Features

If you think playing computer games is not for you because you are not a little child anymore you should think twice. There is more in gaming than meets the eye.

Some don’t play because their life style or their work doesn’t leave time for that. This is perfectly understandable. Others don’t because they feel it’s just not serious to play. This is less understandable.

Whether you are a gamer or not, the gaming industry is a side of high tech you just cannot ignore. Between offline (home consoles mainly) and online games, the sector represented an average of $85 billion turnover for each of the past two years 2013 and 2014.

The diversity of the games you can play and the various age brackets that are concerned draw a large palette that is hard to describe or analyse in a few words or even a few paragraphs. It’s an entire world on its own.

However, one aspect of gaming concerns us all; it is the gamification of e-learning.

E-Learning is an exploding phenomenon that started 15 years ago. By the year 2020 it is estimated that half of learning in the world will be done online. The market will involve $105 billion this year alone.

It makes therefore perfect sense to use the attractive and motivating features of gaming in e-learning to boost productivity, to make it more pleasurable and to achieve better results. Combining gaming with e-learning is a winning formula that only presents advantages. Create courses that are shaped and designed like computer games is the ultimate digital form in the education field.

Keeping score, setting different levels of the game, creating avatars, competing with friends, being part of a story, feeling rewarded by the results and the scores, making it all lively, not forgetting the dynamism and the challenge that all games bring, it all creates a scope of ideal edutainment.

Big corporation are creating their own gamification for e-learning. It is in no way a simple task as it involves a huge dose of creativity, as well as great programming skills, teaching experience, and overall requires large, expensive teams to achieve good results. Look at the credits that roll with advanced gaming and you can easily compare them with the credits that come at the end of major motion pictures that cost tens of millions of dollars and make teams of hundreds work.

“… there is actually an exact science behind why gamification in eLearning is so successful… [It] improves knowledge absorption and retention.” (Christopher Pappas, Dec-2014). 

Given the cost of developing quality gamification for e-learning, for now only the wealthy actors of the private sector seem able to generate good products. In Jordan the activity is hardly emerging and a lot remains to be done. One can bet, however, that locally designed and developed games for e-learning are expected to appear on the market as early as this year.

PARIS — Women who are obese while pregnant may put their offspring at risk of childhood diabetes, a condition that requires lifelong insulin therapy, Swedish researchers recently said.

A study of more than 1.2 million children born in Sweden between 1992 and 2004 and monitored for several years, found a 33-per cent higher risk for the disease among children whose mothers were obese during the first trimester of pregnancy, but were not diabetic themselves

“Maternal overweight and obesity in early pregnancy were associated with increased risk of type 1 diabetes in the offspring of parents without diabetes,” a team wrote in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

The highest risk was still for children of parents who had diabetes themselves, the study found. There was no additional risk for children of mothers who were obese on top of having diabetes.

Over 5,700 children from the study group were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes by 2009.

Type 1 diabetes is usually found in children and young people — a chronic condition caused when the pancreas does not produce insulin to control blood sugar levels. It requires lifelong insulin treatment, and constitutes about 10 per cent of all diabetes cases — though the number is growing.

And the increase “may partly be explained by increasing prevalence of maternal overweight/obesity”, said the study.

People with a BMI (body weight index, a ratio of weight to height) of 25 and higher are classified overweight, while 30 and over obese. 

Obesity, too, is soaring, having more than doubled worldwide since 1980. By 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults were overweight, of whom 600 million were obese, according to the World Health Organisation. 

Type 2 diabetes is much more common than type 1 and is believed to be caused by lifestyle factors, and controlled through healthy diet, exercise and medication.

“Prevention of overweight and obesity in women of reproductive age may contribute to a decreased incidence of type 1 diabetes,” the study concluded.

AMMAN — Interweaving past with modern cultural aesthetics, Sudanese artist Abdul Qader Bakheit present the Nile River as “the source of all civilisations” in his exhibition “The Nile Breeze”.

