2011 was a momentous year for Charles Curry, the founder of Chronos Technology, it was the 25th anniversary of the start of his business which he originally ran from his Upton Bishop home.

However 2012 is set to be an even greater year for the master of time technology who now operates from Stowfield House, in a peaceful, rural location outside Ross, on the edge of the Forest of Dean. The setting seems timeless yet time is of the essence here.

Only this businessman could have asked guests at a celebration dinner to compute the number of nano seconds in the 25 years since it started or expected them to include not just the leap years but the leap seconds.

Businesses at the forefront of time management, keeping the world's communication systems ticking over are usually found in California not in the rural Wye Valley. Yet it is in Stowfield House that work continues to investigate and design new ways of controlling time.

New jobs have been created as sales of its SyncWatch product, which provides effective measurement and long term monitoring of telecom network performance. During the last 24 months Product Development Manager, Ian Smith and a New Product Development Test Technician, Roger Baldwin have been appointed and the Software Development team has increased by four. Alistair Costley has also joined the team for 12 months work experience as part of his degree course from Stafford University.

More new jobs will be created following the appointment of EXFO, Canada as global distributor for the SyncWatch product portfolio. This will see SyncWatch promoted to telecom operators in practically every industrialised country in the world, including China and Japan.

The actual work Chronos carries out is extremely technical and very difficult for a lay person to understand, especially someone who only scraped maths and science at O Level, and Charles has become adept at finding simple analogies to explain what his company does. He presented this reporter with a ruler to demonstrate the amount of time a nano second is.

A nano-second is the time it takes for light to travel 30 centimetres, the length of the ruler. Actually holding the ruler and having it explained makes much more sense. Charles is the sort of person I would have liked as a science teacher, he is very aware that most people simply cannot keep up with his level of knowledge and expertise, and he is able to explain complex technologies in ways even I can understand. He said he had to find ways to explain what he was doing to his family and friends and now he does it automatically.

Charles, whose wife runs a nursery school at their home, is passionate about education and a firm believer in supporting young people who need work experience. This has paid off, both for the youngsters he has given a chance to, and for the company. However many of the staff Charles employs are from overseas where technology education is given a higher priority and youngsters who show an aptitude are pushed to achieve higher results. He is keen to see an improvement in the teaching of technology in this country as he feels there are many youngsters missing out on opportunities because they do not have a good enough grounding in basic technology.

Charles was born in Ludlow, studied electronics at university and then started working for a research company. However he saw that the sales staff were better paid and certainly drove better cars, so he went to work in sales. First of all for a company selling test equipment then for a company which rented equipment to the oil industry. At this point he was introduced to the first GPS devices and saw their potential.

He could see that controlling the flow of information is critical as too much can cause a traffic jam in the same way that controlling the flow of traffic around a road system avoids problems building up.

A born leader and entrepreneur Charles continues to look for new applications for his teams's knowledge and he started this year with an announcement that Chronos Technology, has partnered with UrsaNav, Inc. of Chesapeake, USA to support product development and technology application for Global Navigation Satellite System jamming and interference detection.

For someone concerned with the exact measurement of time Charles is very generous with his own time, taking this reporter on a fascinating and informative tour of Stowfield House, but eventually the time came for me to leave, with my nano second ruler and a head full of timely possibilities.

Jo Scrivin