RISC OS South West Show 2005

Right, morning Ladies and Gentlemen ("Morning" from the crowd) We wern't sure that we were going to make it.
The forcast lead us to believe frantic snow for tomorrow, It never came, pleased to say, so we are here.

Right, I'm Jack Lillingston from Castle Technology, the Managing Director.

What I'd like to do thismorning is go through a few of the latest things that weve got on offer,
talk a little about USB 2 which is the new release (inaudible) Iyonix Users.

And a bit of time just telling you whats going on in the world of RISC OS.

(inaudible)

If anyone's got any questions at any time obviously please don't hesitate
to stop me in mid flow and I'll do my best to answer.

Right, just very quickly I'll going to show you what Ive got here and we'll go through it.

We have got a selection of things that you can add to an Iyonix.

First of all Ive got an x100 which is basically the same as any of the Iyonix range computers apart from the fact
that case is desktop format so it has the same motherboard obviously its not very expandable, then the other
versions of the computer are more expandable and the Panther is very expandable so (inaudible)

This is the x100 here, Ive got a USB 2 memory card reader here and I'll show a little more about that in a moment,
I've got an Epson 1660 colour scanner, A new Cannon ip3000 printer and that here is a USB 1 hub and for those of
you who know a bit about USB all of the Iyonix come with USB fitted actually we supply a USB 2 card,
we supplied a USB 2 card from the outset so all Iyonix have exactly the same USB card regardless whether they were
bought right at the outset or wether you buy them now, but we ever implemented USB 1 to start off with for various
mainly technical side issues more than anything else.
There is an upgrade to USB 2 that is available we released it about two or three weeks ago, (inaudible) at the end
of January, and so that does bring us out from USB 1 or 1.1 infact as it is commonly known,
and to give you a range of much faster USB devices for USB 2.

So the USB 1 hub here is actually driving all the USB 1 Items Ive got on the table here, thats a mouse,
keyboard and infact the printer which is a USB 1 printer. And that is plugged into the back and I've still got a
spare USB socket there, on the front here I've got the card reader and the scanner both of which are USB 2 Items,
You can plug USB 2 things in the front or the rear it doesnt matter, the software works it all out for you,
so its very, very easy to set up.

And you can have over 100 differnet USB devices connected to your Iyonix at any one time, but if youve got a
USB 1 hub you wont get any more than USB 1 performance out of it.

So, just quickly for those of you who dont know about memory card readers, Memory cards come in all shapes and sizes,
this is a little XD memory chip here and thats used in high quality cameras, this reader doesnt actually do that,
(inaudible) should have to buy a seperate card reader for the XD.

This is a quite interesting little memory card its actually a 2 gigabyte hard drive, a micro drive, again that works,
I'll show you that a little later, and this is just a standard multimedia card. There are a variety of other cards
SDRAM's, SD Cards and memory sticks and a few others as well.

So for those of you who've got cameras or MP3 players with removable media, using one of these card readers on a
Iyonix will enable you to read and write material to the computer.

From time to time we run special offers, and any Iyonix thats bought in February, were giving away this rather snazzy
Cannon Camera, its a 5 mega pixel camera with a LCD screen at the back, I'll just show it to you working, like that.

And what I'd like to do, its got a direct print that goes to the printer, and as its a Cannon Camera and a
Cannon printer you actually do get some very good results, and if I just plug that in,
and remember how to work the camera....

With just a few key-presses (laughter from audience)(inaudible) Im just trying to find the correct picture to print out.

(inaudible) (trying to get camera to work with printer)

(voice from audience) "Is the printer switched on?"

JL - Ah, Full marks to that fellow, thats why its not working.
(inaudible), just wait for it to.... It was on,somebody must have switched it off.

Here we go, right.......

Ok, right, the camera has a direct print facility that allows you to print out onto high quality glossy paper
and in true Blue Peter style this is something I printed earlier and I'll pass those round for you to have a quick
look at, while its actually doing a print out, and you can see,
If I turn the lights on you can see the quality is extreemely good, ...

(inaudible)

It takes under a minute to do a print and go through its process.

(inaudible)

The camera itself sells for £319 but Ive already mentioned if you buy an Iyonix you get one free,
infact if you buy one of the top range Iyonix computers you also get the printer free aswell, so its quite a good deal.
If you buy the printer here at the show you get the .... sorry the camera at the show, you get the printer free
so we've got some special deals on the combination there, which I think is an excellent bit of kit.

(inaudible)

So, just to show you how the memory card reader works as well, from the camera theres a compact flash card,
and (inaudible) card reader, and click on the icon (inaudible) the mass storage icon at the bottom.

(inaudible) software that allows us to view thumbnails (inaudible) so there are the actual pictures (inaudible)

So thats reading everything off the memory card (inaudible) in the camera.

So you can transfere things to the camera, you can transfere things from the camera its very versatile indeed.

