Pictures of the Future      Spring 2008

In Brief

? Mass customization is the wave of the future. Siemens and VW have teamed up to show visitors to the 2008 Hannover Fair industrial trade show how individual customers’ wishes can be realized. The answer lies in the combination of the real and virtual manufacturing environments
^{more in the Interview and at Mass Costumization}

? Whether it’s for an airport, a hotel, hospital or complete new city district like New Wembley in London—the Siemens One corporate initiative brings together the company’s wide-ranging expertise to deliver complete solutions and appropriate financing models that fulfill customers’ wishes
^{more at Financing and Siemens One and in the Interview}

? Regional passenger traffic worldwide will grow by more than 30 % over the next 20 years, and freight traffic by over 65 %. Examples of innovations in this area include modular locomotives that can be adapted to their area of operations and driverless subway trains that share tracks with conventional lines ^{more at Subways PoF Rail and Eurosprinter}

? Usability is essential to the success of many systems, which is why Siemens has a usability team. The team’s main job is to analyze and optimize user interfaces. And experience has taught the company’s usability experts that equipment as varied as medical angiography systems, locomotive controls, and power plant control rooms should all have one thing in common: a human-machine interface that can be operated easily and intuitively ^more

? Tailored IT solutions represent a growth area—for example, when it comes to eGovernment applications. Here, Siemens has developed solutions for the manufacture and machine reading of biometric passports and for dealing with tax returns. Thanks to Web-based software, a high- performance network, and an IT Center, Turkish tax offices can now process applications more rapidly and discover tax cheats more effectively  ^more