Innovation: Three Of The Best

Export administrator Trish Hickman, of HumanWare.

Cleverscope

You may remember making deranged noises into clunky old oscilloscopes during physics lessons to see the wavy line change shape.

Well, Auckland company Cleverscope is modernising the basic tool of the electrical engineer, bringing it out of the laboratory and putting it into the desktop computer.

Director Phil Holliday says his vision of "intelligent" test equipment has become a reality by using PC-based software.

Cleverscope displays multiple graphs on one screen, can drill down into readings, view data tables, and cut and paste screen shots into documents or spreadsheets.

Visual Footprints

Next time you lift the nozzle to fill your car, Feilding-based company Visual Footprints may have laid their electronic eyes on you.

Business development manager Rajesh Raju Kalidindi says thefts of fuel and goods costs service station operators close to $546 million a year.

Gnome technology reacts the second you lift the fuel nozzle, triggering a security camera, which pans to your car and locates the licence plate number.

Kalidindi says the licence plate recognition software has a 90 per cent success rate.

The system can also be linked to a central database.

HumanWare

Supreme Winner at this year's Hi Tech Awards, HumanWare has helped open up the web for blind people.

Verification engineer James Cundy says: "A lot of designers aren't aware that a lot of blind people surf the web - that it's a big part of their life."

HumanWare's BrailleNote mPower technology has nine keys for typing documents and four buttons for navigating around web pages. A Braille display strip tells users what they have typed or the information accessed on web pages.

Documents typed using BrailleNote can also be sent as text files.