Before I take that out I'm just going to dismount the multimedia card,
and put it back in the camera before I forget where it is.

(inaudible)

One of the features of USB is the fact that (inaudible) pops-up, so, if I can show you here if I disconnect the
memory card reader you see all the icons disapear, and again if I plug it back in again they will re-appear,
if I put this 2 gig (inaudible) card in (inaudible)........

(Audience asking if JL is clicking the right drive icon on task bar)

(inaudible)

Ill come back to that in just a moment ok, lets move on...

to...

Scanners.....

Most of you will probably be familiar with Dave Pillings Scanning software, and if I just do a preview here,
I can show you how much faster... whats actually happening at the moment is the scanner is warming up its light
before it actually does a preview scan. And you will see in a moment the green bar will when its warmned up,
start moving across there, and it will do an initial preview scan.

The (inaudible) of USB 2 is actully about, I'll just have to look at my notes here, two and a half,
two and three quater times faster, than USB (inaudible), so (inaudible) if I set that to scan at 600dpi this is
running two and a half, two and three quater times faster than you would normally get on a USB 1 function,
in fact what usually happens with USB 1 is that the scanner will start and stop, start and stop, start and stop,
and this more or less goes straight the way through.

(inaudible)

Ok, while were doing things, scanners and printers, Ive also got.... this printers good at doing normal printing.

I've got a PDF here, I'll put some standard paper in here....

So in here Ive got downloaded from the web, from Cirrus Logics website, all about the 9312 processor,
what I need to do is get a printer driver icon on the icon bar, again, once you've shown the Iyonix a new printer
it remembers it, so that any time you double click, if theres a printer connected, it will remember which printer
you connected and will automatically load that printer driver, so its another feature of the plug and play.

(Question from audience) "Wheres the drivers from?"

JL - We produce the drivers for the Cannon range of printers and you can either buy a printer from us,
obviously you get the driver at the same time or they are available for extra for cost, for people who want to buy
their own printer. (inaudible) We try to be very competative on price so we recommend you buy them from us..
(inaudible) (laughter from audience)

And again I've got a print-out here which I'll hand out to show everyone the quality (inaudible)

Its printing four pages out, its in high resolution colour, so it will take a few minutes to print it out.

(Question from audience) "How much is the printer?"

JL - The printer? normal price is.... I'm not sure actually what our special show price is,
I had it written down somewhere...
But the normal price is £129 but its considerably less than that so its very good value.

And you get one free with the top range Iyonix and you get one free if you buy a camera, so its a pretty good deal.

But they are also available if you come along to our stand and ask Stacey or myself or one of my other
members of staff how much they are.

I think that the key thing here is its got the direct print feature, it is a USB only printer so it doesn't
have a parallel port, for those of you who are still running some of the older machines, the Risc-PC's,
however Cannon do do an ip4000 which does have a parallel port and does have the direct print feature (inaudible)..
the quality is the same so there is an option there but at a slightly higher price.

So it actually prints upto 22 pages per minute in black, so it quite a fast printer, obviously in colour or
photo it goes a bit slower than that.... so thats the same document printed out and I'll just hand it out.

Actually its worth saying for those of you are interested in printing out photographs, and I think people are
these days, It is very important to buy, high quality glossy photo paper, it makes all the difference to printing
things out. Ive got some Epson paper here which actually we recon is slightly better than the Cannon paper
but thats a matter of personal opinion.

(inaudible)

Ok, so thats the end of this sort of demonstration, part of my presentation so if I just take a few minutes
telling you a bit about what were doing (inaudible) alot of what we do, obviously, is very confidential,
because we are working for large international, multinational companies, and they like to keep everything apart
from their products secret, for various reasons, (inaudible) their competitors stealing their key suppliers i suppose,
so unfortunately I cant tell you all the things that we are doing, but what I can tell you is that the tematic side
of the Castle's business, Tematic is a trading division of Castle so we are part of one and the same company.
Were doing a lot of work for embedded applications using RISC-OS, these are mainly vertical market applications
where the operating system is not important where the customer needs a product to do a certain thing, and we can
convince the customer that there are methods of doing it better, its going to happen quicker,
gives them a edge over their competition.

If we do what we say were going to do, thats the way to build a business in that marketplace.
So, the products you actually, we actually engineer for other people don't know that RISC-OS is running behind
the scenes, well, you would know, if you knew what to look for, the things like our anti-alaised fonts, very quick
graphics capabilities, and things like that that actually set us above what anybody else is doing,
those are the key things together with reliability (inaudible) go for.

And I think, what were doing is using software that started off life in the beginning of the 80's its been developed
constantly since then, its incredibly reliable product, in use in millions of applications, not only in BBC-B's through
all the Archimedes, A4 range of computers, stuff that Acorn did for other people, huge range of products out there.