“It is a geographical location that supports various cultures and traditions,” Bakheit told The Jordan Times.

The exhibition focuses on culture from that region and the woman, who according to Bakheit, “play an integral part of this world”.

“Most of my works include the presence of the female. The woman symbolises life; life without her is not complete, to me she represents stability,” Bakheit said.

To bring the essence of the Nile’s culture into his art, Bakheit used carpets as his canvas.

“Each year I try to use different mediums and this year I decided to integrate carpet into my works,” Bakheit said, “I worked on carpet known as ‘birsh’ that is made of a specific type of tree leaves. This kind of carpet is very commonly used in countries surrounding the Nile such as Egypt and Sudan at weddings, to sleep on, for prayer and for sitting in general.”

The exhibition also includes works in acrylic on canvas and watercolour on paper, all created during the past four years.

Bakheit, who currently resides in Jordan, said that there needs to be continuous experimentation for the technique used to be seamlessly integrated within the context of the work.

The exhibition runs at Dar Al Anda Art Gallery until May 27. 

Watching pictures of the arrival of little princess of Cambridge this week, I was reminded of my own childhood. Thankfully the youngest British royal baby’s month of birth did not coincide with that of her sibling. 

When I was younger, I thought it was one of the worst things that could ever happen to me. I had to share my birth month with that of my older brother, who was born exactly nine days before my arrival. So I could not claim the month entirely as my own special one because it was also his. Special month, that is. 

It was no fair, especially since he did not care much about the matching party dresses or the doll shaped cake that was prepared. Our mother cut our clothes from the same cloth, quite literally also. If I wore a chequered frilly frock, my brother’s sailor suit was handmade in a similar print too. We looked like two frowning peas, forcibly stuck together in the same pod. 

Since throwing two birthday parties within the span of a few days was terribly expensive, my parents would combine them into one and invite our common friends. I was given the option of selecting the birthday cake while my brother got the choice of organising the party games. Therefore throughout our pre-teen years our photographs show both of us either cutting girly cakes in the shape of pink hearts, or playing a rough boyish sport-like cops and robbers.

With the passage of time our parents became wiser and decided to allow us to have individual celebratory parties, or none at all, if we so wished. But it took them a long time to reach that stage. By then we had gone our separate ways and moved to different cities for higher education. 

I thought I had seen the last of common birthday parties till I met my husband. As luck would have it, he shared not only the birth month but also the birth date with, of all people, my own mother. Only their year of birth was a little more than two decades apart. 

My mom could not stop beaming when she learned about this bit of coincidence. Her son-in-law suddenly gained in stature and could do no wrong in her eyes after that. I could forget about any support from her if we ever had an argument because she would always take his side.

On their birthday they would call each other up in the morning. 

“Birthday greetings, son,” my mother would greet. 

“Thank you Aunty, same to you,” my spouse would respond. 

If they were in the same town, they rejoiced in having a combined celebration. Quite unlike my brother and my childhood angst over a joint party, this mother and son pair-in-law would spread happiness with their shared merriment. 

When I lost my mum 12 years ago my husband felt her loss deeply too, especially around the time of their birthday. I was so cooped up in my own misery that it took me quite a while to notice this but when I did, I decided to make amends. On this weekend we were up early with the cake. 

“Happy birthday Dad,” our daughter announced. 

“Thank you little one,” my spouse answered. 

“Happy birthday Mom,” I said. 

“Many thanks, on behalf of Nani,” our daughter giggled. 

“Happy birthday Aunty,” my husband took the cue. 

“Same to you son, on behalf of Nani,” we chorused together.

NEW YORK — On a recent morning, Roger Tarazon and several friends gathered a few blocks from their Queens, New York high school. Some smoked traditional cigarettes, but Tarazon and a few others puffed on electronic vaping devices.

