Electronic spies come in all shapes and sizes, but none is as funny looking as an oyster impersonator called the Flex Spy now infiltrating the waters off western France.
Looking for all the world like the bivalves it is protecting, the plastic imposter is fitted with a circuit board that allows it to snitch on thieves.
Invented by French start-up Flex-Sense, the device has been on the market since September.
Photo: AFP
After the first prototypes were tested in Vietnam, the gadgets are now making their appearance in the oyster beds off France’s Atlantic coast, with a major deployment planned in February.
Several dozen tonnes of oysters are stolen each year out of France’s total production of 100,000 tonnes.
“It may not be a big proportion, but it is a lot for the operator who is robbed” after seeing much of his production wiped out by a mystery disease for the past several years, said oyster farmer Gerald Viaud, president of France’s shellfish farmers’ association.
Theft is a “real problem” in the sector, which is “always on the lookout for solutions,” from surveillance cameras to ground, sea and air patrols, he said.
One quirkier approach is to fill an oyster shell with cement stamped with the farmer’s phone number in the hope that a vendor who finds it among stolen oysters will contact the victim.
Enter Flex-Sense, which was founded 18 months ago specializing in wireless telemetry in complex environments.
Initially it was interested in offering shellfish farmers a way to monitor water temperature, salinity and oxygen concentration from a distance to enable them to limit the mortality rates of their mussels and oysters.
However, customers were also interested in ways to prevent thefts, which spike ahead of the holiday season.
After months of development, the electronic oyster was hatched.
Infiltrated into an oyster bed, the waterproof, pressure-resistant Flex Spy is equipped with an antenna, a simple motion detector, a buzzer and a frequency modulator, said Sylvain Dardenne, co-founder and commercial director of Flex-Sense.
The user pulls out a pin — think hand grenade — before setting the energy-efficient device among the oysters.
The electronic spy kicks into action if it detects suspicious movement, transmitting an alert to the oyster farmer’s phone or computer.
The user can then track the oysters’ movements for up to a week.
If left to “sleep” without the need to report intruders, the Flex Spy can lurk in its watery field of operations for 60 months with no need for recharging — more than 20 times more than any geo tracker, Dardenne said.
“Since you can’t monitor the entire shoreline, you have to innovate,” Viaud said. “The electronic oyster may not be the ideal solution, but it’s a step in the right direction.”
It is too early to judge the device’s effectiveness, however, since no thieves have yet been caught.
So far Flex-Sense has about 50 clients who pay 10 euros (US$10.45) per month for each Flex Spy, Dardenne said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts