Top 10 Beyond Enterprise Mobility Management

TOP 10 BEYOND ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY

Issue 03 Summer 2018

BUSINESS BOULEVARD Cover Story - A story of two telecom fanatics, who envisioned connecting and empowering everyone to create a world where business communications aren't complicated

EXCELLENCE CAUSEWAY The most comprehensive caller ID app with the ability to identify over a billion unknown callers YOUNICK CORNER

Darren Schreiber Co-founder & CEO 2600Hz

A software development company that goes beyond expertise to provide the best in the industry

OMNISCIENT VOYAGE NEWSMAKERS LOCALE DEFINITIVE DESTINATION

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EDITOR’S COMMENT

I

n 2010, the enterprise was dominated by Blackberry previously known as RIM with having 43% of US smartphone market share. Blackberry’s fame in the corporate world created a pressing need for MDM (mobility device management), aimed at enabling IT full access and managing employee mobile devices. It was a sudden hit as the business world quickly accepted MDM in the early days of enterprise mobility when corporations purchased Blackberry phones in wholesale for their employees. However, soon in the intervening years, with the rising adoption of iPhone and Android smartphones by employees who then brought these to work, the market share of Blackberry dropped to 1%. Employees rejected the idea of having to carry two separate phones – one for personal use and one for work, which made enterprises stop the purchase of phones and allow employee to use their own devices. One an enterprise giant is now at cusp of whether it can survive or not, only because it failed to respond to the consumerization of IT.

Editor in Chief CHRISTINE

By obliging to employee demand for Bring Your Own Device, the businesses wanted to boost the productivity. Moreover, employees had the flexibility to shift from work to personal use, anytime, anywhere with using single device. This booming smartphone app market and the BYOD’s rising development prompted the creation MAM (Mobile Application Management), solutions that nearly limited control and management of particular applications. Fast forward to today, Enterprise Mobility Management is basically a combination of MDM, MAM, MCM and identity and access management; the technologies which were created as individual products, are now available through larger EMM software suits.

Also, we have thought provoking articles contributed by industry leaders that include Connected Vehicles Are Revolutionizing the Mobility Experience, Keys to make your partnership thrive, Mobile Security — Multiple level starting points., and The Future of Identity in the Mobility Market.

So, let get started then!

Poonam Yadav

Managing Editor POONAM [poonam@beyondexclamation.com]

Art Director VICTOR [design@beyondexclamation.com]

Graphic Artist NICK [nick@beyondexclamation.com]

Project Manager JENNIFER [jennifer@beyondexclamation.com]

Development Manager JUSTIN [info@beyondexclamation.com]

CONNECT!

Recognizing the growing adoption of enterprise mobility management, Beyond Exclamation is launching a breakaway journal titled Top 10 Beyond Enterprise Mobility Management. On our cover story, we have 2600Hz. It tells a story of two telecom fanatics, who envisioned connecting and empowering everyone to create a world where business communications aren’t complicated. Further we have a shiny, mobile development and web application, A.Y. Technologies; a software development company that goes beyond expertise to provide the best in the industry – Apiumhub; a developer and marketer of a truly collaborative app development environment – OneBlink; the most comprehensive caller ID app with the ability to identify over a billion unknown callers – CallApp; the heroic savior disguised as a transit app – Moovit; and one of Australia’s leading 3D Animation and game development studios with over 16 years of experience servicing the Gaming and Advertising industries – Red Cartel.

[editor@beyondexclamation.com]

www.beyondexclamation.com BeyondExclamation @BeyondEx Beyond Exclamation beyondexclamation

Business Boulevard A story of two telecom fanatics, who envisioned connecting and empowering everyone to create a world where business communications aren't complicated

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An article that predicts the future of identity in the mobility market

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Excellence Causeway The most comprehensive caller ID app with the ability to identify over a billion unknown callers

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A detailed illustration of how connected vehicles are revolutionizing the mobility experience

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Younick Corner The heroic savior disguised as a transit app—simplifying your urban mobility in more than 2,200 cities around the world in 80 countries and 44 languages

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A software development company that goes beyond expertise to provide the best in the industry

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Omniscient Voyage One of Australia's leading 3D Animation and game development studios with over 16 years of experience servicing the Gaming and Advertising industries

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A write-up that explains multiple level starting points of mobile security

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Newsmakers Locale An encouraging conversation with the newsmaker of shiny, mobile development and web application startup accelerating at rocket speed

DeďŹ nitive Destination

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CONTENTS

A developer and marketer of a truly collaborative app development environment with more than 50 'brand name' enterprise and government clients

