Pi into a

teletext broadcaster. Simply install the software with a few taps on the command

line, and plug the Pi into your TV using the

old-fashioned RCA socket. Then hit the teletext button

on your TV remote to see a fully working teletext system, just as you remember it. This isn’t a simulation or a recreation using the Raspberry Pi’s graphics processor – this is teletext inserted into the TV signal in the same way as it was back in the day.

If you follow Jason on Twitter, you’ll see that he’s recently brought back from the dead pages of the

much-loved Channel 4 video-game section, Digitiser.

At the moment, Jason and Alistair are pretty much the only real teletext archaeologists, although the wider teletext “scene” appears to encompass a few hundred people. Jason has plans to create a proper archive, but this appears to be a way off yet. At the moment, the best place to find what has been captured is on Jason’s blog.

Google’s Vint Cerf has warned that we risk a “forgotten century” as humans take their first footsteps into the digital world. He wasn’t talking about teletext, but something much bigger: the internet, of which he is credited as one of the founding fathers.

As fewer and fewer hard records are made of the vast amounts of information on the internet, there’s a very real risk that historians of the future won’t have access to material that will help them understand how we lived and why we did the things that we did.

Ultimately, perhaps the work of Jason, Alistair and the other teletext archaeologists is not only valuable in its own terms, capturing historical data that would otherwise be lost, but could also serve as a warning: we need to be better at looking after our historical data, and we need to change before it’s too late.

20 million

THE NUMBER OF VIEWERS CHECKING TELETEXT SERVICES AT LEAST

ONCE A WEEK

TELETEXT: DEAD BUT NOT

FORGOTTEN


Junior

Making sense of the world

INSIDE THIS ISSUENEWS ✚ SCIENCE ✚ APPS PEOPLE ✚ PUZZLESQUIZ ✚ GIANT CROCSFarewell to the Half- Blood Prince P9

HOME NEWS

London lights up P5

23 January 2016 l Issue 9 l £1.99

Tim Peake’s incredible space walkBritish astronaut steps into history p2

NEW!

BRITAIN’S

FASTEST GROWING

CHILDREN’S MAGAZINE

Moving at 17,500mph

250 miles above Earth

Orbits Earth 16 times a day

Here’s Tim’s sky-high home

theweekjunior.co.uk

PEOPLE

30 01 I 10 I10030 01 I 10 I100

Apple 27in iMac with Retina 5K display

MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF PIXELSApple’s largest iMac gets an upgraded Retina 5K display and

faster hardware – it remains the best all-in-one PC by far

REVIEW

£1,333 (£1,599 INC VAT) FROM APPLE.COM/UK


3101 I 10 I10001 I 10 I100 31

No two ways about it, the iMac’s Retina 5K display has plenty of pixels. To be precise, the 5,120 x 2,880

resolution means there are 14.7 million of the things. Enough that, if you counted every single one, at a rate of one per second, it would take you 170 days non-stop.

Turn the display off and it looks identical to previous 27in iMacs, because the physical design hasn’t changed a jot since 2014 – and that’s because it’s already ridiculously good looking. If we lived in the 14th century, Jony Ive would have been burned as a witch.

The Retina display on last year’s model was already superb. There are still very few 5K monitors that you can go out and buy right this minute, and the ones that are available all cost well over £1,000. Not to be outdone, though, Apple has given this iMac a new 5K panel that reproduces a wider range of colour than before. In professional parlance, you can expect to see 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut.

Forget about the geeky intricacies, though, and you can summarise the iMac’s display like this: it’s bright and insanely crisp, and whether you’re dabbling in Photoshop, Final Cut Pro or just shooting everything in sight in BioShock Infinite, it looks stupendous. Black is really very black; white is very white. For most people, it’s the pinnacle of display performance – but there are caveats.

IT ALL COMES down to numbers. Our X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter is a harsh mistress, capable of revealing the shortcomings that all but the best-trained eyes would struggle to see, but the Retina display puts up quite the fight. For instance,

brightness reaches right up to a slightly silly 466cd/m² – that’s the kind of figure I’d expect from a top-notch TV, not a desktop monitor – and contrast hits a ratio of 1,166:1, which is very good indeed.

Colour accuracy is much improved on last year’s model, too. While the

2014 iMac achieved a Delta E of 1.8, this year sees that

figure drop to 0.7. The downside is that if

you’re a professional for whom only the very best

will do, then the iMac’s backlighting still isn’t up

to the standards of pro-level monitors. While the backlighting of money-no-object displays is designed to be consistent from corner to corner, deviating by as little as a few percent, the iMac is less rigorous – for the particular model I tested, it was between 10% and 16% dimmer in the bottom-left corner. If you need a display that is consistent across the whole panel, then this isn’t it, but you’ll need flawless vision – and some serious experience – to notice the problems in the first place.

THE 3.2GHZ INTEL Intel Core i5-6500 in our review model – which is the slowest processor available in the new lineup – proved almost 10% faster than the 3.5GHz Core i5 in last year’s iMac, which is a pretty impressive increase. Would you notice the difference in everyday use? Probably not. A few seconds here and there in Photoshop maybe, a slightly speedier, snappier overall feel.

In fact, one of my few disappointments with this year’s 27in iMac is that the new AMD graphics chip doesn’t quite hold up its end of the bargain. Depending on which model you go for, you’ll get the new R9 M380, R9 M390 or R9 M395X, but

these aren’t fundamentally superior to last year’s graphics chips. Like it or not, it’s going to be several years before the iMac delivers dreamily smooth 5K gaming.

