Awards honour female inventors

Morag Hutcheon has won the 2006 British Female Inventor of the Year award for 'pre.vu' an audio device integrated into the spine of a standard CD tray. The award was presented at the

conference held in

’s Guildhall.

Pre.vu allows potential buyers to press a button on a CD case and hear 60 seconds of sound, which could be a snippet of music or an introduction by the artiste. Other planned applications include spoken installation instructions to accompany a mobile phone SIM card and personally recorded messages to accompany gifts or flowers.

Hutcheon said, “We had to fiddle with the acoustic design of the speaker cavity a lot to boost the bass and get the required quality without tinniness in the space of a standard CD case. Then we had to re-engineer all the components to fit.”

The invention includes the software that compresses the files and the machinery to upload the audio. Two recording devices are available to businesses that want to employ the technology. A high-speed uploader loads audio files into the device at a rate of 80 per second and a desktop version records a single one in three seconds via a computer USB port.