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A commentary on the keys to make your partnership thrive

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Revolutionizing Business Communications

Darren Schreiber Co-founder & CEO 2600Hz

T

he phone network has always been a black box to the outside world. Before Anonymous and LulzSec, before logins and passwords, and warez bulletin boards, before everything, there was phreaking. In the 1960s, the first

wave of proto-hackers emerged, and figured out ways to scam the only truly massive electronic network in existence at the time: the telephone system. People realized that the 2600Hz tone could be used to convince the system that your call was on an idle line and in essence make free phone calls. For decades

thereafter, pranksters, tinkerers, and anarchists shared the latest ways to fool automated systems into giving them free calls and unapproved access. Until well into the 1980s, waves of system-crackers built little DIY devices (“blue boxes”) that could emulate phone-company signaling tones.

This is a story of two telecom fanatics, who envisioned connecting and empowering everyone to create a world where business communications aren’t complicated.

With that vision in mind, a VoIP software engineering company, 2600Hz Project, was formed backedup on their past experiences and

interactions with the community behind “blue boxes”. Read-on to know about how an open-sourced core platform, bestowed upon the ability to gain insight into the underlying network and power current and future technologies/applications.

The VoIP revolution is here “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” These opening lines in the classic ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ pretty much sum things up in 2600Hz’s case. The time when you start getting an unexpected boost in the business, makes it a great period in the life cycle of your product/software/application. At the same time, you will experience times when the performance of your application drops drastically and the server crumbles. This is not a desirable state to be in when your business is growing. The ability to scale is crucial — not only being able to scale things up when the business is up but also scale down when the load goes down. The key idea here is to distribute your network with multiple servers, so that if you actually build a cluster of servers together and then put it in multiple data centers, the system will always be up and running.

The company primarily focuses on reducing operational costs for carriers utilizing bleeding-edge technology that has only been attempted in other industries. From self-scaling to fully redundant API driven hosted systems, companies can now compete with “the big guys” for a fraction of the cost. 2600Hz modernizes the way businesses

communicate with a Unified Communications VoIP platform to suit Small Businesses, Resellers and Enterprise clients.

Like all great stories, this one too, started at a bar It was a regular evening for an Multinational Corporation (MNC)sales-superstar Patrick Sullivan, now the COO and Co-Founder of 2600Hz, until one of his old friends Darren Schreiber, present CEO and Co-Founder of 2600Hz, approached him with a great idea that would disrupt the telecommunications industry. Patrick, with the final sip of his cocktail, gave his career a brief overview. He was managing a large sales team for a Fortune 100 company, where he worked to bring the techniques and skills that he learned in Computer Science to build the business world.

However, his stagnant job made him uninspired after each day at work.

Darren’s enthusiasm on starting a business—which undeniably came with real challenges—seemed like an exciting and wild ride for Patrick.

Eight years thereafter, 2600Hz has been an incredible journey for Darren and Patrick, and an inspiring endeavor for the rest of the world.

They had the idea and the intellect, now the young entrepreneurs needed some financial backup along with a valuable source of guidance and consultation. Among the chaos of app-builders and API developers, there stood the 2600Hz Project with a broader vision to have an actual business phone platform with

interconnected APIs. However, they had a hard time convincing capitalists to look at the bigger picture. In the end, 2600Hz came out to be 100% bootstrapped and a completely employee-owned, burgeoning telecom company.

One day, while working crazy hours and sacrificing lifestyles to save money, they got the game-changing phone call from a major carrier—Deutsche Telekom. After a meeting at the MNC’s Menlo Park office, Darren and Patrick grabbed their first major consulting project with one of the biggest telcos in the world. This worked as a throttle for the 2600Hz Project and the duo could now focus on building their product—a cloud-based telephony platform that combines the various switching functionality all into one distributed system.

Forget worrying about the glitches in your switches Scalable switches like Broadsoft and Metaswitch could handle volume, but had a very closed architecture and was expensive to get started. The open source world (FreeSWITCH and Asterisk) had an Open Architecture (you could make very custom experience) but were designed for a single server and your operational cost went through the roof at scale. The 2600Hz company aimed to hit both targets – massively scalable cluster technology with Rest APIs for every function so that you have the ability to make a very custom experience for your end user while scaling at a fraction of the cost.

Darren and Patrick gathered a team of experienced telecom engineers to build a truly clustered solution that could handle the large-scale capability of a carrier grade switch while keeping it open so users could build their own integrations. Karl Anderson, the CTO and Chief Architect at 2600Hz, joined the duo as a core design engineer of the 2600Hz Platform. An engineering/ fanatic known as the jack-of-all-trades for all things VoIP, Karl has contributed majorly to the 2600Hz project. Their product’s distributed technology is their pride and joy. This has prevented outages for large companies that got hit by natural disasters while allowing them to scale worldwide.

