Today is the 25th of September. Because I went to bed too early last night I woke up at 7 today after which I went out to get a fresh nose. Fresh is relative because at night the temperature doesn't drop below 25 degrees but still it was nice. It was Hugo's birthday so he gave away bananas which fell into good earth. Then in the bus to the Science Park, ofcourse under loud singing of "happy birthday". Because everyone was miraculously on time at the meeting point we arrived half an hour early. This gave us time to admire the view over sea, we all agreed that the Science Park in Enschede should also have a view like this. After 30 minutes almost everyone met at the right conference room, some were lucky enough to have admired the view from the 6th floor but soon we were all ready.
We were greeted by the CMO of Convenient Power, mr Bas Fransen and his colleagues Laurens and Angelo. After a short introduction about himself mr Fransen told us in half-Dutch half-English that the batteries of mobile devices have not improved much in the past years, but that the energy requirements of those devices are increasing rapidly. This creates a gap between supply and demand. The solution provided by Convenient Power is to make recharging a device easier. This is done by placing an induction loop in e.g. your mobile phone, when this is placed on a charching unit the battery is charged wirelessly. Other applications for this include remote controls and hearing aids and we were ensured that the market for this is very big. This is why together with Philips they founded a consortium called Qi which already includes 126 companies. In Japan and the US there are already cell phones on the market with Qi-technology in them, and there are plans to build charging coils into restaurant tables, very cool. There were also some demo models present with which we could play.
Against the advice of the people of Convenient Power we went for lunch on the Science Park in a place where the airco was set to 18 degrees but the food was fine. After that we took the bus back to the hotel because there was free time planned. I used this time productively to organise the cultural programme for Wednesday, more on that tomorrow. Ather that we went for diner with a small group to a Nepalese restaurant on Temple Street. The curry was great and bad music video's were playing on the tv, one of which was recorded in the Keukenhof. Next we agreed to meet at Victoria Harbor for the Sympony of Lights, a daily lasershow. Unfortunately this was not as cool as I thought, but fortunately the booze cruise began shortly. We were picked up by a double deck boat with open bar, needless to say the beer and whiskey went like hot breads over the counter. For a moment we were the only ones on board, but soon the captain though it neccesary to pick up a group of British elderly people. Unfortunately for them we outnumbered them, and aside from some skirmishes we coexisted peacefully. As said the Dutch courage flowed richly, unfortunately there were no sanitairy facilities on board which caused high tensions after one and a half hour. We quickly went looking for a bar to drain our bladders and found one just in time. After a mandatory beer we went after the stomping music looking for a night club. When this was found it turned out the other Spockers were also there. This Ansluss was celebrated with liter mugs of Hoegaarden. Then there was a lot of drinking, dancing and tongue wrestling, and halfway through the night I took a taxi back to the hostel. It was a good day.
Thomas Kerkhof