NAVTEQ, a provider of digital map data for vehicle navigation and location-based solutions, will bring a dedicated NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge event to Asia-Pacific (APAC) to further facilitate the participation of developers across the region.
Registration for APAC participants officially begins October 2007 and an awards ceremony announcing APAC winners in Singapore.
Since its inception in 2003, the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge has become the premier program for the development of cutting-edge location-based services for wireless applications.
NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge contestants typically range from start-up developers hoping to launch their first commercial application to established companies pushing the limits of their creativity.
This annual competition has helped eight previous participants receive venture capital funding and nine past winners have launched commercial applications on major wireless carriers, including Verizon Wireless and Sprint.
In 2007, NAVTEQ and its sponsors awarded a prize pool collectively worth almost $2 million.
Interest in location-based services in Asia continues to surge as map coverage expands throughout the region.
NAVTEQ already has map coverage in countries such as Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
Also fueling the growing interest of LBS in Asia is the vast number of wireless developers in the region.
According to an Evans Data Corporation study in the fall of 2006, nearly 40 percent of the world’s wireless developers reside in the APAC region.
“The rapid expansion of map coverage of the Asia-Pacific region combined with the wealth of developers located there will be a driving force for the creation of new location-based services in Asia in the years to come,” said Winston Guillory, Senior Vice President, Consumer & Enterprise, NAVTEQ.
“The NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge is the perfect vehicle to continue the expansion of LBS application development in this region and help shine a spotlight on some of APAC’s most talented developers.”
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
NAVTEQ, a provider of digital map data for vehicle navigation and location-based solutions, will bring a dedicated NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge event to Asia-Pacific (APAC) to further facilitate the participation of developers across the region.
Registration for APAC participants officially begins October 2007 and an awards ceremony announcing APAC winners in Singapore.
Since its inception in 2003, the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge has become the premier program for the development of cutting-edge location-based services for wireless applications.
NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge contestants typically range from start-up developers hoping to launch their first commercial application to established companies pushing the limits of their creativity.
This annual competition has helped eight previous participants receive venture capital funding and nine past winners have launched commercial applications on major wireless carriers, including Verizon Wireless and Sprint.
In 2007, NAVTEQ and its sponsors awarded a prize pool collectively worth almost $2 million.
Interest in location-based services in Asia continues to surge as map coverage expands throughout the region.
NAVTEQ already has map coverage in countries such as Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
Also fueling the growing interest of LBS in Asia is the vast number of wireless developers in the region.
According to an Evans Data Corporation study in the fall of 2006, nearly 40 percent of the world’s wireless developers reside in the APAC region.
“The rapid expansion of map coverage of the Asia-Pacific region combined with the wealth of developers located there will be a driving force for the creation of new location-based services in Asia in the years to come,” said Winston Guillory, Senior Vice President, Consumer & Enterprise, NAVTEQ.
“The NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge is the perfect vehicle to continue the expansion of LBS application development in this region and help shine a spotlight on some of APAC’s most talented developers.”
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Yahoo has signed partnership agreements with six mobile operators across Asia for the distribution of Yahoo’s mobile search service, Yahoo onesearch, which launched in Asia in May this year.
The six mobile operators are Globe Telecom (Philippines), Idea Cellular (India), LG Telecom (Korea), Maxis Communications (Malaysia), PT Telekomunikasi Selular ‘Telkomsel’ (Indonesia) and Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan).
By distributing Yahoo onesearch, these operators will enable people to search for results on their mobile devices. Yahoo onesearch gives consumers access to news, web images, financial information, weather conditions, Flickr and web and mobile sites, and enables navigation to other web sites.
Yahoo onesearch is now available in 14 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, India, Italy, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam) and will soon be available in South Korea and Taiwan.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Sigma Systems, a global leader in service management solutions for broadband service providers, has recently announced that Charter Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: CHTR), third largest publicly traded cable operator in the United States, has selected Sigma to provide enterprise-wide Operation Support Systems (OSS) for Charter Telephone® and Charter High-Speed® Internet services. The agreement provides Charter with an integrated next-generation platform for service provisioning and activation, and resource management across all service domains.
Charter selected the award winning Sigma Service Management Platform (SMP), to seamlessly integrate its business, operational and network management systems, and to provide end-to-end automation of residential and commercial telephone and high-speed Internet service.
“Using Sigma SMP, we expect to enhance the customer experience while improving our operational efficiency,” said Marwan Fawaz, Chief Technology Officer for Charter Communications. “SMP will enable us to cost-effectively consolidate several back office systems and Internet protocol (IP) service networks on to a common platform through multi-service provisioning automation.”
Sigma’s OSS solutions are based on 11 years of broadband IP deployment experience and provide Charter with fully automated order management, business support system integration, self-care integration, resource management, customer service provisioning and network activation. Inter-carrier gateway integration, call feature management and voicemail provisioning are provided for telephone service, along with management of high-speed Internet, email and web hosting.
“Communication service providers have critical need for end-to-end automation for broadband IP services which will allow them to scale business and operational processes, and meet their objectives for customer satisfaction. Our significant deployment experience is a key differentiator, gained from 25 VoIP deployments and 50+ broadband deployments globally,” explains Tim Spencer, President and COO, Sigma Systems. “We are honored to be selected as the foundation for Charter’s next generation OSS architecture. With choosing Sigma, Charter will benefit from our proven and trusted product portfolio; which provides a common OSS infrastructure for all future broadband IP service offerings.
The first phase of this enterprise-wide deployment is now completed, setting the stage for end-to-end automation of telephone and high-speed Internet services. Future service support for broadband IP services have been subsequently planned and are being implemented at Charter through the remainder of 2007.
About Sigma Systems
Sigma Systems is a premier provider and leader in the design, development, and deployment of OSS service management solutions. A global company, we automate Communications Service Providers’ (CSPs) business and operational processes enabling them to define, activate, manage and diagnose subscribed, on-demand and real-time IP broadband and wireless services. Sigma All Play Solutions provide the “Intelligence Behind Converged Services Delivery”.
Sigma’s proven software provides CSPs with industry leading solutions for voice (circuit switch, VoIP, SIP, cellular voice), video (IPTV, DTV, ITV, VOD, PPV), data (DSL, DOCSIS, 2-way satellite, mobile and WiFi/WiMax data), and IMS-based services.
Sigma has 11 years experience using a proven implementation methodology that provides rapid deployment integration and turn-up in multi-service, multi-technology operating environments. Today, we manage over fifty (50) deployments for communications service providers, such as Cox Communications, TELUS, Rogers Communications, TVCabo, Shaw Communications and @NetHome, and others with a combined total of over 25 million subscribers managed on our platform, across North America, EMEA, CALA and APAC.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
cVidya Networks, a global leader of telecom data integrity and revenue assurance systems, has recently announced that BT has signed an agreement for implementation of cVidya’s MoneyMap® solution across its UK operations. This agreement follows on successful execution of cVidya’s project with BT in 2006 and subsequent ITT process.
BT created its Revenue Assurance Centre of Excellence two years ago, and has since been reviewing many strategic programmes and has run a number of proof of concepts with various vendors. BT’s objective was to provide a single revenue assurance subscription inventory to better support its internal and external customers worldwide. cVidya was selected due to its leadership in implementing industry standards, as well as its track record for success.
Geoff Hammond, head of BT’s revenue assurance centre of excellence, says: “We have previously managed our own revenue assurance needs through internal developments and legacy applications; however the significant pace of change and product development, combined with the growing operational role within our team meant the only way forward was with an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution.
“Through our stringent ITT selection process it became apparent that the cVidya MoneyMap solution offered the functional capabilities to streamline our revenue assurance processes, and enabled our team to react quickly to new requirements and make major contributions to BT’s goals in the short and long term.”
“We are proud to be selected by BT, and look forward to building on our previous success to strengthen our relationship,” commented Alon Aginsky, CEO at cVidya Networks. “In addition, this decision highlights the added value that MoneyMap can bring even to those service providers who already have a mature revenue assurance operation in place.”
cVidya’s MoneyMap® Revenue Assurance Solution enables operators to correlate and consolidate information from all network, operations and business systems. Through an ongoing process, it automatically detects problem areas in which profit margins are decreasing as a result of revenue leakage, data inconsistencies or resources that are not being used efficiently, leading to substantial revenue loss. Once MoneyMap® identifies the areas of revenue leakage and resource inefficiency, it provides the user with intuitive tools to promptly correct and manage the problems to achieve profit maximization.
About cVidya Networks
cVidya Networks is a global leader and innovative provider of Telecom Revenue Assurance and Data Integrity products.
cVidya’s suite of comprehensive Revenue Assurance solutions assists fixed, mobile, and triple-play communication service providers (CSPs) to continuously improve their bottom line results.
cVidya’s innovative and flexible product, MoneyMap®, provides a unified platform for implementing Process Aware Revenue Assurance solutions, Data Integrity, Risk Management and Rating & Billing Verification within legacy and new service environment, over all types of networks, OSS and BSS.