Some of their major technological breakthroughs include: o Mobile – They partnered with Sprint to connect to their network and allow their customers to have a white-labeled MVNO offering.

Features such as Call Recording, Call Parking, Extension Dialing, etc... can all be enabled using the native mobile dialer, and integrators such as SalesForce and Hubspot are linked to the mobile device without the use of an OTT application. Hence a sales rep in the field can use their mobile device naturally and have all the data logged into Salesforce, record the call if needed and allow remote workers to see when the sales rep is done with their phone call. o Call Center – They have built out Call Center to handle all forms of media (voice, SMS, Tweets) while exposing the agents, manager, and administrator settings so queues can be managed as efficiently as possible. Call Center is specifically stacked to handle and manage large volumes of incoming/outcoming calls, making sure the call load is distributed equally to prevent downtime. The Call Queues are API drivin so you can integrate with other programs in and outside of the platform, hence an agent can answer calls, respond to texts, and even Tweet back to customers.The future of customer communications is ever evolving so having an underlying technology that can grow with your need is paramount.

o Developer Tools – Rest APIs, WebHooks, WebSockets, Voice, Video and SMS are just some of the standard features and tools that developers can use to create dynamic applications.

Patrick Sullivan Co-founder & COO 2600Hz

Nowadays, companies require the ability to build out a particular experience via APIs (CPaaS). The 2600Hz Project provides a scalable clustered technology that is all API based so clients can integrate with their existing platforms, or build on top of KAZOO to create a customized experience. They have the advantage of using the latest and greatest technologies to lower the cost of scale while bringing in bleeding edge technologies (Webhooks, Websockets, WebRTC).

Since rival platforms were built before these technologies were adopted, they’re using outdated technology. Because of this, they can’t compete with 2600Hz on price and can’t offer many of the features customers need. Furthermore, their closed architecture and lack of APIs can hinder their clients from competing in the evolving world of dynamic communications.

Today, 2600Hz is an award-winning company offering voice, data and messaging services to millions of users globally through their flagship platform – KAZOO. Kazoo, the revolutionary open-source platform, is a thoughtfully engineered mixture of tools built by leaders in the telecom industry and implemented to offer a feature-rich enterprise telecom solution. Its unique multitenant architecture is distributed and highly scalable, with flexible

deployments and dynamic call control managed from one simple, intuitive interface.

The Urge to Innovate From their humble beginnings to today, being a brand offering the power of VoIP infrastructure to their various national and international clients, the 2600Hz project is a truly inspiring journey in itself. The founders have been presenters of their innovative ideas on various conferences including the TechCrunch Disrupt.

The company also organizes an annual conference named KAZOOcon, which brings together developers, managed service and internet providers, carriers, and telecom evangelists to shape the future of communications, discuss evolving technologies and share best practices to help the telecom community. The wall-of-fame at 2600Hz boasts the “Core Award”

by Telecom Council, SPIFFY AWARD, and the “Top Innovator” award by DeveloperWeek.

Based in San-Francisco, California, 2600Hz has expanded to offer a full enterprise-PBX, a hosted out-of-the box version and a variety of support and monitoring services as well. For developers building their own telephony apps, 2600Hz offers 100+ APIs that gives them full access to the building blocks of the entire platform. Whether it be voice, video or SMS, 2600Hz enjoys simplifying and modernizing the cryptic black box of telecom.

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Embracing Opportunities

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Amit On Founder & CEO

CallApp

I believe the communication industry has room for infinite growth and we will be the company to pave the future of it.

I

n today’s modern era of technology, everyone uses mobile phones, and we all have tons of contacts on our devices.

However, it is not always possible for us to identify each person calling, mostly because we might not have them in our contact list. It could either be a friend or it could be a telemarketer. Thus arises the most important question: whether to answer the call or not?

Faced by a similar dilemma, Amit On, the Founder and CEO of CallApp, decided to create proprietary algorithms using smart data, which will allow you to have information and details about the person calling you. This algorithm is the backbone of CallApp, a free caller ID and call blocker application that allows smartphone users to block calls, identify telemarketing calls, record calls, blacklist unwanted callers and much more.

CallApp is the most comprehensive caller ID app with the ability to identify over 3 billion unknown callers and update your contact list with complete information from social media platforms. Today, the app has won several awards and is integrated with over 60 information sources. Supported in over 200 counties, CallApp combines your dialler and local search platform to give you access to people and places all in one convenient location- your dialler.

