The new two-way bellows control valve from Bürkert is a pneumatically actuated process valve with a single action membrane drive.

Samsung is moving to add voice control to its products with the acquisition of the Silicon Valley start-up company Viv founded by the creators of Apple’s Siri voice-control for search. Samsung says it plans to incorporate Viv into a range of its electronics products. “Samsung offers us a unique opportunity to deliver a single conversational …

Read full article: Samsung buys Viv to add voice control

Nokia has bought six year-old start-up ETA, founded by two MIT professors to help it into 5G technology. The 20-employee ETA, based in Cambridge, Massachussetts with an R&D centre in Stockholm, has technology which makes base stations more energy-efficient. Eta was founded in 2010 by MIT professors, Joel Dawson and David Perrault, entrepreneur Mattias Astrom, …

Read full article: Nokia buys ETA for 5G

Fujitsu is reported to be talking to Lenovo about selling its PC business to the Chinese company which bought IBN’s PC business and Motorola’s phone business. Lenovo is PC market leader with 21% of the market, according to IDC. Fujitsu has 6%. Second is HP with 20.8% and third is Dell with 16% Fujitsu shares …

Read full article: Fujitsu talking to Lenovo about selling PC business

Peregrine Semiconductor, which specialises silicon RF chips, has expanded its UK offices into a larger facility in Theale, Berkshire. The US-based semiconductor company said its UK team has grown by 90% since the Murata acquisition in 2014. “Our team had outgrown our old facility—both in seating capacity and in lab space to accommodate new product …

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The high visibility of open source software could help improve security in embedded internet of things devices, according to software specialists speaking at the IoT Evolution 2016 conference in Las Vegas. Art Swift, president of the prpl Foundation, pointed to high profile IoT hacking attacks saying that “regardless of whether these hacks were malicious or …

Read full article: Open source software is best for IoT security

The government has conceded it needs to do more the protect personal data held by services and research bodies. It has agreed to set up a Council of Data Ethics, which it calls an “ethical framework for government data science”. The government has stopped short of introducing criminal penalties for serious data breaches. Instead it …

Read full article: Data protection forced up the agenda by IoT

e2v has signed a supply agreement with gallium nitride power transistor manufacturer GaN Systems which will see the UK firm supplying power transistors to the aerospace and defence sectors. e2v has signed a supply agreement with gallium nitride power transistor manufacturer GaN Systems which will see the UK firm supplying power transistors to the aerospace …

Read full article: e2v signs GaN deal to cut weight in hi-rel designs

136 years ago one of the agents employed to work on the 1880 US Census possessed a genius for inventing and innovating machinery. He figured out that if the information was put on cards by punching holes in certain positions then the counting process could be performed by machines. In 1884 he set up a …

Read full article: Fable: The Man Who Built Machines

There was an interesting apercu from Stefan Dykerhoff, CEO of SiFive the RISC-V start-up, reported by Don Dingee in SemiWiki earlier this week. “Although SiFive isn’t targeting ARM specifically, Dyckerhoff says there was a definite uptick in developer registration activity after the SoftBank acquisition of ARM,” writes Dingee, adding, “both Dyckerhoff and Kang (Jack, SiFive …

Read full article: Armless or Legless?