“Sometimes I use it to relax,” the 18-year-old senior said of the device. He also uses it to perform tricks with the vapour, blowing smoke rings or creating funnels of smoke that look like miniature tornadoes.

“I don’t do it to show off,” he said. “I just do them because I’m bored.”

Tarazon’s embrace of such tricks reflects a growing trend among US teenagers, whose use of e-cigarettes tripled in the last year alone. New research provided to Reuters has found that performing tricks is one of the top two reasons young users say they consider the devices cool.

Public health officials have warned for several years of the attraction of flavoured nicotine liquid to teens and tweens, and have urged regulators to ban them. Consumers have a wide range of flavour choices, including menthol, single-malt scotch, cappuccino and pomegranate.

But the role of tricks in enticing young people to use e-cigarettes has not previously been explored. Now researchers are asking whether they could help hook a new generation who otherwise would not have used nicotine.

“We expected the flavours were attractive,” said Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, a psychiatry professor at the Yale School of Medicine. “But smoke tricks were a surprise to us.”

Krishnan-Sarin and her team, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, asked 5,400 Connecticut teens to identify what they found “cool about e-cigarettes?”

The top two answers were: the flavours of the vaping liquids, and the “ability to do tricks”.

Electronic devices produce much more vapour, especially when adjusted to operate at high temperatures, than conventional cigarettes, which helps facilitate the vapour tricks. Teen interest in performing them comes as “cloud competitions”, are increasing in popularity.

The contests, in which adult vapers, as they call themselves, compete to perform the best tricks and create the biggest and densest vapour clouds, are becoming a regular feature at local vale shops. Some regional competitions offer thousands of dollars in prize money.

Thousands of videos demonstrating expert vaping and how to perform tricks have been posted on YouTube and Instagram. “Even if [teenagers] don’t attend these events they are exposed to a lot of these issues,” Krishnan-Sarin said.

Alarm over teen use

E-cigarette use by US tweens and teens tripled in 2014 to 13.4 per cent from 4.5 per cent in 2013, according to data released in April by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall tobacco use during that period dropped to 9.2 per cent from 12.7 per cent. 

The data prompted new alarm among public health advocates, who urged the Obama administration to quickly finalise proposed rules that will allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate e-cigarettes for the first time.

Using e-cigarettes is considered less risky than smoking traditional tobacco cigarettes, which increase the likelihood of lung cancer and other disease. But several studies have found that heating the liquids used in electronic devices to very high temperatures could release formaldehyde, a carcinogen.

“If you don’t smoke, if you don’t use tobacco products, there is no reason to experiment with electronic cigarettes,” said Maciej L. Goniewicz, a professor at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, who has done some of the formaldehyde research.

Tarazon and other teens said their favourite tricks include something called the “dragon”, in which vapour is exhaled from both nostrils and sides of their mouth. They learn the tricks from each other or by watching online videos with demonstrations set to popular music.

Many are of cloud competitions, which started on the West Coast a few years ago but are now popular nationwide. The majority are low-key events at vape shops where winners typically are awarded devices or gift cards.

But there are also beginning to be far more serious competitions. The Vape Capitol Cloud Championship, for example, will offer $10,000 for the Biggest Cloud and the best Vape Tricks.

The competitors — mostly men in their 20s and 30s — train to increase their lung capacity by blowing up balloons and by using diving equipment and plastic breathing devices typically used after surgery. The events bar minors from competing, and often from attending, too, though there is no law prohibiting them from being part of the audience.

“We’re aware that there is a niche group that enjoys participating in vaper competitions,” said Phil Daman, president of the Smoke-Free Alternative Trade Association. “Any use of these products should be strictly limited to adults.”

Chris Esker, at Fogwind Vapour in Effingham, Illinois, said he’d rather not have minors attend the store’s events, but he can’t prevent parents from bringing their kids.

Esker converted his T-shirt store into a vale shop about a year ago. Sales have been so strong that he hopes to open this year two more stores.