The beginning of going beyond!

Amit started his entrepreneurial journey at a very young age. At age 14, he started his first tech company, which was a very popular BBS. When he was 16, the internet arrived in households and changed his life forever. While still in high school, Amit worked for 2 different start-ups, both were acquired by larger companies later on. Moving on a few years later, at age of 18, Amit’s passion and leadership qualities landed him a position in the IDF’s Special Intelligence Technology Unit.

20

Following the IDF, Amit joined a startup called Followap as a developer.

Once again, Amit excelled in his work and climbed the ladder all the way up to Chief Architect. Followap was later on acquired for approximately $140M by the U.S. company, Neustar. After his successes at Followap, he later on joined the start-up Amobee as the company’s CTO for 4 years. After years of hard work, Amobee was acquired by Singtel for approximately $340M. Amit has also played a major role in many other start-ups.

When he decided to create CallApp it was because of his personal experience that every time he made or received a call there was a lot of information missing. He knew that all of this

information was already publicly available and thus wanted to create a solution for people to access this information in one easy to use place.

Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.

If Amit is the brain behind CallApp, his team is certainly the backbone without whom CallApp would not have reached its present heights. They are not just a team of average developers. CallApps’s Research and Development team is filled with leaders of their country’s Special Intelligence Technology Units.

“We didn’t just take an open source Caller ID & Call Blocking code someone already created. Instead we

took smart data to create proprietary algorithms, which are now the backbone of CallApp,” says Amit.

Moreover, what makes CallApp so great is that the users are actively helping in blocking calls and tagging spammers. One reason people download the app is to get rid of telemarketers, therefore it is known that the users want to be shielded. With this being said, the users take an active part in CallApp’s service by flagging telemarketers, so others can gain the benefit of not being hit with spam calls.

Exceptional people know doing their best is all they can do.

Amit and his team have created a breakthrough technology that has revolutionized the world we live in

21 recognizes any number that goes through your messaging apps. Thus, allowing you to put a name, profile, and context to those nameless numbers. Some other features CallApp has are comprehensive profiles for each user, advanced reminders, the ability to share contact details, fun birthday reminders, and much more.

Being unique is better than being perfect.

today. CallApp is a comprehensive call management solution that gives you all the necessary information you need about who is calling you. They truly provide the best “Caller ID” space available on the market.

CallApp provides a full-blown communication ID including identification for phone calls, text messages, WhatsApp messages, etc. It is a known fact that people like personalization and that is exactly what CallApp gives them. Their Caller ID gives you a fully personalized experience about the person calling; the name, mutual friends, photos, etc.

It is different for every person and that is what makes them stand out. Sure, the name will be the same, but the rest

of the details are customized to the user and context.

The CallApp Platform connects each phone to its universal social contact book of over 3 billion phone numbers using algorithms to correctly identify people and businesses. The CallApp community defends each other by reporting spam calls, so these reported numbers are instantly blocked for other users.

Apart from this, they have recently released the most advanced and highest quality Call Recorder on the market free of cost within the app. Moreover, for all of those numbers from your messaging apps, CallApp has launched a feature called CallApp Plus, which

Apart from the fact that CallApp is not just a Caller ID app, there is also no other app or platform on the market that provides the same usability and information that they provide to the users. CallApp can truly replace your phone’s native dialler and contact list.

The value that CallApp brings to the user alone separates it from its industry competitors. They like to concentrate on the social world and giving users the best experience possible is their main focus. As many people today use social media, incorporating it into the app allows CallApp to give its users a much more personalized experience. In addition to this, the team at CallApp is always on the lookout for testing new ways to increase the performance and user experience of CallApp. Every feature is fully tested and made sure to be of highest quality. “Anything less than perfect for our users is not acceptable for us. We never release a new feature just so we can put it in our app description,” adds Amit.

Currently, CallApp is the most liked Caller ID app in the world. They have over 37 million users and an evergrowing community of supporters. In the coming years, CallApp aims to launch some industry-changing innovations. They believe that the communication industry has room for infinite growth and CallApp will be the one to pave the way towards future development.

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Jacob Baskin Engineering Lead Coord

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The Future of Identity in the Mobility Market

A

t Coord, we spend a lot of time trying to connect systems together to make life easier for users and developers, and one of the biggest challenges we face is how to handle identity. Every time a user has to enter a password, they have to take time and mental effort away from the task they want to accomplish. And every additional piece of information you need to remember makes your life harder: did I change my credit card number on the bike share app yet? What about with my favorite ride hailing service?