THE SHORT VERDICT is easy: the Apple 27in iMac with Retina 5K display is great. The best all-in-one computer around, and by a furlong.

It’s impossible to describe any computer that costs £1,599 as cheap, but the mid-point of the new 27in iMac lineup really is good value for

money. A display of this quality would cost at least £1,000 on its own, maybe more; it wouldn’t look as pretty; and it wouldn’t come with a fast, capable, fully functioning computer. Sure, you could build a faster desktop PC and make do with a 4K monitor, but this is beside the point. As all-in-one PCs go, the 27in iMac is something of a steal.

By Sasha Muller

RIGHT: THE iMAC’S DESIGN HASN’T CHANGED SINCE 2014, BUT THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S ALREADY RIDICULOUSLY GOOD LOOKING


01 I 10 I10032

In today’s football industry, decisions about which player to spend £35 million on aren’t based purely on gut reaction

or notes jotted down in the chief scout’s black book – they’re made after months of analysis, tracking thousands of players.

Birmingham-based Scout7 has one of the biggest scouting databases in the business, allowing clubs such as Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool to marry their own, highly confidential scouting data with the video analysis and data captured by the company. We caught up with Scout7’s operations director, Bradford Griffiths, to find out how they manage it.

SCOUT7 WAS ONE of the pioneers of using computer software to identify transfer targets, something that was largely confined to players of football sim Championship Manager when the company was founded in 2001. It was also one of the earliest proponents of cloud computing.

Scout7 provides its own database of player data and also allows partner clubs to create a scouting database of their own. Clubs can search the company’s database of 135,000 players worldwide to create a list of potential targets. This details the player’s full history: appearances, goals, positions, injury history, transfer fees and more. Clubs often have specific requirements – they might, for instance, want a right-back, no older than 26, with an EU passport, who’s played at least 75% of the games for his club over the past three seasons – and Scout7 allows clubs to filter against such detailed criteria.

When the company first started offering this database to clubs in 2001, it took a gamble – not only was it asking clubs to adopt entirely new methods of scouting, but it was also asking them to access this data over the internet.

“This was a time when the internet was a fledgling as a business tool,” says Griffiths, “but the decision was made to start collecting global football data

DATA IS THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL

USING BIG DATA TO DISCOVER THE NEXT LIONEL MESSI

British firm Scout7 is crunching Big Data to help clubs identify the football stars of the future

SPORT

By Barry Collins


01 I 10 I100

and presenting it through an online application. It was ambitious to go for Software as a Service back in 2001, because these scouts weren’t even working at the stadium. They were working the training ground, and training grounds weren’t connected to the internet. By luck or judgement, it was absolutely the right decision.”

Once clubs have a shortlist of players matching their criteria, they can watch the player’s recent matches on video to help them make an assessment of whether he’s the type of player they’re after.

Having created a shortlist clubs can then send their scouts to visit grounds and make a first-hand assessment of a player. Potential transfer targets will be watched several times by multiple experts before the manager is asked to watch the player himself. The reports from the club’s own scouts are fed into the Scout7 database, so the chief scout can add it to the information that Scout7 provides to all of its member clubs from its own database.

This poses two challenges. First, it has to make the scout’s report forms as simple and accessible as possible, because even today your average

football scout is more comfortable with a pen and notepad than a laptop. “We’re not talking about guys from technical IT backgrounds; we’re talking about guys who might struggle to find things in an internet browser,” says Griffiths.

Second, it has to ensure tight security because at the highest levels of football you’re dealing with information worth tens of millions of pounds. Only authorised personnel within the club can access the key scouting information. This is achieved through tight management of access controls by Scout7 itself, because “clubs either didn’t trust themselves to do it properly or didn’t want the burden of it”.

Consequently, individual scouts entering data into the system aren’t granted access to the shortlists of the club’s main transfer targets, because these

freelancers could pass that hugely valuable information on to other clubs. What’s more, if the chief scout receives a better offer to join a rival club, he can’t take all that valuable data with him, because it’s all stored on Scout7’s servers – something that makes the company’s cloud-based service even more attractive to the CEOs of the leading football clubs.

SCOUT7’S SCOUTING database isn’t only used to identify new players, it’s also a source of intelligence on rivals. The video database can be searched to, say, review the past ten goals scored by a forthcoming opponent, or watch a team’s set-piece routines. These curated video clips can be shared with players in team meetings or downloaded onto their iPads, so they can do their homework on the guy they’ll be marking on Wednesday night.

The company also uses its own server equipment to store and deliver the 800TB of video footage in its database, which grows at the rate of 3,000 full-length HD match videos every month. “To go to a third party and say ‘we need 800TB of storage, it has to grow by this amount every month and we need certain bandwidth’, the costs would be huge. So we manage that within a dedicated hosting environment,” says Griffiths.

Griffiths says the next step for Scout7 is working with partners to bolster its databases with even more information. Clubs don’t want to log in

to different systems to get players’ medical records, for example,

they want it all in the one place. Griffiths says the company is looking to partner with other software providers so it can collate that information:

“We accept we can’t do everything ourselves.”

Football is a team game, after all.

33

TOP: CLUBS CAN ALSO ADD THEIR OWN SCOUTING DATAABOVE: SCOUT7’S VIDEO ARCHIVE IS 800 TERABYTES BELOW: BRADFORD GRIFFITHS


34

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