Katia Moskvitch from the BBC has just published a nice article on using the mind to control technology. As part of the article as well as trying out the Emotive headset* she interviewed Ed Jellard and Kevin Brown from the IBM ETS team based in Hursley. * This is the same headset used for the [...]

Scaling things up a little from my first eightbar post. This was one of those projects that just sort of “turned up”. About 3 weeks ago one of the managers for the ETS department in Hursley got a call from the team building the new IBM Forum in IBM South Bank. IBM Forums are locations [...]

Extreme Blue is IBM’s summer intern scheme. Students can apply to IBM to be part of the scheme and those lucky enough to be selected are brought into various IBM locations worldwide to be mentored by IBM staff who have proposed an idea and small project for them to work on. This morning I went [...]

It’s not all about process, software development, and quadricopters… This week we’ve had what could be described as a “mini Hackday”, instigated by an idea from Andy Stanford-Clark and organised by Hursley newcomer Vaibhavi Joshi. The idea was to spend a few hours exploring the world of plug computers (in this case, a model called [...]

Andy Piper brought his new toy to the lab today. While on a whistle stop tour of China recently he called in at Hong Kong on the way back, where he picked up one of the a Parrot AR.Drones which have been released this month. The AR.Drone is a quadricopter with 2 video cameras, one [...]

A few weeks ago, the Financial Times Digital Business podcast visited Hursley and checked out some of the innovations that are being worked on. The result is a nice 22 minute episode which tours the lab (including the Retail Lab pictured on the left!) and talks to John McLean, Andy Stanford-Clark, Bharat Bedi and Jamie [...]

As with yesterday’s post, I really don’t have to do too much work on this one, as the detail has already been written up elsewhere… If you watched this week’s edition of Bang Goes The Theory on BBC1, you will have seen Nick O’Leary and Kevin Brown from IBM Hursley helping Jem and Dallas to [...]

As a festive entry on eightbar this year, let’s talk about Christmas lights. Twitter-controlled ones! Andy Stanford-Clark hooked up a set of lights to Twitter. As reported in Computer Weekly: Using some clever IBM middeware, The microcontroller sets the illumination colour based on a signal from the internet or via SMS over a GSM network [...]

[A guest post by Hursley’s Ben Fletcher. This was originally written as an internal blog post – Ben recently received the award for External Honours at the IBM Corporate Technical Recognition Event. Here, he reflects on his experiences] I believe it is important to leave it entirely up to the individual to recognise the positives [...]

I’m very excited to be welcoming another Hursley innovator as a guest here on eightbar – Benjamin Hardill (you can find him on Twitter as @hardillb). Here’s some insight into what he’s been up to lately! More home automation, hardware hacking, and MQTT messaging adventures follow I got a new TV around Christmas last year [...]