“There are kids doing back flips on dirt bikes,” said Esker, who began smoking at age 12 but now vapes. “There are way worse things they can be doing.”

Washington — The latest iPhones have helped Apple gain smartphone market share in Europe and China, with a large number of customers switching from Android devices, a market tracker said Wednesday.

Kantar Worldpanel also said that in the United States, the market for "phablets", or large-screen smartphones, has quadrupled over the past year, also helping Apple with its iPhone 6 Plus.

The newest data showed that in urban China, Apple boosted its share to 26.1 per cent in the first quarter, up from 17.9 per cent for the same period in 2014. Android's market share in China, meanwhile, slipped 8 points to 72 per cent.

China is now driving more volume for Apple than the US, Kantar said.

Kantar found that Apple lifted its smartphone share in Europe's five largest markets by 1.8 points to 20.3 per cent in the quarter. One-third of Apple's new customers switched from Android in these markets — Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

"The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus continued to attract consumers across Europe, including users who previously owned an Android smartphone," reported Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar.

Android's market share in the big EU markets share declined by 3.1 percentage points compared to last year, to 68.4 per cent, Kantar said.But the free Google Android operating system is still dominant due to a price advantage.

"In Great Britain, while 25.6 per cent of new iOS buyers switched from Android during the quarter, Android's leadership remains strong, thanks to the price options consumers have in both the contract and pre-pay market," said Dominic Sunnebo, business unit director at Kantar.

"Thirty-five per cent of consumers who bought an Android smartphone in the first quarter said their decision was driven by receiving a good price on the phone. Another 29 per cent said that getting a good deal on the tariff/contract was a factor in their purchase."

In the US, Android's market share made a modest 0.2 per cent gain in market share to 58.1 per cent while Apple lost the same amount to 36.5 per cent, losing a bit of momentum after a big surge in late 2014.

The survey found US customers are increasingly opting for bigger phones or "phablets" with displays of 5.5 inches or bigger. This segment represented 21 per cent of all US smartphone sales in the first quarter, from a 6 per cent share a year ago.

Apple's iPhone 6 Plus took 44 per cent of this segment, according to Kantar.

"Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus already represent 18 per cent of all iPhones in use in the US, and 64 per cent of the iPhone installed base uses an iPhone 5 or newer — good news for the Apple Watch that interacts only with these newer models," Milanesi said.

NEW YORK — Patients with type-2 diabetes who are overweight but not obese outlive diabetics of normal weight, scientists reported on Monday, in another example of the “obesity paradox”.

Although public health officials issue dire warnings about the consequences of overweight, and employers are pressuring workers to slim down via “wellness programmes”, the relationship between weight and longevity is paradoxical: Studies show that although obesity increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD), overweight patients with CVD live longer than patients of normal weight.

Similarly, obesity increases the chances of developing type-2 diabetes. But it wasn’t clear if overweight confers a survival advantage in diabetics.

Sixteen previous studies got conflicting answers: Some found overweight diabetics had lower mortality; others didn’t. But many were hobbled by methodological problems including few patients, short follow-up, or using questionnaires rather than clinic records.

The new study tried to do better. Researchers led by doctors Stephen Atkin and Pierluigi Costanzo of Britain’s University of Hull followed 10,568 patients with type-2 diabetes for an average of nearly 11 years.

Although overweight and obese patients had an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, they were more likely to stay alive than normal-weight diabetics, the researchers reported in Annals of Internal Medicine.

(Overweight is defined as a body mass index of 25 to 29.9, which would be 66 to 77kg for someone 1.63 metres. Normal weight means a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9, or 108 to 145 pounds at that height.)

Underweight diabetics had the highest risk of dying during the study, with nearly three times the mortality of normal-weight patients. Overweight patients had the best survival, being 13 per cent less likely to die than normal-weight or obese diabetics.

