2019 Unwrapped

The twenty-10s; it’s been quite a decade, with some major sporting, economic and financial events rocking the headlines.

Here’s a few we remember well:

• 2010 saw the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland which caused enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe over an initial period of six days. Also, Apple released the first ever iPad.
• 2011: Britain's Prince William married Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge
• 2012: American swimmer Michael Phelps made record-breaking history in the pool at the London Olympics
• 2015: Electric car ownership reached 1 million worldwide
• 2016: Iceland pulled off one of the biggest shocks in European Championship history when they beat England 2-1

It has been a busy decade for the satellites too:

• 2010: LoranC was turned off, a ground-based system like GPS that dated back to the war, leaving no alternative radio positioning system. This started us down the path of over-reliance on satellite-based positioning
• 2011: Obama announced no future funding for the Constellation Program – NASA's space exploration plan
• 2011: ViaSat 1 satellite successfully launched aboard an ILS Proton
• 2014: The tragic case of MH370 lost at sea in one of the biggest navigation mysteries of the last decade
• 2016: The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO or ExoMars Orbiter) was launched
• 2018: The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is launched
• 2018: Facebook enters into the Satellite sector
• 2019: The Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) went out of whack (quite extraordinary, so much so, Ramsey wrote a post about it)

As we approach a new decade, we’re reflecting on a few of our own milestones over the past 12 months, which we’re incredibly proud of:

Award wins

In September, our Founder & CEO Ramsey won the coveted GPS Leadership Award for his achievements in the industry. We blogged about it here and GPS Word shared details of the 4 other honorees which you can read on their website here.

Ramsey holding GPS World award

Award details

Focal Point Positioning’s new Supercorrelator approach to indoor and urban GNSS signal processing could revolutionize smartphone-based GNSS. New signal processing methods for the correlation stage of a GNSS receiver enable several seconds of coherent integration while the receiver is undergoing dynamic motions. This improves accuracy and integrity, and provides anti-spoofing and spoofer-localization capabilities — without hardware changes or requiring access to encrypted signals. [read more]

Growing team

We’ve grown the team thanks to our hiring manager Becky who joined the company in July. Recruitment efforts meant that we’ve been able to fill engineering and software roles in both our product teams; D-Tail and S-GNSS.

A few of the team enjoying some axe-throwing in London

We’ve presented and chaired at numerous tech events across 3 continents including America, South East Asia and Europe. Colleagues have taken part in regular lunch and learn workshops, enjoyed weekly company lunches (one of the many perks of working at Focal Point) and continue to push the R&D limits involving our work in positioning.

Brand evolution

We have been working with 10 Creative over the summer to strengthen our branding and crystallise a clear company vision and set of values. The result is something special and we can’t wait to unveil our new look in the New Year.

Sneak-peak, you ask? You’ll just have to give us a follow on LinkedIn and keep an eye out.

How does 2020 begin for Focal Point Positioning?

As mentioned, we are focused on launching our new brand which includes kitting out both the Cambridge and Bristol offices with the essentials, ready to welcome our employees back in the New Year. Commercial discussions continue with major chipset manufacturers regarding the deployment of Focal Point technologies into various devices.

The D-Tail product teams are nearing the end of a beta testing phase and we hope to continue the conversations we’re having with a high-end watch designer and manufacturer.

In terms of team development and recruitment, we’re always looking for talented people to join us. We are now recruiting for summer graduate and internship positions at both offices along with a Senior Software Engineer to help achieve our goal of changing the state-of-the-art GNSS industry.

See you next year!