Users want identity to be seamless but under their control: it’s rarely at the front of a user’s mind, but when it is, it’s very important that they have full ownership of their own information. For us to make this happen in the mobility market, we have to let users manage their identity easily across multiple systems. This means that unlocking a bike from an operator you’ve

26 never used before shouldn’t involve entering your email address, password, and credit card information all over again. This is even more complicated for shared mobility services than it is in other industries because of liability and the law: drivers’ licenses, age verification, and insurance checks can often make account creation quite involved.

Luckily, web standards are increasingly allowing users to easily and securely connect their identities to be across apps and the services they depend on. Below, I’ll describe how we think identity should work in a modern mobility marketplace, and what we’re doing to make it happen.

From Social Sign-On to Open Identity You’ve probably seen a dialog like this on a website: An OAuth permission dialog box.

This dialog uses the OAuth 2.0 standard. This standard was built to allow users to delegate authorization from one service to another: it helps you tell a service you’re using what data it’s allowed to see and what actions they’re

allowed to take on your behalf. But these days, you mostly see it used for social sign-on: the only authorization you give is for an app to see your name and email address.

Here’s a simplified view of how OAuth 2 normally works:

An OAuth 2 permission flow This process is great at helping users sign up speedily with new apps, but it doesn’t solve our problem. In particular, this flow is optimized for services that the user already has an account with. If the user doesn’t have an account already, they will need to create a new one, just as if OAuth weren’t there. Since this can be a complicated process, OAuth only gets used in practice with services that billions of people have already signed up for, like Google or Facebook.

The apps we’re working with have the reverse problem. If your app connects to multiple different mobility services, you don’t want to ask the services who the user is, since you probably know that already. Instead, you want to tell them who the user is! But how can we do that?

27 Luckily, a new standard called OpenID Connect, built on many of the same technologies as OAuth, was released to the public in August 2017. OpenID Connect describes a format for encoding identity information called a “JWT”, which stands for JSON Web Token, and a standard mechanism for validating that a trusted app issued the JWT. As long as they trust the issuer, a service can use a JWT from any OpenID Connect compatible application to authenticate the user who’s sending it. Better yet, apps that use frameworks like Firebase or Auth0 support OpenID Connect out of the box already!

This solves exactly the problem we have: an app that already has a relationship with a user wants to connect with multiple services, each of which may or may not have such a relationship.

Here’s how this flow works:

Sharing identity with OpenID Connect While the user still has control over their account with the service, since they always have the ability to deny or revoke an app’s permission, their interaction is much more seamless. There are no more passwords to remember, and they don’t have to enter the same information again if the app they’re using already has it. This means that the user can get where they’re going much more quickly. Once the auth flow has finished, the app can use the services APIs to access services right away; for instance, the user could unlock a shared bike directly through the app.

Where Coord Comes In Even though OpenID Connect makes dealing with user identity much easier than it used to be, it can be challenging to support as part of an existing system. At Coord, our Users API handles sending only the necessary user information to each service while automatically tracking which users have access to which services. Because all Coord APIs, regardless of the underlying service provider, handle authentication uniformly, you can add a new service

to your app with hardly any new code. Linking an existing user to a new application takes just a single HTTP GET request, and requires no new credential management for your app.

Also, Coord’s platform serves as a compatibility layer for service providers and for applications, allowing any provider or app to become standards-compliant without making any technical changes to their underlying system.

Finally, and most importantly, OpenID Connect doesn’t solve the problem of building trust between app developers and service providers. Going through Coord’s platform makes sure that only trusted services get access to user identity, and that only trusted applications are granted access to a service provider’s API, all without any change to the core app or service.

We’re excited to work with you to make Coord’s identity platform work with your application or service! Chat with us on coord.co to get started.

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Marc Amblard Managing Director Orsay Consulting

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Connected Vehicles Are Revolutionizing the Mobility Experience

T

he mobility revolution we are currently experiencing, the most disruptive since the automobile was introduced about 125 years ago, is the result of four mega-trends: electrification, autonomy, shared mobility and connectivity. Vehicles are becoming increasingly connected to their users, owners and pedestrians, to each other, to the infrastructure and more. A myriad of value propositions have already emerged and many more should be expected. They benefit safety, user experience or productivity. Let’s see how this is unfolding for various categories of value propositions.

Enabling the Safe Deployment of Highly Automated Vehicles Whereas connectivity can be a “nice to have” for certain use cases, it will be necessary in various semblances to maximize the safety of highly automated vehicles. Vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication can address blind spots when cameras, lidar and radars cannot see around the corner, and provide overall redundancy. Savari, Veniam or Autotalks have developed different parts of the solution to this problem. They not only provide the location of other

32 vehicles, but also potentially information as to their behavior, e.g., acceleration or braking.

Vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication enables a dialog with traffic management systems and road markers. This will eventually allow for traffic to flow more smoothly thus more efficiently, for emergency vehicles to be given priority over regular traffic, and potentially to help autonomous vehicles (AVs) precisely locate themselves. A few corridors, such as El Camino Real in Silicon Valley, have been fitted with DSRCbased equipment to test the technology. BMW is also deploying a solution developed by Connected Signalswhich provides current and predictive information on signal status (green/yellow/red). This allows drivers to adapt their speed and drive more smoothly.

At least for the foreseeable future, AVs will require 3D HD maps to precisely locate and guide themselves. Such maps are likely to be crowdsourced and updated in realtime in order to reflect changes, such as road construction. Gaps observed vs the onboard reference map will be pushed to the cloud, confirmed with similar data from other vehicles and pushed back to all vehicles in the concerned area. For instance, Mobileye is collaborating with BMW, VW and Nissan on such a solution. By end 2018, they expect to have 2 million vehicles capable of crowdsourcing map data.

Drivers and pedestrians are accustomed to informal communication. In an AV world, pedestrians must be made aware of vehicles’ intentions. Conversely, vehicles must identify all pedestrians who may get in their paths, whether they are visible or not. Autonomic, which was acquired by Ford earlier this year, is incorporating pedestrians into their cellular V2X platform.

Driver and Vehicle Monitoring Enhance Safety and Cost Vehicles already generate a large amount data due to a multitude of sensors. Intel predicted that an AV will generate 4 TB of data each day. Currently, this data is by and large processed onboard for the purpose of optimizing vehicular operations. However, a number of companies are already taping the data available on the vehicle’s CAN bus (via aftermarket dongles installed on

the OBD port) or adding extra sensors, e.g., cameras.

The data is exported via 4G and processed remotely or sold to third parties. This opens the door to a myriad of services.

Some of these services relate to safety, such as Zendrive or i4drive, which analyze driving behavior and provide feedback to both drivers and fleet managers. On top of this, Nauto alerts drivers when their behavior puts them at risk in dangerous situations, e.g., vehicle breaking ahead. Safe driving habits can mean lower premiums via Usage Based Insurance, which is the main focus of OctoTelematics.

Vehicle diagnostics and predictive maintenance is critical, not just to reduce operating costs, but also to remotely diagnose vehicles when the user is not the owner. In addition, it can provide leads to service networks. Companies like Mojio or Voyomotive address such opportunities. Carfit (which I am advising) uses vibration AI to diagnose systems that are not fitted with sensors with the same objective. The monitoring of a vehicle’s parameters creates a richer history than that built on dealer visit records (e.g. Carfax), which will enable fact-based fleet valuation. VINchain plans to build a blockchain-based history of individual vehicles to do just that.

Tesla has been collecting vehicle output since the introduction of Model S. The resulting data lake provides a huge resource that leads to engineering improvement as well as business performance. The rest of the industry is following suit, as natively connected vehicles will represent about 80% of global sales vs 40% today. Yet this does not suffice. Corporate culture and expertise at incumbent players must evolve to leverage the full potential of this massive data.

A Plethora of Extra Convenience and Services If safety remains the most critical objective, customer benefits allow for differentiation, thus extra value. By introducing over-the-air (OTA) updates in 2012, Tesla was not only able to fine-tune its software overtime — without the need for customers to come to the dealer — but also to add new features on the fly. Examples include Autopilot updates, the recent reduction in braking distance on Model 3, the temporarily range increase in an emergency situation or the addition of voice

33 command. Movimento now offers such OTA services to all OEMs. Connected vehicles also offer extra convenience. While we still own cars, remote access enables services such as dropping your Amazon parcel in your trunk, servicing, refueling or cleaning your car while you work, etc.

SmartCar is working with BMW, Hyundaiand PSA on such a solution. The understanding of human behavior inside the cabin will provide insights first on the driver (awareness, ability to take over the driving role) and then on passengers. Identifying their sex, gender, emotion, position or activities inside the cabin will enable a series of features including targeted promotion. Eyeris (which I am advising) has a production-ready solution for both drivers and passengers.

With these services comes the need for secure payment.