That result was at odds with a 2014 study in the New England Journal of Medicine that found no survival advantage with extra weight. That study, however, used the upper end of normal weight as the comparison. If it had used the full range of 18.5 to 24.9, Costanzo said, “it’s likely” the results “would have been similar to ours”.

One way extra weight might keep diabetics alive longer is if overweight protects against frailty and osteoporosis, which can kill. Alternatively, diabetes in lean people might take an especially lethal form.

“It’s likely those diabetic patients with normal weight have a more aggressive form of type-2 diabetes compared to those who are overweight and obese,” Costanzo said.

Los Angeles Times (TNS)

One of the greatest mysteries of how stars behave has been right in our own backyard: the sun’s corona. Scientists have long wondered what heats this thin, ethereal shell of particles to roughly 300 times the temperature of the surface of the sun itself.

Now, after combining evidence from a sounding rocket and a black-hole-hunting telescope and computer modelling, researchers say they’ve found the cause: nanoflares.

“We have for the first time direct proof that nanoflares exist and heat the corona,” said Jim Klimchuk, a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md. “This proof takes the form of superhot plasma... it’s a real breakthrough.”

The findings, described at the first Triennial Earth-Sun Summit meeting underway in Indianapolis, may help solve the decades-old mystery of what powers the corona and help scientists better predict the effects of space weather on Earth.

The solar corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, is so incredibly faint that it can only be seen with the naked eye during a solar eclipse, when the moon completely blocks out the sun’s bright body, leaving only the corona’s ghostly glow.

While the sun’s surface is around 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit, the corona, which extends high above the sun’s surface and into space, sports temperatures of around 4 million degrees, and can even hit 18 million degrees in some spots. Scientists have been stumped when it comes to explaining how this wispy shell of gas so far away from the sun’s blazing core can get superheated to such extremes.

Researchers have long suspected that nanoflares exist and might account for the corona’s mysterious heating source, but they haven’t been able to prove it. Nanoflares, so called because they’re one-billionth the size of typical solar flares, are still powerful, packing the equivalent energy of a 10-megaton hydrogen bomb. While they’re small by the sun’s standards, there are so many of them — millions going off each second on the sun’s surface — that they have the potential to heat the corona to its incredible temperatures.

The problem for researchers is that nanoflares are so small and brief that they’re hard to pick out against the overwhelming brightness of the sun. But now, researchers working on different lines of inquiry each say they’ve found strong evidence that nanoflares exist.

To get a better look at the sun, scientists flew a sounding rocket equipped with an instrument called the Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incidence Spectrograph for 15 minutes, looking for signs of super-heated gas (around 9.9 million degrees Celsius). Using this instrument, lead scientist Adrian Daw, a solar scientist at Goddard, was able to find those bits of gas, which scientists say are heated to those extreme temperatures by the nanoflares.

“That superhot plasma emission that we’re seeing there is the smoking gun of nanoflares,” Daw said.

Scientists also used NASA’s NuSTAR telescope to look for evidence of nanoflares. NuSTAR is used to study the X-rays coming from black holes, among other high-energy phenomena, but it can also be used to study X-ray emissions coming from regions of the sun where normal-sized flares could not be detected. These regions were popping with X-ray energy, a sign that nanoflares were at work, Iain Hannah, an astrophysicist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, said in a media briefing in Indianapolis.

The scientists think these nanoflares are caused by the twisting and breaking of magnetic field lines around the sun, Klimchuk said, though it will be a while before they can probe exactly how the nanoflares work.

Tracking how nanoflares might contribute to the space weather that reaches Earth is very important, he added, because such solar radiation can disrupt terrestrial technology, including weapons guidance systems, navigation systems and anything that involves radio transmissions.

“We need to understand how these hot plasmas are created and produce these X-rays and UV radiation so we can better understand and prepare for their effects here on Earth,” Klimchuk said.

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles art scene is exploding thanks to a wave of artists and galleries escaping New York, which has become over-crowded and too expensive for young creative types.

