A British company called Pavegen has recently developed a novel flooring system that generates electricity from footsteps. Yes, you read that right – just by walking on the tiles, you can help to light offices, airports and even football stadiums. These tiles have already been installed in some key locations in London’s Heathrow airport and in community locations in Nigeria and Brazil.

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Kinetic Energy

These innovative tiles have been designed to harness kinetic energy. The tiles are usually triangular in shape and have a small generator in each of the corners. This shape and design ensures that, regardless of where the footfall lands, the kinetic energy generated by each footstep is maximised. That means that the more footfall on the tiles, the more energy is generated, with estimates of between 5 and 7 watts of power per footstep.

Function

The founder of Pavegen, Laurence Kemball-Cook, asserts that the tiles have an important function as they are able to light areas that are either too poor or too rural to gain mains powered electricity. As an example, they have been used in Nigeria in a small community that had no mains power and so had no light. This lack of light was preventing the community from socialising or playing sport after dark, but installation of these tiles has encouraged a new social element within the community.

Limitations

Despite the many potential applications of this smart flooring, the technology does have its limitations. Firstly, the flooring requires lots of circuits and lots of batteries to store the energy, as it’s an off-grid power system, and secondly, it has a vast price tag, costing around £1,250 per square meter. So, it’s unlikely to overtake laminate flooring as the UK’s favourite flooring option, especially as laminate is so readily available at many flooring outlets, including ukflooringdirect.co.uk.

Future

Pavegen claims that with improvements in the design of the flooring technology, the amount of energy that can be generated from the tiles will increase. The increase in power generation is likely to be coupled with an increase in applications, therefore potentially helping countries to reduce their carbon footprint. Greenpeace endorses this technology and claims that there is a possibility that many areas could be running entirely on renewable energy sources by 2050.

When designing a website, we all look to engage our customers. Of course, your site is ultimately there to sell your product or service or to promote your business. It’s all about driving customers to engage with you.

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But before a customer will engage with you as a business, you need to build a relationship with them. The first step in doing so is to give them something that is of value to them. This not only drives them to your website in the first place, but also keeps them coming back. The more times they visit you, statistically the more likely they are to become a customer.

Mobile Versus Desktop

We all know that internet-ready mobile phones have been improving and making the internet more accessible in recent years. In fact, according to Forbes, we have finally reached the point where they have become more popular than desktop devices. That is to say that more people are now performing internet searches via their mobile phones than via desktops.

Of course, this means that for anybody with a website, optimisation for mobile devices is now crucial. Unless you are a web designer yourself, you will probably need some help to make sure that this is done correctly and in a way that is recognised by the Google search bots as being mobile-friendly. Failing to do so could affect your search engine rankings.

It is sensible therefore to ask for some help from a professional web design company. For example, you could try a Cardiff Web design agency such as netcentrics.co.uk, who would fully understand the requirements for mobile-friendly sites and ensure that your website was optimised in a way that the search engines would be happy with. This will give you a higher ranking.

The Demise of the News Site

With the Guardian reporting that news websites look to be finding it difficult to be profitable in the mobile climate, is it possible that your business could benefit from this trend? Users are reluctant to read the news on traditional sites, since these are forced to use advertising in order to remain profitable.

On a mobile device, advertising is particularly annoying. That’s where you could come in. If you have a blog or news page with relevant news in your field, you could find that people with an interest in your area of business use you as a point of reference. This will of course drive traffic to your website, as any newsworthy item is also share-worthy. You will get organic views and your search engine ranking will increase as your site is shared more widely on other websites.

Of course, for every person that reads your blog or looks up a relevant news article and gets directed to your website, a proportion will take the time to look around your site. These are the ones who will potentially be converted to customers. So the cloud over the news sites really could be your silver lining if you plan your website design and content appropriately.

When Neil Armstrong made his one small step onto the Moon in 1969 the computer that got him there had around 64 kilobytes of memory. That’s probably less than the amount contained in a modern toaster.

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Even the IBM mainframe back at Mission Control that was used to calculate the launch data and monitor the progress of the mission had less memory than the USB stick in your pocket. The space programme proved that computers could be trusted to carry out complex tasks on which human lives depended, but it also serves to illustrate how the technology has advanced in the last 40 or so years.

One Small Chip

The Apollo guidance computer wasn’t the first programmable electronic machine of course, they go back to the code breaking efforts of WWII, but it was among the first to use integrated circuit microchips. What has driven advances in computing since then is the ability to pack more components onto each wafer of silicon so that more memory and more processing power is available in the same space.

This of course means that the programs run the machine can be larger and more complex so there’s even greater need for software testing. The desktop computers that began to appear in the late 1970s and early 80s paved the way for today’s use of PCs, though still relatively low powered and very expensive.

The affordable home computers that came next showed that it was possible to make a usable and relatively powerful – though still usually with no more memory than the Apollo computer – that could be used by almost anyone.

Computing In Your Pocket

By the late 1980s the PC had become an essential in most businesses and IT Support in Southgate and other areas of London and further afield across the UK and abroad were becoming essential as office applications like word processors and spreadsheets took off so agencies like http://www.pc-docs.co.uk were becoming a desirable contact to have in case any issues arose.

Although the desktop PC hadn’t shrunk much in size at this point it was becoming much more powerful. The advent of compact, affordable hard drives also meant you could store much more information without having to continually swap floppy disks.

The first portable machines, ancestors of the current laptop, appeared in the 1980s too, allowing you to take your computer with you. Though these were bulky and heavy by today’s standards they began to free PCs from the office and the home, paving the way for today’s connected, mobile world.

Computers continued to get faster and more powerful through the 1990s as graphical operating systems like Windows replaced the older command line interfaces. At the beginning of the decade PCs would have had around 640 Kb of memory – ten times that of Apollo – but by the end memory capacities of 64 megabytes – 1,000 times that of Apollo – weren’t unusual.

From then on power and memory have increased at a rapid pace, modern laptops will have three or more gigabytes of RAM and multi-core processors allowing them to multi-task. Multi-core processors are in smartphones and tablets too and even modest phones will have 512 Mb of memory – that’s around 8,000 times the memory that took man to the moon and back sitting in your pocket so you can text your friends and play Angry Birds.