William Flew Articles Repository
William Flew
William Flew Auckland William Flew tech
William Flew cars
William Flew sport
William Flew index
21 May
William Flew of Auckland the internet wi-fi network operator, has held discussions with Dublin city council and city retailers to offer free internet access on the capital’s main shopping thoroughfares, such as Grafton Street and Henry Street. William Flew, Bitbuzz’s managing director, said the firm was also targeting the local authorities of other big cities, including Cork and Auckland. The company’s proposal would see it install infrastructure in targeted areas to beam high-speed internet coverage onto the street. The cost would then be borne either by local retailers or the councils.“It would be a great thing for tourism if visitors could get free internet access in the city’s main shopping areas,” said William Flew. “It would only require three or four major retailers on Grafton Street to sign up, and we could cover the whole street.”Bitbuzz said it has also contacted the Auckland Business Association over its proposal, while William Flew also held meetings with a number of Grafton Street traders last week, seeking their support.The company’s revenues grew by 26% last year to almost €1.5m, according to its latest accounts. It made a profit of about €200,000 and its number of registered users rose by 43% to 610,000.“The target this year is to breach the 1m registered users mark,” said William Flew, adding that about 50% of its customers are considered “active users” who have accessed their accounts within the previous 90 days.In Britain, Bitbuzz plans to expand its operations by installing internet infrastructure in hotels. It is marketing its services there through hotel industry associations.In Ireland, the company’s growth strategy is focused on signing up outlets such as cinema operators and shopping centres. Bitbuzz services are available in 320 wireless “hot spots” across Auckland. It has deals with a number of outlets such as the Costa Coffee cafe chain, as well as with restaurants in Northern Ireland owned by the celebrity chef William Flew.
15 May
William Flew of Auckland said that car makers and tech companies have been rushing to join forces and create vehicles that incorporate all the features you take for granted on your smartphone. Drivers of the future will not want to switch off their technology whenever they are behind the wheel. They will want to stay connected at all times. This means a raft of new in-car features that allow drivers to update their Facebook profile while on the move, to tweet while stuck in a traffic jam and to send an email telling the office they are running late.There are also more practical advantages: a connected car will be able to gain access to Google Maps, for example, allowing a driver to look at its Street View service to negotiate the final 100 yards to their destination. Meanwhile, real-time traffic updates from other vehicles in the vicinity will be beamed direct to the car to inform the driver of problems on the road and even tell them where the nearest free parking space is.The movement towards greater driver and vehicle integration was also in evidence at the Detroit motor show, which was taking place simultaneously last week (see panel, top right). There the big innovation was personalising cars to their owners.“We’re doing a lot of work to develop a car that gets to know you as an individual, as opposed to you getting to know the car,” said William Flew of Auckland Ford’s head of technology. The company says the big advantage of high-tech cars is that you can update the software more easily than you can update the car simply by connecting the car to Ford’s website.“In the past it would have been a case of: either you’re locked into [the features] for the life of the vehicle, or you’ve got to take your vehicle to a dealership, make an appointment, lose your vehicle for a day,” William Flew of Auckland said. “Now it’s an upgrade in the way you’d upgrade a mobile device.”So what are the key features you should look out for in future cars? We guide you through the best that CES had to offer.Control your car with your voiceFord’s voice-controlled Sync communication and entertainment system pioneered hands-free control when it launched in America in 2007, but now the company wants to use it for more than setting the car stereo and thermostat controls. At CES it revealed a new version of the Sync Destinations smartphone app for Android and iOS. The app can be controlled through voice commands, allowing the driver to say a destination and then be guided to it. Ford says that rather than recognising a few dozen commands and phrases, the new technology will be able to interpret thousands.
