Mobil-Inn a new innovative SME(PME) in Lannion

Mobil-Inn is a new small business in Lannion, France, presented by its founder Frederic Jeanne, as a mobile development enterprise.

Frederic is a former Alten employee, he has more than 15 years of experience in software architecture in the telecom industry.

Frederic's concept is is based on the fact that smartphone market is growing very fast, and its share is increasing among mobile devices, so why don't we use smartphones to replace old fashioned boxes with dedicated functionality? a simple app on a smartphone can make use of the several capacities of the device (geolocalization, communication, orientation, sound...) to provide a similar functionality to a traditional box.

The first ready product of Mobil-Inn is Avenguard. Avenguard is a solution to protect isolated workers. In fact in France, the law defines isolated workers and requires that they can be able to ask for help at any moment when something bad happens to them. The current solutions for this are expensive dedicated boxes, which are hardly customizable to the needs of a specific company:

Avengard is a solution on smartphone, on Android in its first version, which allows an isolated worker to use his mobile to inform about his problem. In the basic free version, Avenguard sends an SMS to a prefigured contact upon a fast movement (worker falling), long time immobility (worker lost conscious) or an intentional click of a big button on the screen in case the worker feels threatened. The SMS includes the name of the worker, a preconfigured message and his GPS coordinates. In its Pro paid version, avenguard back end system initiates a call to the preconfigured contact, interacts with the callee using the latest IVR technologies to inform him about the worker and then puts him in contact with him. You can test the demo version in the android market here.

Mobil-Inn is in its very first steps of creation, searching for its form, its economical model, its financing, market studies, partners..

Frederic still has a lot of innovative ideas in this field, and he has the necessary experience and dedication for succeeding in his project.

Fore more information, you can check Mobil-Inn's website: http://www.mobil-inn.com/, or contact Frederic directly on this email: frederic.jeanne@mobil-inn.com

Achraf

Social answering machine

A few days ago I was in a music class and I was messing with my smartphone. Then suddenly I had this idea: What about an application that updates the message on my answering machine just like a status on a social network? for example in my case in the music class i would have started this application on my phone, then written “I am in the music class” in the status field, then updated the status. If someone calls me and he gets my answering machine, he will hear “I am in the music class”.

As a geek, I thought about the technical aspects of the idea, and i figured out a way to do it. First, you must redirect your incoming calls when you do not respond, to a fixed number. For example, with Orange in France all you have to do is dial: **61* redirection number #. You should own the redirection number, on which you install an interactive voice server (IVR), Asterisk for instance. The VXML script of the IVR must do the following: read for the redirected caller the message text file (e.g.: msg.txt containing the string “I am in the music class”), then save his voice message if he leaves one in an audio file. We will suppose that this is a simple answering machine, so afterwards it sends the voice message to me as a mail, and notify me by SMS for example using the Orange SMS API or other APIs. On the same machine, we install a web server with a simple servlet that changes the msg.txt file upon an authenticated web request. Lets suppose that the request is according to the following form:

www.mydomain.com/servlet/setMessage?msg=I%20am%20in%20the%20music%20class

The server side is done, all we need now is a simple client application on the smartphone. On the application UI, I write my new status, and click on update. the application sends an HTTP request to our webserver with the new status in parameter to update the answering machine message.

We can add complexity the idea by integrating the traditional answering machine services, like calling back to hear the message, or we can have several customized statuses according to the calling number (SFR offers a similar service: SFR Repondeur+). Social extensions maybe thought of, like synchronisation with Facebook or others.

Would you appreciate such an option in you answering machine if it existed in you offer?

Achraf