“An enormous number of artists are coming to set up in LA,” said Philippe Vergne, director of the West Coast city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), citing exorbitant real estate costs in the Big Apple in particular.

“In art, it is like in real estate: you have to follow the artists, that’s where it’s going to develop,” he said, asserting that LA is “the city with the highest density of artists in the world”.

Martha Kirszenbaum, director and curator of the Fahrenheit Arts Centre, which opened just over a year ago in a booming area of downtown LA, added: “LA’s strength is the artists, and the schools which have trained generations of artists.”

The City of Angels is known for some of the most prestigious art schools in the country, including CalArts, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC).

It is also already home to leading contemporary artists including John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, James Turrell, Chris Burden, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, Ed Ruscha and the late Mike Kelley.

Galleries, even if their number remains tiny compared to the hundreds which crowd New York, are popping up in increasing numbers in Los Angeles, with its year-round blue skies and wide open spaces.

“New York is so saturated, we’d be the 700th little gallery, versus in LA it is in a very interesting state of flux,” said Karolina Dankow, director of Zurich-based Karma, which has just opened a gallery in Los Angeles.

“Everybody knows the very big galleries are moving here,” she added, pointing to figures such as Larry Gagosian, one of the world’s biggest art dealers, or Michele Maccarone, Gavin Brown and Matthew Marks, who have moved from New York.

That is without mentioning the new art fairs which flourish beneath the palm trees: Paramount Ranch or Paris Photo Los Angeles, whose third edition wrapped up on Sunday.

Even the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC), one of the biggest contemporary art fairs in the world, has been talking about organising a Los Angeles version.

The New York Times wrote about the trend over the weekend, noting the irony of creative types including musician Moby moving to a city long sneered at by East Coast types.

“Chased out by rising rents, punishing winters and general malaise, New Yorkers [are heading] west to the city they once poked fun at,” it wrote. 

The East Coast’s arts calendar can be overcrowded with events like the Armory Show in New York or Art Basel Miami.

For this reason, “it makes sense to come to the West Coast,” said Jean-Daniel Compain of Reed, which organises FIAC and Paris Photo.

Admittedly, in terms of institutions, it is difficult to go up against New York with its Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Met, the Whitney, Guggenheim, Dia Art Foundation and New Museum, to mention only a few.

“We don’t have the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ in a permanent collection here,” said Vergne, referring to Picasso’s famous 1907 painting hung at the MoMA.

Catching up with East Coast

“We are sometimes 100 years late compared to some institutions on the East Coast,” said Michael Govan, director of the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA), which is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

“We have a wonderful collection, but in many ways we’re still catching up,” he said, adding that it has received donations of works by Edgar Degas, Andy Warhol and Claude Monet for its “50 for 50” exhibition.

“There’s a little less of the traditional blockbuster big names here,” he said. 

“But... we enjoy our status of a little bit off-centre, and for me it’s much more fun to enjoy new topics, projects.”

In terms of visitors, LACMA, which welcomes 1.2 million people annually, is way behind MoMA, which opens its doors to 2.5 million people every year. But the Los Angeles museum’s numbers have doubled in eight years.

Govan also highlights that his museum hosted a Tim Burton show which was previously at the MoMA, and a retrospective of US artist James Turrell which went on to Asia.

“I’ve made it a high priority that our shows travel because I think Los Angeles, California has a lot to say,” he said.

Meanwhile Los Angeles’ artist expansion continues apace: philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad will open a museum in September to house their collection of 2,000 art works including pieces by Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Cindy Sherman.

The French-Moroccan fashion designer Maurice and Paul Marciano, brothers who made their fortune with the Guess brand, are working on a museum project to showcase their own collection.

AMSTERDAM  — Dutch navigation company TomTom aims to become a main provider of technology for self-driving cars as it charts its way back to success after seven lean years, CEO Harold Goddijn said.

