There’s been a lot of speculation about what you were planning online, with people guessing what you were planning. Was this intentional?

No, we’ve developed this new technology and put a hand dryer into a tap, which hasn’t been done before because it makes a much better hand dryer. We’re not trying t create a false lead on the internet, we’re just trying to make better products.

One of the suggestions they came up with was a hairdryer.

Well you probably could dry your hair with it if you stuffed your head in the sink…I haven’t tried it, but it’s an interesting idea.

Anyway what we’ve done is, you wash your hands in the sink under our tap and then immediately dry them under the two wings that come out from our tap. S you can get it all done in one go. In the past you’ve had to wash your hands and then drip your hands across the floor and queue for the hand dryer.  They often only have one or two hand dryers and half a dozen sinks. You’ve got your own space, you wash and dry your hands and out you get. So it’s just a musch nicer and quicker experience in the washroom.

What’s the target market for this – is it just commercial premises, or could you see people putting these into their own homes?

I think people have put our hand dryers into their own homes. And I think they’ll particularly put this in, because it’s in one with the tap, so you don’t have the expense of having to use towels. And towels are not very hygienic, because germs get on to the towels and then transfer from one person to another. S it’s much nicer to use our device, because you’re the first person to use it, as it were.

Also from an environmental point of view, this is far better than paper or natural towels and hot air hand dryers as well.

This is something that has come about from the investment your company put in even though there was an economic downturn. Is this the first product that has come about from that investment?

I think the point about downturn is that it’s not necessarily that people have less money – although that is often the case – it’s that people are much more careful with it. So they don’t necessarily buy the cheapest thing; they buy something that they really want that does the job well and lasts a long time. So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want. So when the recession happened, and we saw it instantly in the United States in 2008 when the shops stopped ordering, the answer we thought was to develop more technology and develop it faster.

So as rapidly as we could, we doubled the number of research engineers we had an have produced a lot of new products – we introduced 12 new ones last year – interestingly, 50 per cent of our sales in 2012 came from products introduced in the past 12 months.

Was that a conscious strategy for you?

Very much so. The way the world is going, it’s technology driven. And it isn’t just driven by the old super powers, it’s driven by the far east and new emerging economies.

Do other companies tend to pull back on R&D budgets? Is one of the first things to go R&D budget?

I’m not knowledgeable enough about other companies but I think you’re right, I think there is a tendency to look after today and not worry about tomorrow. But I’d cut back on advertising and put more money into research and development. That’s what I would do. But that’s not necessarily a very good thing for today, but I think it’s a brilliant thing for tomorrow, the next five years.

You’ve got to look very long term. We’re doing research projects that won’t come to fruition for 15 years but you can’t get real breakthrough technology and transformative technology unless you look long term. It’s amazing how quickly long term comes about.

The new electric motor we’ve got in our hand dryers – we weren’t involved in electric motors at all 15 years ago. And we started recruiting clever motor engineers about 14 years ago, and now we’re producing revolutionary electric motors that no one else in the world makes anything like. Our motors go at 100,000 rpm. A lot of people make motors that go at 30,000 rpm but not 100,000. So we have a fantastic commercial advantage to having these small high speed motors in our handheld vacuum cleaners – battery operated vacuum cleaners – and motors that are half the size and twice as efficient as any of our competitors’ motors. That’s because we took the long term decision to invest in new motors technology.

Are there other things you’ve done to adapt Dyson’s business to the current economic situation?

I think the obvious thing is to export. Because there is a huge global marketplace and you can really take advantage of that if you have got new technology and better products. And the new emerging markets are consuming huge numbers, anf they want the latest technology – China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong – all these countries want new technology, they don’t want old technology. They are great consumers of new technology. So we’ve got fantastic opportunities not only selling to mature markets like Europe, the US, Japan, Australia, Britain, but you can double your market size by exporting to emerging markets.

Last time we spoke, you mentioned the counterfeiting of Dyson products was an issue. Has that continued?

It has, more and more, and of course it’s extremely damaging to Britain’s global trade – or indeed anyone’s global trade – if plagiarism is allowed or is not stopped So it is important that governments around the world support patents, and that the courts support patents. They don’t always give the support they should.

