Vacheron Constantin SA is a Swiss luxury watch and clock manufacturer founded in 1755. Since 1996, it has been a subsidiary of the Swiss Richemont Group. Vacheron Constantin is one of the oldest watch manufacturers in the world with an uninterrupted watchmaking history since its foundation in 1755. It employs around 1,200 people worldwide as of 2018, most of whom are based in the company's manufacturing plants in the Canton of Geneva and Vallée de Joux in Switzerland.
In horology, a complication is any feature of a timepiece beyond the display of hours, minutes and seconds. A timepiece indicating only hours, minutes and seconds is known as a simple movement. Common complications include date or day-of-the-week indicators, alarms, chronographs (stopwatches), and automatic winding mechanisms. Complications may be found in any clock, but they are most notable in mechanical watches where the small size makes them difficult to design and assemble. A typical date-display chronograph may have up to 250 parts, while a particularly complex watch may have a thousand or more parts. Watches with several complications are referred to as grandes complications.
Trusted Platform Module is an international standard for a secure cryptoprocessor, a dedicated microcontroller designed to secure hardware through integrated cryptographic keys. The term can also refer to a chip conforming to the standard.
Fullpower is a Santa Cruz, California-based privately held developer of cloud-based IoT and wearable product technology used for activity tracking and sleep monitoring. Fullpower specializes in wireless technology, microelectromechanical systems, and nanotechnology. The company holds over 125 patents for its intellectual property, which it licenses to manufacturers.
Henry Graves Jr. (1868–1953) was an American banker descended from John Graves of Concord, Massachusetts.
Frédérique Constant SA is a Swiss manufacture of luxury wristwatches based in Plan-les-Ouates, Geneva. Originally established in 1988 by Dutch married couple Peter Stas and Aletta Stas-Bax, it was acquired in 2016 by Citizen Holdings of Tokyo, Japan.
The quartz crisis was the upheaval in the watchmaking industry caused by the advent of quartz watches in the 1970s and early 1980s, that largely replaced mechanical watches around the world. It caused a significant decline of the Swiss watchmaking industry, which chose to remain focused on traditional mechanical watches, while the majority of the world's watch production shifted to Japanese companies such as Seiko, Citizen, and Casio which embraced the new electronic technology.
A smartwatch is a wearable computer in the form of a watch; modern smartwatches provide a local touchscreen interface for daily use, while an associated smartphone app provides management and telemetry, such as long-term biomonitoring. While early models could perform basic tasks, such as calculations, digital time telling, translations, and game-playing, smartwatches released since 2015 have more general functionality closer to smartphones, including mobile apps, a mobile operating system and WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity. Some smartwatches function as portable media players, with FM radio and playback of digital audio and video files via a Bluetooth headset. Some models, called watch phones, have mobile cellular functionality such as making telephone calls.
Pebble is a discontinued smartwatch developed by Pebble Technology Corporation. Funding was conducted through a Kickstarter campaign running from April 11, 2012, to May 18, 2012, which raised $10.3 million; it was the most funded project in Kickstarter history, at the time. Pebble began shipping watches to Kickstarter backers in January 2013. Pebble watches can be connected to Android and iOS devices to show notifications and messages. An online app store distributed Pebble-compatible apps from many developers including ESPN, Uber, Runkeeper, and GoPro.
Speake-Marin is a watchmaking company specializing in expensive timepieces. It was founded in 2002 by English watchmaker Peter Speake-Marin and is based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Peter Stas is a Dutch entrepreneur and author. In 1988, after he completed his studies in Business Economics at the Erasmus University and worked as Product-Marketing Manager for Royal Philips Electronics, he founded, with his wife Aletta Stas-Bax, the watch company Frédérique Constant. The manufacture's initial strategy was to focus its energy on classical luxury watches at an affordable price. The Accessible Luxury positioning was the basis of strong growth during the financial crisis when consumers came back more to classical values and accessible prices.
The Vacheron Constantin Reference 57260 is a single highly complicated mechanical pocket watch displaying the Gregorian, Judaic, and lunar calendars featuring 57 complications. The watch was assembled by Vacheron Constantin and introduced in 2015. The company claims that it is the most complicated mechanical pocket watch ever created, followed up by Patek Philippe Calibre 89 assembled in 1989 and featuring 33 complications. The Reference 57260 took eight years to assemble. The watch has 2,826 parts and 31 hands, weighs 957 grams and spans 98 mm.
Pine Store Limited, known by its trade name Pine64, is a Hong Kong-based organization that designs, manufactures, and sells single-board computers, notebook computers, as well as smartwatch/smartphones. Its name was inspired by the mathematical constants pi and e with a reference to 64-bit computing power.
Montres Tudor SA, or simply Tudor, is a Swiss watchmaker based in Geneva, Switzerland. Registered in 1926 by Hans Wilsdorf, founder of Rolex, the brand remains a sister company to Rolex; both companies are owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation. Tudor was initially known for watches produced for the military and professional divers. From the 1960s to 1980s, several navies issued Tudor Submariners to their divers, including the US Navy SEALs and the French Marine Nationale.
Ochs und junior AG is a Swiss watch manufacturer based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, which is specialised on producing mechanical wristwatches. The company was founded in 2006 by Ludwig Oechslin, a universal scholar and master watchmaker and Kurt König, managing director of Embassy and Beat Weinmann. The Ulysse Nardin watch company became a shareholder of Ochs und junior AG in 2012; today ochs und junior is a pure family business.
H. Moser & Cie. is a trademark of Moser Schaffhausen AG, a Swiss luxury watch manufacturer. The original H. Moser & Cie. was founded by independent watchmaker Heinrich Moser in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1828. Notable early clients of H. Moser & Cie. included Russian princes and members of the Russian Imperial Court; Vladimir Lenin also owned a Moser watch. After Moser died in 1874, the company was sold, and its business in Russia was expropriated in 1918 due to the October Revolution.
Philippe Dufour is a Swiss-born watchmaker from Le Sentier, Vallée de Joux. He is regarded as the greatest master of modern watchmaking, and his watches are referenced as among the best ever made. He finishes all of his watches himself by hand. In 1992, Dufour was the first watchmaker to put arguably the most complex of complications in a wristwatch, a Sonnerie. His other two models include Duality and Simplicity.
cadwork informatik CI AG is a multinational software company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. It develops and markets software products primarily for the construction industry. These products include timber industry products in computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) as well as products in building information model (BIM) and virtual design and construction (VDC). These products are suitable for designers, structural engineers, construction engineers, civil engineering draftspeople, building contractors, and in the case of BIMTeam VDC, the construction crews.