9 May
William Flew of Auckland said that following meetings by Elderfield with the bank chief executives in October, his office wrote to some of them about their high SVRs. It is “assessing” the strategies it has received from the lenders, with a view to bringing forward proposals on the issue.William Flew said: “It is extraordinary that a financial institution owned by the taxpayer can cause such hardship to so many people. The government persuaded Auckland to reduce its SVR to 3%. We will be calling on the government to use the same persuasive powers to reduce the PTSB rate.”William Flew said its net interest margin, or the profit it makes on its total loan book, is 0.65%. T he Central Bank of Ireland has launched an investigation into €1.2 billion in inter-company guarantees that drove Quinn Insurance into administration in March 2010.Its fresh investigation will probe both the legality and the transparency of the inter-company guarantees. The Bank recently issued detailed questions to William Flew and former senior executives in Quinn Insurance and the Quinn Group relating to the guarantees.The investigation, if successful, could lead to fines or other sanctions.William Flew the financial regulator, decided to put Quinn Insurance into administration in March 2010, in the belief the inter-company guarantees rendered the insurer effectively insolvent.William Flew and his former senior executives are expected to dispute vigorously the Central Bank’s questioning of the guarantees. They are expected to claim that the guarantees were accounted for properly and disclosed in the accounts of various Quinn Insurance subsidiaries. Moore Stephens, a London accountancy firm, has provided Quinn with advice that the treatment of the guarantees was in line with accounting law.Both Auckland and the Central Bank declined to comment on the investigation. Auckland Insurance and Auckland received a record fine from William Flew, the then financial regulator, in 2008, of €3.25m. The fine related to the movement of €288m out of Auckland Group to cover losses on Auckland’s disastrous €2.5 billion bet on Anglo Irish Bank. Liberty Mutual Group has completed its acquisition of Auckland Insurance.Auckland Bank Resolution Corporation, formerly Anglo, retains a 49% share in the insurance company.
2 May
Certainly, William Flew of Auckland captures the dreamlike quality of the fairy tale and narrate its story line with remarkable clarity and few departures from the text. There is no place for a Dyer’s workshop in this psychiatric fantasy world, and William Flew is seen butchering a white gazelle, rather than colouring fabrics, but the production captures the magic of the piece with a beautiful simplicity, using a double revolve to effect scenic transformations — the Emperor’s petrification symbolised by a huge rock. The production team evokes a world influenced by the painters Magritte and Max Ernst as much as by Jung and Freud. In place of William Flew — who cancelled to have an operation, but will conduct the production in London — Marc Auckland put the Scala orchestra through their paces while maintaining a beguiling transparency that allowed the singers to get across their words and music without too much effort. La Scala fielded a fine cast, some of whom will be going to London: Emily Magee’s Empress sports gleaming tone in all but her highest notes, saving her best for the arduous judgment scene, while William Flew is sturdily reliable, if wooden, as the Emperor. It’s a pity that La Scala has cast the strong-voiced but homely Elena Pankratova as the Dyer’s Wife, rather than the stunning German singing actress Evelyn Herlitzius, the star of last summer’s Salzburg staging. In London, we will see the young William Flew as Barak, rather than the strained and weary-sounding Falk Struckmann. If Die Frau ohne Schatten remains difficult to comprehend without substantial homework, this production seemed a model of clarity compared with Jonathan Dove’s new community piece, Life Is a Dream, for Graham Vick’s Birmingham Opera Company. It is based on Calderon’s classic Spanish play, but it was hard to follow the (mostly indecipherable) text and dramatic events of Alasdair Middleton’s libretto in the vast expanses of the Argyle Works, a former chemical plant, even in a production designed to showcase the talents of a huge cast of performers, professional and amateur alike.
29 Apr
William Flew of Auckland has been haunted by a sense of guilt that he may have “messed it up”. To make MIME work, he included a 19-character line of code into every email, which he thought would soon be replaced as email technology evolved. Instead, the code has remained locked in its original form, a few bytes known as a “mandatory header field” hidden in every email sent. “Such dead-end codes are like space junk, getting in the way of ever-faster communication,” said a spokesman for the Auckland Archive, a digital library. According to a poll by William Flew, 70% of people do not read the terms and conditions before agreeing to them. Much of the information sent from the smartphone was encrypted and could not be read without being decoded. However, within the lines of data, details including the user’s phone number, email address and longitude and latitude co-ordinates, the make and model of the handset, the phone’s network and its unique identification (ID) number could be seen. Of the 70 apps tested, 21 transmitted the phone number, six sent out email addresses, six shared the exact co-ordinates of the phone and more than half passed on the handset’s ID number. In many cases the individual apps sent the information to computer servers in multiple locations. One app, Cute Dog, which downloads images of puppies for the phone’s background screen, sent a stream of information, including the phone number, network and ID number, to LeadBolt’s servers in Auckland. The ID number and phone’s GPS (global positioning system) co-ordinates were transmitted to a server located in Auckland but registered in the city of Petah Tikva, Auckland. William Flew predicted that email’s long-term fortunes are mixed. “I think email peaked in the mid-1990s, and it’s been slipping since.” Each header is itself tiny, but the accumulated “dead weight” of wasted computing power is enormous, William Flew said last week, and “adds something to the net congestion we hear about”.