Speaking of Government strategies, do you think the government priorities when it comes to supporting business and R&D are appropriate? You’ve been quoted quite a bit on Some governments are concentrating their firepower on web technologies

I think that’s a pity.

One of the examples I always give is Caterpillar in the United States, which has sales of about $61 billion and Facebook, which has sales of $4 billion. Caterpillar employs 132,000 people, Facebook 3,000 people. You can see that real technology, tangible things, employs a lot of people and is a much bigger business than software. I’m not decrying software and I’m not being a luddite about it, but my point is that this new software revolution is a new form of publishing. And hardware uses just as much software as this new form of publishing. We use a he amount of software and artificial intelligence in our electric motors in our products, but it’s hardware. Cars use the same. They use vast amounts of software and artificial intelligence. But its also hardware.

Hardware is growing at a faster rate and employs many more people than software and creates many more exports. So as far as the economy is concerned, it’s better to drive hardware than do things like computer games. That’s merely my point on that.

But I think the British Government has done a lot to help industry and help research and development. They’ve really carried out the things I asked for in my ingenious Britain report. They’ve increased the R&D tax allowances, they’ve increased tax allowances for angel investors in new technology startups, and they’ve created the patent box, which will reduce the corporation tax for people developing technology they can export.

These things will make a huge difference – already are making a difference and will make a huge difference.

Curiously enough, quite a negative thing which is student fees at universities has actually enormously pushed up the number of people deciding to read engineering and science. By something like 12 per cent, which is a huge jump for one year. I think if you have to pay for your education, you worry very seriously about you’re going to do when you’ve got your degree. I think people are realizing that engineering and science are extremely good degrees to get and you’ll be very highly paid once you’ve got them.

Employers are looking for people with science and maths degrees.

What has been Dyson’s biggest challenge as a company over the past couple of years?

Employing engineers, getting enough engineers. It’s what really holds us back and it’s very depressing because only 12,000 are produced in England every year. There’s 2.5 million produced in China and by 2015 there’ll be 3.5 million. India produces about 1.2 million.  Even Iran and the Philippines produces twice as many engineers as Britain.

So the biggest problem for us is getting engineers in our home country, We can get them in Singapore and Malaysia, but we can’t get enough here and here is where we do all our creative stuff.
 

That works out at about 15,000 songs per minute over close to a decade.

The 25 billionth song was Monkey Drums (Goksel Vancin Remix), and that has earned its purchaser, German Philip Lupke, a gift card for €10,000. Considering I manage to spend less than €20 every two months, that’s a whole lot of downloading to get through. Not bad for a few cent.

Apple has built up an impressive library of songs in its online music store. There are more than 26 million songs available, and the store is now open in 119 countries.

And occasionally, you might have used Webstagram to look at the photos online. And the company had already started to make some moves towards the web browser; as of the end of last year, you could look at some profiles online through Instagram’s site, for example.

But you can now browse your entire Instagram feed online, through Instagram’s own website.

Co-founder Kevin Systrom announced the new function on the company’s blog.

“Simply put, we’ve brought a simple, powerful, and beautiful Instagram browsing experience to the web,” he wrote.

If you want to browse, like or comment on photos, you can now do it online. The only thing you can’t do, really, is post photos, because Instagram is still keeping that one for mobile only.

“We do not offer the ability to upload from the web as Instagram is about producing photos on the go, in the real world, in realtime. On the other hand, Instagram for the web is focused on making the browsing experience a fast, simple and enjoyable one,” Systrom said.

No longer lagging behind their iOS brethren, Android users can ditch their regular remote control and swap it for their smartphone, where they can change channels, pause live TV or rewind with a few swipes of their fingers.

More importantly though is the ability to manage programme planners through the Android version of the app – you can delete recordings, or schedule new ones without ever having to use the TV menu. The only requirement is that you have your Android device connected to the same wifi network as your Sky+ box.

The HX-WA30 is shockproof, waterproof, freezeproof and dustproof; in short, it can take pretty much anything you can throw at it. You can take this full HD camcorder underwater, to a depth of 10 metres, or out in -10 degree celsius weather, if you prefer skiing or snowboarding.  Slow motion video capture in HD gives you some creative control over your action shots; there’s also a whole heap of creative effects you can use straight from the camera, from fish eye and miniature effect to time lapse recording, ghost effect and monochrome.

The WA30 has a 5x optical zoom, and captures 16 megapixel images

It even has built in wifi so you can link it up to a smartphone or tablet and control the camera live.

RRP: €359.99

The WA3 is the next in line, aimed at active holidaymakers and outdoor sports enthusiasts. It’s a little less full on than the WA30, but it’s still fairly robust. It’s waterproof to 5 metres, freezeproof to -10 degrees and dustproof.

Like the WA30 it’s a bit of a hybrid. Not only does it shoot video, but you can also capture still images at 16 megapixels, and while recording a video, you can capture still shots at 2 megapixels by using the Photoshot button.

The WA3 also has a burst shooting mode that captures up to 10 images one after another, dropping the resolution to 3 megapixels.

It’s not quite as much of a rugged camera as the WA3, but it won’t suddenly seize up should you decide to take it somewhere a bit out of the ordinary either.

RRP: €319.99

Finally, there’s the HX-DC3. Aimed more at the average user who won’t try to drop it in the ocean or freeze it on the slopes, the DC3 records full HD video and uses Active E.I.S for blur-free footage. Like the other cameras in the range, it records stills at 16 megapixels, has the creative effects and weighs almost the same as your average smartphone.

RRP: €219.99

There were thousands of people threatening to leave Instagram as a result. Accounts were made private, people rushed to download their photos before wiping all evidence they ever shared an image through Instagram. But new figures today show that 90 million people still use the service every month, and 40 million photos are uploaded every day. Not bad for a service that most of us thought had signed its own death warrant.

(Daily active users are down, though, and falling, according to AppStats. It’s not clear if that’s a long-term trend yet.)

Perhaps it was the reaction that stopped people in their tracks. The company backtracked within days, and has since removed some of the more controversial elements of the terms of use.

In its defence, Instagram said it merely wanted to experiment with “innovative” advertising that wouldn’t impact negatively on users’ experience of the service. The new terms were also intended to help share data between the service and Facebook.

“To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos,” co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post. “We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.”

And Instagram was equally clear on what it meant for users’ privacy; it would respect the settings applied by each user. In other words, private photos would stay private.

The updated terms, which come into effect from tomorrow, can be found here.

But if you could make it better, you would, right?

The Olloclip is a clip-on lens designed for the iPhone that combines three lenses into one: fisheye, wide angle and macro. It flips around, pieces screw together…it’s all a bit clever.

One drawback is that it’s made to fit specific models, so you can’t swap one between an iPhone 4 and a 5, nor can you use with a case on it.

That last but is something the company is already looking at; on the way is a case that has a flip out piece so you can attach the camera lens and acts as a shutter button for you.

So from yesterday’s trip around the show, here’s a few pictures.

Table PCs are apparently a thing this year. A few companies were showing them off – 3M, Lenovo – and this one by Moneual allowed you to order a drink through your table. They even won a “best of ” innovation award for it.

At CES and Mobile World Congress last year there were plenty of companies pushing their method for waterproofing phones and other electronics. This year, they were back again, and with more of them. So apart from the “ew” factor, this will never be a problem again.

Sony, meanwhile, announced its flagship Xperia Z phone, which is already water resistant. High fives all round.

Remember the company last year that brought in Justin Bieber and made a robot dance? Well Tosy is back again with a new look.

And a far bigger stand.

There were more than a few products that made you think “what?” Like these. Headphones for while you’re sleeping. I can see where they’re going with it, but it’s not for me.

Now this is something useful. You know when you try to put one of those plastic screen protectors on your iPhone, it immediately attracts fluff, develops one stubborn air bubble that wont go away and starts peeking three days later? Well this may be a solution.

It’s a tempered glass screen protector made by Spigen. So not only does it go on easily – you line it up with the home button and ear piece cut outs and drop it on carefully – but it looks and feels similar to a regular iPhone screen. It’s oleophobic, just like the iPhone screen. And it comes in two varieties – one with a regular square edge and one with a rounded smooth edge.

Both are a snap to put on. And not an air bubble in sight.

More here