Vehicle-specific platforms are coming to life to allow for the payment of tolls, parking, EV charging, foods or other in-car services without human intervention. Several players are developing solutions, including Tier 1 supplier ZF and IBM who are jointly developing ”Car eWallet.” GM is rolling out Marketplace, which enables access to third party service providers directly on the vehicle’s head unit, as well as payment. Xevo, which powers Marketplace, just announced a similar deal with Hyundai to develop their Digital Wallet.

Drivers and passengers alike expect continuity between their smartphones, vehicle displays and home/office. To this end, Apple and Google are already widely present in the cabin respectively with CarPlay and Android Auto.

Whereas Apple has so far allowed very few proprietary apps, the giant will open up and include Google Maps and Waze with iOS12 later this year. CarPlay and Android Auto come with their digital assistants, i.e., Siri and Google Assistant. However, Amazon’s Alexa seems to have taken the lead when it comes to in-car assistant.

A few startups also work on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for cars, such a Xbrain, German Autolabs or Mobvoi.

Privacy and Monetization Who owns the data? The user, the OEM, the solution supplier or any 3rd party? How is data transfer controlled? Europeans are more protective of their

personal data than Americans, who mainly put free services ahead of privacy. GDPR, introduced last May in the EU, puts citizens at the center. They own and have full control over the use of their personal data — a user’s consent is required before such data can be shared. Since the USA lacks the equivalent of GDPR, early signals seem to indicate that the GDPR may become the de-facto global rule for any company that does business in Europe.

Once data ownership is sorted out, business can be made from monetizing data. A majority of the companies mentioned above make money off of their data in some ways. However, marketplaces have been created for the sole purpose of trading automotive data, connecting sellers and buyers. Companies behind them includes Caruso in Europe or Otonomo in the USA. Such companies often process or augment the data through analytics in order to increase their value.

How about the Tech behind these Services?

Whereas V2I and V2V are likely to rely on DSRC, this tech has only been deployed so far by Toyota and Cadillac. This is a major hinderance as it takes two to communicate. The large amount of data sent and received by vehicles will use 4G, then 5G when deployed — Audi has already announced they will roll out 5G-connected vehicles starting in 2020. In specific use cases where a narrow bandwidth is sufficient and energy is scarce (e.g. vehicle tracking), the ultra narrow band modulation tech deployed by Sigfox or LoRawill make sense. As for, vehicle to pedestrian communication, cellular is main contender though LiFi, an LED-based tech deployed by Zero.1, may be an alternative. Whichever the communication, a robust cybersecurity layer is absolutely essential, but that’s a whole other topic.

Lastly, large amounts of data will means large bandwidth and high cost. For this reason, I expect that processing data at the edge will become more prevalent, unless its monetization potential far exceeds the cost of beaming it.

However, a side benefit from processing more data locally will be that more personal data will remain inside the vehicle, e.g. the dialog you have with your digital assistant will not be shared!

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Ideas to Innovation

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Evgeny Predein Co-founder

Apiumhub

We help you transform your idea into a powerful and scalable product.

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ave you ever wondered which aspects of your life haven’t been touched by the capabilities of a smartphone? Aren’t we dependent on this tool for almost everything right from working, banking, traveling, shopping to even learning? Even businesses are embracing mobility to enhance the efficiency of their workforce. This has led to tough competition among the mobile app development companies.

As a result, many players fail to reach their set target. Often the reason for failure is attributed to the ignorance of app development companies towards one or the other fundamentals of mobility management. A common error committed by many business owners is to try to do everything themselves. They often end up doing too much without being experts in anything!

Apiumhub is a software development company that went beyond expertise to provide the best in the industry.

Apiumhub brings together a community of software developers & architects, and partners with other experts to provide you with the best team to help you transform your idea into a powerful and scalable product.

Extraordinary belongs to those who create it.

The company was founded in Barcelona back in 2014. Over the years, the more experience they acquired working on design & development projects, the more it made sense to separate them. That’s why Apiumhub decided to focus on their core services: software architecture, web development and mobile app development. That’s how Apiumhub’s spinoff studio specialized in product management, user experience and design: North was launched. After doing some research, talking to clients and friends in the industry, they realised that in order to offer the best solutions, they need to create this network of experts in the digital industry, each one specialised in its own field, for example SEO, ASO,

36 digital marketing, design, IoT, blockchain, tech lawyers, etc. Today, Apiumhub is a tech hub that reunites innovation, design and technology.

Apiumhub covers the whole cycle of digital product development by collaborating with different partners, each one specialized in their own field.

Quite logicical, isn’t it? Apiumhub!

The green colour represents their fresh new start and, at the same time, gives a feeling of a clean renewal. In fact green can mean many things as for example growth, reliability, prosperity, mental clarity, renewal & safety. And let’s be honest, they just love the colour!