Goddijn told Reuters that an overhaul of TomTom’s digital mapping architecture lies behind a renaissance that has seen its automotive division win big contracts in recent months, prompting analyst upgrades and a 40 per cent surge in its shares.

He said carmakers are now betting on TomTom as one of the few companies besides Google capable of providing location data good enough and fast enough to meet the safety requirements for computer assisted driving — and ultimately, self-driving cars.

“We are seen by our customers as the guys with the right ideas on how you do those things,” he said in a interview, relishing the company’s comeback story.

A rare example of a global consumer electronics brand to come out of Europe in the 2000s, TomTom went into a tailspin after overpaying for digital map-maker TeleAtlas in 2008.

The market for its main product, personal navigation devices, entered a brutal decline. Prices fell and margins were crushed as cheaper competitors entered an increasingly saturated market for dashboard-mounted GPS systems, and smartphone navigation apps offered an even cheaper substitute.

With the PND market stabilising, Goddijn thinks TomTom’s other business lines are poised for a new cycle of growth.

Analysts’ enthusiasm has been fired by contract wins with carmakers, including two with Volkswagen this year as well as deals with Fiat , Hyundai and Kia.

Diversification

But TomTom’s revenue base has also diversified. Its consumer product offerings have expanded to include fitness watches and a line of ‘GoPro’-style action cameras launched this week.

It also licenses its digital maps to tech giants. One of TomTom’s few bright moments during the dark years came in 2012, when Apple, seeking to end its reliance on Google , choose TomTom’s maps to use in its own navigation app, starting with the iPhone 6.

And finally, TomTom has been quietly building up a “telematics” business, providing the telecommunications systems used in car fleet management, which has become the largest of its kind in Europe’s fragmented market.

In the interview, Goddijn said the unit, which reported sales of 110 million euros ($124 million) in 2014, has the potential to grow sales at more than 20 per cent per year for the coming five years without acquisitions.

But TomTom’s mapping technology is at the core of investor demand that has given the company a 1.8 billion euro market capitalisation despite 2014 profits of just 22.7 million euros.

The company’s maps can now be redrawn on the fly, integrating feedback from cars on the road, and then shared immediately with other drivers.

“No one else has that,” Goddijn said, flatly.

‘Exciting and scary’

Cars are increasingly equipped with multiple sensors, not only GPS positioning and mobile phone connections but radars, cameras and driver heart-rate monitoring systems. Lidar (reflected laser imaging) may also be added in future.

Goddijn said the overhaul of TomTom’s digital mapping architecture “gives us a lot of confidence” this proliferation of data can be processed in a way that ensures users’ safety.

“It’s exciting and it’s scary, because millions of cars will come and there’s tonnes of data going to be produced,” he said.

The biggest question mark hanging over TomTom’s strategic future is Nokia’s plan, announced this month, to sell its map-making arm HERE, which has US roots. Google, TomTom and HERE are the three major digital map-makers with the potential for use in self-driving cars.

Though TomTom has won almost all major automaker contracts renewed in the past year, HERE still has more than 70 per cent of the automotive market.

Potential buyers include tech giants Apple and Uber, or less realistically, Microsoft, which could have taken HERE when it bought Nokia’s smart phone operations. Google is also mentioned although it already has its own technology.

A consortium of automakers who view Google as an undesirable rival is also seen as a realistic possible buyer of HERE, as are private equity buyers who could build the business up — or wind it down. The worst case scenario for TomTom would probably be a takeover of HERE by navigation arch-rival Garmin Ltd.

What does Goddijn think will happen?

“That question is too complex to handle,” he said. “Even if I wanted to I couldn’t give you the answers, because a lot of it depends on who it is and how they want to handle it.”

He said his focus for now is on continuing TomTom’s winning streak with automakers.

“Let’s face it, our market share is not where it should be. There is an incumbent and we need to take market share away.”