Tornado Labs is a 100% technology company. Necessity is the mother of invention and human needs drive us. Tornado Labs uses Intelligent technology as a tool to solve human problems. Tornado Labs is the best Intelligent software house in the world because we only recruit the Smartest, most Passionate and Honest people, and provide them with an environment where they can maximize their potential.

The Internet is becoming the 21^st century's answer to the famous ancient library of Alexandria. The present phenomenal growth of the Internet will gradually stabilize. The World Wide Web is non-hierarchical by nature and the content is being updated at an enormous rate - the most pressing issue is becoming how people can find their way through this maze of continuously changing data.

Current search engines are not usable by a large section of society, such as non-computer literate people, or people with disabilities. Tornado Labs will provide solutions to allow these groups to become part of the Internet community. It will apply technologies from the field of Artificial Intelligence along with innovative human-computer interfaces.

Two elements are relevant when explaining how we develop software. First, a static component, our Software Development Process, which is rigorously applied, regardless of whether it is an internal project of work carried out for clients. This process forms the backbone for all our work.

Tornado Labs works with clients to draft the Functional Specification, which outlines their software requirements and expectations. The Functional Specification formalizes the requirements of the application and serves as a functional description of the contract. It also ensures the client is made fully aware of the relevant design issues and Tornado Labs and the client have a common vision for the application.

Next a Design Study is completed to record the implementation details, delivery schedule and project cost. The Design Document details the technical implementation issues by drawing up and justifying the project Task List. The Task List details the time required, and hence cost, of each feature. The Task List is broken down into tasks of approximately 4 hours duration. This way the risk, inherent in any high-tech project, is minimized. Our philosophy is that if you canÆt split the job into small subtasks, youÆd probably donÆt understand the task.

Throughout the Development Phase the Milestone Release methodology ensures consistent quality through project management, version control and defect/feature tracking. During this phase the application is delivered regularly to the client for comments and review. Milestones are typically approximately 4-6 weeks apart but often increase in regularity as the project nears completion.

Accompanying a Milestone Release is a Build Release Document (BRD) that details the functionality implemented and the functionality since the previous Milestone as well as the known bugs in the Milestone Release. The BRD includes details of the features to be focused on for testing purposes as well as features that are currently unstable and should not be tested.

A Milestone Release is declared "Alpha" when all features have been implemented, and all Crash and High level bugs have been fixed. A Milestone is declared "Beta" when all Medium and Low (and above) level bugs have been fixed. When all bugs have been fixed, each subsequent Milestone is dubbed a "Release Candidate", and could become the final or "Gold" release for the application, depending on client satisfaction and regression testing of bug fixes. Before a project is shipped, an external Quality Assurance house checks the application based on a general principle of checks and balances: those who build the software application cannot test it as well.

The extra effort involved with the Functional Specification, Design Study, and Incremental Milestone Release, ensures that clients consistently receive software conforming to their Basic Acceptance Test (BAT). Many software development houses lack a formal methodology to cope with "bugs" when they occur. Tornado Labs knows that bugs are an integral part of the software development process and has procedures in place to track and eradicate them. We provide our clients with open access to the status of feature implementation and bug fixes to ensure a common vision is maintained for all work to be undertaken.

The second element is dynamic: our Expertise. The Engineers at Tornado Labs are technically equipped to handle projects in the specialist fields of Artificial Intelligence and Visualization. We have experience developing advanced software using:

Tornado Labs sees the following partners as vital to achieving her long-term vision:

Palm based computing, such as the 3Com PalmPilot is quickly becoming an indispensable digital alter-ego, allowing seamless integration of contact details, diary, personal key, purse, browser, mobile phone, VCR, jukebox and radio. Tornado Labs is a registered 3Com developer working on integrated systems to help you manage networked information.

Cost-effective high performance network computing is poised to upset server provision. The price to performance ratio of Beowulf clustered networks ensures it will quickly unlock the potential of supercomputing for businesses.

One cannot ignore the almost ubiquitous Microsoft Windows Operating System on the personal desktop. The engineers at Tornado Labs have many years' experience of developing commercial shrink-wrapped software for the Windows platform and bring this experience to bear (both good and bad!) when faced with new projects.

Tornado Labs is currently an internally funded company. In order to be the best Intelligent software house globally and be able to recruit the Smartest, most Passionate and Honest people, Tornado Labs has adopted an Open Source Recruitment and Human Resource policy. The landscape of our industry is reshaping itself constantly. To manage this dynamic workplace Tornado Labs has instituted an innovative company share plan. In order to deliver tomorrowÆs applications today, we solely work with domain experts. An expert can only remain an expert if she keeps working at the leading edge. Tornado Labs canÆt guarantee that this work is available at all times, so we think it is only fair that we set our project goals together before project works commences. Based on the project goals, company stock is awarded. All our engineers succeed when Tornado Labs meets its goals!

Tornado Labs has completed the following projects:

Tornado Labs has developed a proof of concept for an open and extensible architecture for Internet information delivery. Current search engines use static snap-shots of the Internet. This enables them to return results very quickly, as they do not check the physical page on the Internet where the information is located. This means search engines often return out of date information, or pages that no longer exist. Euclid defines a search engine architecture to which companies and individuals can contribute, to quickly create a dynamic and vital environment within which users can easily locate search agents specializing in topics or products of interest.

Sens is an easy-to-use software tool, which allows researchers to set-up experiments to assess and monitor the cognitive functioning of the brain, even if the behavior is subtle and hard to pinpoint. Sens is a Microsoft Win32 application, which has been developed for researchers who are interested in cognitive functions such as problem solving, learning and memory, as well for clinicians that want to assess and monitor patients with cognitive difficulties. You can use Sens on a very wide range of people, even allowing for the diagnoses of very young and disabled subjects. Carrying out experiments with Sens can be done anywhere: be it in your research lab, hospital, or in the subject's own familiar environment.

Unlike many psychological testing tools Sens does not use "normal" psychological behavior as its yardstick, but has been designed to provide an even coverage of the learning space: from severe mental and physical deficit or learning disability to high cognitive ability. The Sens technology is easily scaleable to allow clinicians and researchers to monitor individual progress over months and years.

A key goal of Sens is to provide the researcher or clinician with meaningful and well-founded data, using tests with academic underpinnings in theories of learning, which can be adapted as patient cognitive ability improves or degrades.

At present Sens supports more stimuli than any other experiment generator on the market: video clips, live captured video, graphics, text, ActiveX controls and supports custom code integration using DLLs or ActiveX to, for example, control databases.

Viper is a technical feasibility study carried out on behalf of Scottish Sensory Centre (SSC). The document provides the UK Library and Information Commission (LIC) with implementation advice for satisfying the requirements of Visually Impaired People (VIPs) using a National Library Computer Network. The overall aim of this report was to investigate the technological possibilities of allowing Visual Impaired People to customize application settings on workstations of a future United Kingdom national library computer network to satisfy their special needs. Furthermore users of the network should be able to recall these settings each time they access the library network.

The Snare project was carried out for NewAge Utilities and implements video capture and unified voice and email messaging on the Win32 platform.

In June 1999 Tornado Labs was commended by the ISI/InterForum, in conjunction with the United KingdomÆs Department of Trade and Industry, for its Exemplary Use of Electronic Commerce.

If you have any questions regarding old or new projects, job openings, partnerships or potential investment, please contact our main office: