Safety First

Smartphone software »Made in Bavaria«

Police speed checks and points in Flensburg? From now on, mobile users needn’t be surprised by mobile radar traps – the »Rad-Alert« service offered by Pullach based car rental company Sixt and auto website Carmondo.de, warns registered car drivers in real time about speed checks – directly on their iPhone or Blackberry. The special software promptly alerts drivers on speed cameras ahead with GPS triangulation and automatically activates the ring tone or vibration alarm.

RadAlert lives from the registered users – if a driver discovers a new speed camera he only has to press a button on his smartphone which transmits his location to the system and records it in the directory. Konstantin Sixt, Head of Internet at Sixt, is convinced by the benefits: »Speed checks should help increase road safety. We at Sixt use modern technology to help drivers avoid any unnecessary bother and make roads safer. It is, after all, only the timely alerts from RadAlert which will ensure that drivers slow down before potentially dangerous areas.« RadAlert set a record already right from the beginning: more than 3,500 members registered on the first day alone and, after a week, it was already more then 14,600. As if this weren’t enough, in April 2009 RadAlert won the »Vision Award« as media innovation of the year in the mobile category.

Mobile all-rounders

Market research institute EITO has predicted only a slight increase of 0.3 per cent for the current year for the German mobile market. Instead, 2009 will be the year of mobile data services – in this area of business it is predicted that turnover will increase by eight per cent to 5.5 billion euros. Alongside notebooks, netbooks and classic mobiles, it is precisely the new smartphones which offer the perfect hardware for the use of mobile data services.
After the auctioning of the UMTS licenses which cost mobile phone operators billions, there was, for a long time, a lack of suitable devices to fully exploit all the opportunities of the new technology. Already today, one in ten mobiles worldwide is a smartphone with satellite navigation functions as well as internet and e-mail access. Sixteen per cent of Germans use the benefits of mobile internet and 41 per cent of smartphone owners even admit that they use the internet daily with them. In this way, these mobile all-rounders, a combination of mobile telephone and personal digital assistant, ensure lucrative business.

Apple’s iPhone started this development in 2007. For the first time a mobile could be used by touch screen and as a portable mini computer which offers constant access to the world wide web. Apple even went new ways in its marketing for this and made exclusive contracts with select providers, securing itself a share of their monthly turnover from the mobile contracts with end users in doing so. The iPhone software is a further source of income for the company: external software developers are allowed to produce applications for the Apple Smartphone but, in return, Apple receives 30 per cent of all revenue from the sales of these.
Of course the success of the iPhone also provoked other mobile companies to enter the market with smartphones. They paid special attention to the touch screen technology, for example the Google mobiles with the operational system developed especially for them, »Android«. The phones are also becoming increasingly efficient and powerful and also smaller: since summer 2009, the Munich based mobile phone operator O2 has been marketing the world’s thinnest smartphone which is only 9.9 millimetres thick. The Toshiba TG01 offers a 4.1 inch screen and, with 1 GHz, the most powerful processer of all mobiles on the market. »The Toshiba TG01 was one of the highlights of this year’s Mobile World Congress and is currently one of the most interesting new smartphones,« says Lutz
Schüler from O2. »With this we offer our customers a mobile which perfectly combines multimedia capability and office functions with high performance and efficiency.«
What makes smartphones so attractive, though, for end customers is the possibility to individually put together applications. Accordingly, the smartphone market offers perfect conditions for business success with the downloading of the necessary software.

Bavaria as software development centre

The booming IT industry in Bavaria has also discovered the potential of the smartphone. In December 2008 the first iPhone Developer Conference was held in Munich in which 80 participants discussed usage and development possibilities. One of the key areas of discussion was the use of smartphones in business. The Developer Day focused on the development of new iPhone applications. Developers gave practice talks on specific projects and participants received tips on the development of games and business utilities, particularly with regards to the special requirements of the mobile »helpers«.
The market also offers good opportunities for new entrants which is proven by navigation device manufacturer, Garmin from Gräfelfing. At the IFA 2008 the global market leader in mobile navigation presented a software which transforms the Blackberry into a full value navigation tool. Olaf Meng, Product Manager at Garmin Germany, emphasises the importance of this application, particularly for business people: »Safe and simple navigation is decisive for all people who travel around a lot. The journey to an important business meeting, for example, becomes less stressful and information such as traffic warnings can help you to arrive punctually. A new feature also enables you to receive the status of a booked flight and check take off and landing information which saves unnecessary waiting for a delayed flight at the airport.« In addition to this, users can also use a databank of hotels, restaurants, shops and sights. Yet Garmin offers even more – in February 2009 the company formed an alliance with electronics manufacturer Asus with the aim of launching its own smartphone device series called »Garmin-Asus Nüvi-
fone« on the market. This offers companies an internet search with local reference and own social networking application called »Ciao!« which promises the seamless integration of different site-related social networks. »The brand may well prove to be strong enough in the consumer division so that customers are really interested in the device,« predicts analyst Carolina Milanesi of Munich consultants Gartner. »Garmin doesn’t really have a choice as more and more users are changing from portable navigation devices to smartphones as the preferred navigation aid.«

As it is today hardly possible to imagine particularly business life without Blackberrys, it is also becoming more and more important to protect transferred sensitive data. The Nürnberg company Certgate has developed a Smart Card for this purpose which no longer makes it necessary to have external reading devices for authentication and decoding. The card operates in the normal memory card slot of the Blackberry. »Where security is important there are often many reservations against using mobile end devices. Our new hardware based security solution for the Blackberry not only closes any known security gaps but is also exceptionally easy and comfortable for the users,« explains Certgate founder Dr. Paschalis Papagrigoriou. »As no external devices, for example a card reader, need to be connected for our Smart Card, and codes are generated in the chip card itself, it is virtually impossible to read out data. Even if the device is lost or stolen, the data contained within it is protected against unauthorised access due to the strong encoding.«

Key to success

Mobiles can, today, be used in even more ways as Markus Weitzel and Philipp Spangenberg from Munich have proven. Their company Baimos Technologies developed »Blue ID«, a software which enables the smartphone to replace the key ring. The young entrepreneurs won numerous business plan and start up contests with this idea,
something which Weitzel leads back to simple facts. »Studies have shown that nowadays we carry three things with us the whole time: purse, keys and mobile. It therefore makes sense to promote the integration of these.« Both businessmen already have more ideas up their sleeves, for example the further development of their software in the automobile sector and a mobile supported PC log-in.
The Munich based software company Equinux is, on the other hand, expanding the ways of using the iPhone also as a mini TV. The »Live TV« application delivers current TV programmes live to your mobile and reproduces this in the ideal resolution for the smaller screen. The Mac programme »The Tube« provides the necessary television images for this. »As soon as an iPhone is registered in The Tube, all television channels which are currently available can be viewed via click,« explains Till Schadde from Equinux. »It is just as easy to change to the next television channel on the mobile phone.« The next step will be the transmission of TV images onto the iPhone via the internet.«

© 2000-10 Messe Treff Verlag