And so, alot of other software companies have sprung up only recently, they do struggle to produce a reliable software stack.

(inaudible)

Tematic is actually based in Cambridge and just before Christmas we announced that we actually needed some more
engineers, this was part of a development plan where we were doing work for just one or two people,
we are now moving on to do work for many more people and we are about to move premises (inaudible)
five times the size that we were before, floor area anyway.

And taking on more staff throughout the next six to twelve months, and beyond that to enable us to
keep up with the work that we are bringing in.

A lot of people wonder why we aren't putting a huge amount of energy into the Desktop market place,
and I think there's a subtle difference between whats going on in the embedded side of things where the contract
can be sought, signed and then do the work and get paid, (inaudible) trying to compete against dear old Mr Bill Gates,
and the amount of money and what would happen if we were sucessful, the two equasions at the moment are something we
wrestle with every time we discuss this. But having said that alot of the work we do in the embedded platform comes
back into the desktop marketplace, USB 2 is a extreemely good example of something and USB 1 infact (inaudible)

(Question from Audience) "I wouldn't want you to be indescreet with regards the customers that you are serving,
but can you tell us the sort of products that one might guess that, or we might observe these things (inaudible)?"

JL - Right, I can, I have to be very careful what I say, the type of products infact that we have done to-date,
(inaudible) you wouldn't see then in this country, they are likely to be in a home inviroment, so its something
that when its installed has to work for the customer and its, Ive said enough of that already.

Other products will be more distributed, more widely but there not released yet. (inaudible) I'm sorry.
(reponce from question poser) "Thats alright"

(Question from Audience) "Have you been sucessful in getting the staff that you need?"

JL - We at the moment have a plan where by we need extra staff at various points throughout the next six months,
at the moment the responce we had from our call for engineers just before Christmas means that in the short term
were convinced we will have access to the people we need, so that's not a problem. I think the real, the issue
will probably be as time goes by (inaudible)............
Well see what happens if we get that far, but at the moment ..(inaudible)

There are a lot of people out there who used to work for Acorn, again Ive got to be really careful (inaudible)
confidentially they were taken over by Pace, they wern't nesecarily the happiest of people working ..
(inaudible) And then Pace ceased working in Cambridge (inaudible) so there are alot of people around who
(inaudible) are in constant contact with a wide array of (inaudible) people who used to work (inaudible) ..
I can't say their queing up but (inaudible) spread the word (inaudible) responce.

(Question from Audience) "Your quest for more and more engineers who are experienced in this field,
are you in danger that you will actually starve the desktop market (inaudible)?"

JL - I really dont think so, infact I think probably the other way around because a lot of the work that is done
for the desktop market is done as, alonside a mainstream job, and in my experience (inaudible) guys that work for
us at the moment , they do do other things at the evenings and weekends, so the more people we bring back into
RISC OS who have perhaps moved on to do other things probably actually makes it better, I mean there are full time
developers obviously in the desktop marketplace (inaudible) I wouldnt imagine that nesecarily that they may come
work for us, but if they do that, terefic. I think its good that we have a pool to resource there that is keen
and enthusiastic that (inaudible) thats good.

So, (inaudible) thats a very short presentation but (inaudible) the end of the formal presentation,
does anybody have, anybody got any other questions they would like to ask?

(Question from audience)"Slightly down to earth question, can this printer which requires a USB connection,
is there a conversion cable so it can be used with an older Acorn?"

JL - No, thats a very good point actually that, the Iyonix certainly has a USB output, it doesnt have a parallel
port and obviously traditionally all printers and computers use the parallel port especially to drive printers,
what we can supply for those who have a existing parallel printer is a cable that converts from USB to parallel,
so you can plug into a USB port a parallel printer. However doing it the other way round, so in other words running
a USB printer on a old RISC-PC that for instance only has a parallel port, you couldnt do that unless you bought
a USB podule and put it into the computer, of course which you can do.
Having said there is another version of the 3000 which is actually called the ip4000 which has a arallel port on it,
its a little more expensive, a bit faster, but essentially its the same printer.

(Question from same audience member)"That prints either does it? USB or"

JL - That will do either USB or parallel yes, so that might be the option.

(Question from audience)"Do you supply the scanner as well?"

JL - Yes we supply the scanner, infact, there's three types of scanners available in the Epson range,
there's the 1660 here which is £119, the 2400 which has got higher resolution which is £199 and the 4870 which is
professional peice bit kit which sells for just over £400.
The only thing about the them they are coming towards the end of their life and we do have limited supplies
and they come and go rather haphazardly, so if your keen on a scanner and we havnt got one we can make a note of
your name and then well get one as soon as we can.
But the Epson scanner is very good.

Any other questions? if not, thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for listening to me, if you want to ask me
any other questions please come and have a chat now or see me on the stand.

Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of you day.

(Audience) Thankyou (Applause)