MoneyMap®’s solutions and cVidya’s highly skilled professional services teams have a proven track record of achieving rapid ROI with major operators, including Cable & Wireless, Telecom Italia, Colt and Bezeq.
cVidya has offices in EMEA, APAC and South America.
cVidya received the Red Herring 100 Europe Award for 2006.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Sigma System, a premier provider and leader in the design, development and deployment of OSS service management solutions, has further enhanced its service management platform with the release of Service Management Platform (SMP) 4.0.
SMP 4.0 addresses the new realities service providers are facing as the market drives them to a variety of user classes (residential, business, SOHO, mobile) and a broader range of services. SMP 4.0 is Sigma’s new generation OSS that will enable an “All Play” world – access to any service, on any device, at any time and available anywhere. With All Play, a greater number of services are enabled with shorter lifecycles and subsequently delivered across multiple network access technologies.
“The number of service management transactions per subscriber is growing exponentially as service providers deliver many more types of services to each subscriber, and offer new on-demand and event-driven service products,” says Brian Cappellani, CTO, Sigma Systems. “SMP 4.0 has been substantially enhanced to increase its performance, scalability and availability, provide increased flexibility and service agility – all required to address the demands of this dynamic new All Play service environment”.
SMP 4.0 provides a new high performance J2EE-based, BPEL-compatible workflow engine that addresses today’s new demands as well as providing the inherent flexibility to support any type of service including on-demand and event-based services.
SMP 4.0 also provides service agility support with a powerful GUI-based service creation environment that enables service providers to easily create and deploy new and modified services in response to quickly changing market forces.
Other key features in SMP 4.0 include:
• Support for a federated information model: the ability to pull subscriber/service information from other repositories to avoid data replication
• Enhanced support for end-user-based services: the ability to assign specific services to individual users within a household or business
• Enhanced support for commercial services including:
- Support for scheduled orders, held orders and batch orders
- An optional GUI to capture these orders, and to manage the orders within a batch
- The ability to manage service dependencies between orders to ensure pre-requisite orders are executed successfully before dependent orders are processed
• Support for OSS/J compatible and web services/SOA based order APIs: SMP 4.0 provides OSS/J compatible and web services/SOA type interfaces to integrate with external BSS systems
• Support for multiple order priorities: the ability to ensure higher priority orders are executed before lower priority orders are processed
• Ability to trigger automated processes based on a business event: SMP 4.0 can be used to execute a specific process that is triggered by a business event such as a network outage or a billing event
• Support for centralised security: SMP 4.0 is JAAS compliant, providing support for environments that have centralised CSR/operator security management for multiple applications
“Service providers are not only dealing with growing subscriber bases due to market expansion, but are also dealing with competitive pressures to offer a much broader range of services and service bundles to both residential and business subscribers,” says Tim Spencer, President, Sigma Systems. “Sigma Systems’ SMP 4.0 provides a high performance, scalable, reliable OSS Platform that can manage the new increasingly complex services and service types emerging today, with the inherent flexibility to address the new converged services of the future.”
SMP 4.0 is planned for general market availability in Q3 2007.
About Sigma Systems
Sigma Systems is a premier provider and leader in the design, development, and deployment of OSS service management solutions. A global company, we automate Communications Service Providers’ (CSPs) business and operational processes enabling them to define, activate, manage and diagnose subscribed, on-demand and real-time IP broadband and wireless services. Sigma All Play Solutions provide the “Intelligence Behind Converged Services Delivery”.
Sigma’s proven software provides CSPs with industry leading solutions for voice (circuit switch, VoIP, SIP, cellular voice), video (IPTV, DTV, ITV, VOD, PPV), data (DSL, DOCSIS, 2-way satellite, mobile and WiFi/WiMax data), and IMS-based services.
Sigma has 11 years’ experience using a proven implementation methodology that provides rapid deployment integration and turn-up in multi-service, multi-technology operating environments. Today, we manage over fifty (50) deployments for communications service providers, such as Cox Communications, Rogers Communications, TVCabo, Shaw Communications and Jupiter and others with a combined total of over 25 million subscribers managed on our platform, across North America, EMEA, CALA and APAC.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge Extends Into Asia-Pacific