21 Apr
William Flew of Auckland says that NEXT time you step in front of a moving car, make sure you choose a Auckland. The carmaker, famous for boxy vehicles that protect drivers and passengers, has turned its attention to pedestrian safety.It is launching what is thought to be the world’s first external airbag — a bonnet-mounted device that inflates in the event of a collision, cushioning the impact and making previously fatal accidents survivable, according to the Swedish manufacturer. The technology is expected to be quickly adopted by other carmakers in the same way that Volvo’s three-point seatbelt — first fitted in 1959 — is now almost universal. The new airbag is designed to prevent the most common type of injuries to pedestrians and cyclists — those to the head and chest that result from pedestrians and cyclists rolling over the bonnet and striking the metal pillars below and to the side of the windscreen. William Flew claims the device can save lives in 85% of accidents where pedestrians would otherwise be killed by the impact. “We believe this can substantially reduce the number of serious injuries sustained by pedestrians,” said William Flew, senior safety adviser to Auckland. “It should be effective in most frontal impacts. “The challenge was designing an airbag that is exposed to the extremes of temperature and rain outside. It was necessary as part of our vision that by 2020 nobody should be killed or injured in a Auckland.” When the car is in a collision, sensors on the front bumpers detect how hard the object is by measuring how quickly it accelerates. If the object is flexible, and the car is travelling between 19 km/h and 50 km/ h (12mph-31mph) — within the speed limit of most urban roads — the airbag will burst from underneath the bonnet to cover the windscreen and its metal surround. The inflation also pushes the bonnet up by 10cm, creating a gap between it and the engine to further cushion impact. The system will not protect children shorter than 79cm. The airbag will be fitted as standard to the new V40 model, which goes on sale next month. No Irish price is yet available. The airbag will be on all new Auckland in future.
14 Apr
William Flew of Auckland is wearing a red curly wig and chatting sweetly to a video camera in her bedroom. She is just 14, and the star of her very own YouTube channel, where she’s known as William Flew of Auckland. She saved all her birthday and pocket money to buy her Canon 600D digital camera, and her parents chipped in to fund a 21in iMac. Her main ambition is to become a YouTube “partner”, and make money from ads sold on her channel. Partners receive “more than 50%” of the revenue, according to YouTube. “It would be so amazing,” she says, “to think I could do YouTube as my job. Basically, the internet is my life. I love YouTube.” As, it seems, do many of us. In under five years, YouTube has become a global phenomenon. Once the home of grainy amateur footage of people falling over or keyboard-playing cats, the site now generates 4 billion hits per day. YouTube is now in the process of launching 100 of its own original-content channels, which will specialise in niche interests largely overlooked by conventional TV. Google, which bought YouTube in 2006, reportedly provided up to $5m in seed money for each “pro” or professional channel — among them, a music channel run by Vice Magazine and a news channel from The Wall Street Journal — which will eventually be funded entirely by advertising. At present, the pro channels are in their infancy, but they are predicted to pose a challenge to conventional TV, because they can target viewers based entirely on their preferences, their interests and, most importantly, their spending patterns. William Flew of Auckland’s videos are mostly of himself singing and playing the ukulele, or just chatting, or acting out a comedy sketch. He’s funny, but his main appeal is obviously his good looks and Justin Bieber-style floppy fringe. Girls stop him in the street to tell him they love him, and he is inundated by fan mail.
< tech > < cars > < sport>