‘What’s in a name?’ they say.

Pretty much Everything!

Complementary skill divides the tasks and multiplies success.

Ever thought that a technology company could be named after a plant? Much of the apparent influence of names on behaviour has been attributed to what’s known as the implicit-egotism effect; we are generally drawn to the things and people that most resemble us. Apium has, and will always be, representative of their team’s identity.

Apium comes from the word Apium Graveolens, which is the scientific name for celery. Yes, celery, the vegetable. It has great benefits, just like the software they develop. What are the main benefits? It cleans your system, fixes all sorts of health issues and is preventive of various illnesses.

So, it pretty much delineates the clean & healthy software at Apiumhub. There are various definitions to what a hub is, and one of them is “the effective centre of an activity, region, or network.” A hub can be seen as a common connection point, the centre of an activity or the central or main part of something where there is most activity. That’s what the founder of Apiumhub wanted to be; to be more than just a software development company, to be a tech hub that reunites innovation, design & technology.

Evgeny Predein and Christian Ciceri are the co-founders of Apiumhub.

They worked for big companies like Roche, Aigues de Barcelona, NTR, Intersystems, Ono, Telefónica, Accenture, etc., faced problems like lack of agility, flexibility or even endless timings for any modification, and above all, useless meeting. These hindrances made them exhausted and impossible to feel satisfied with their work, so knowing all pros and cons in the software development industry, they decided to join forces and open a new agile software development company, focusing on quality and best practices.

After going through sleepless nights, 20 hours working day, financial ups and downs, Evgeny and Christian had achieved what they dreamt of after years of diligence and determination. Apiumhub is a dream come true with a team of software cracks (leading developers and architects in Barcelona), efficient processes and project management, clients from all over the world (consolidated startups and big enterprises, for example: Nestle, Adidas, Axa, Carnovo, Cornerjob, Antai, Tous, Privalia, etc.) clear strategic vision for growth, network

of experts in their field, segregated areas of responsibilities and a profitable business. Also, it is important to mention that cofounders were and are responsible for specific areas and each one has different profile. Yin and yang, maker and seller, dreamer and pragmatist, call it what you want, but it helped a lot to have a sustainable growth.

Christian and Evgeny don’t have all the skills to run the company successfully, but they have complementary set of skills to do so together. On one hand, Christian is a tech guru. While on the other, Evgeny is a business development leader, an entrepreneur who gets their vision to the market. Another important thing to mention is – their shared vision & shared values; on the short and on the long term. They share the same vision and have common objectives; they lead the team to a common goal and transmit the same culture they want to create in the company.

Valued team, valued people!

To enter into Apiumhub is not that easy. Christian selects the best of the best, and people come to work not only for a good salary, but mostly for career opportunities and professional growth. Right now, in Apiumhub’s team, you may find DevOps, Software architects, Backend developers, Frontend developers, iOS developers, Android developers and Product Owners. Also, they have a marketing department that publishes software articles written by their team, organizes software architecture meetups in Spain, where Christian is the leading speaker, etc.

The success for Apiumhub is reflected in its growing team. A year

37 ago, when the team started to grow without compromising quality, when clients started to recommend their team and of course when co-founders forgot what it means to count every cent before paying the salaries, Apiumhub saw itself achieving beyond the horizon. Now, Apiumhub is very well-known in Barcelona and on a daily basis they receive CVs of people, who are interested in working for them as well as requests from the clients with innovative projects. Now, Apiumhub oďŹƒce became a second home and second family for each member of the team, now everyone enjoys every moment spent together.

Envisioning a brighter future with smarter technocrats Some of the current hottest trends are: NLP, Deep learning, Chat bots and Christian is an expert in it. What Apiumhub always tries to do is to oer solid software architecture, adding latest trends, which leads to scalability, high performance and cost reduction. The company has already worked on AI projects for big international companies and booming startups.

In near future, you will see the Apiumhub team growing, in terms of number of people and in terms of their professional level as well. As never stop growing is one of their values! Also, they are planning to open Apiumhub University to solve the talent scalability problem in Barcelona. Psst! One of their plans is to develop their own product!

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Make Your Way

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Nir Erez Co-founder & CEO

Moovit

Peace of mind for public transportation with all your local transit options in one app.

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n average household in the U.S spends 18 cents of every dollar on transportation, and 96% of this goes to buying, maintaining, and operating cars—the largest expenditure after housing. People can save nearly $10,000 by taking public transportation and living with one less car. Moreover, longer and more frequent car journeys contribute to road traffic congestion, whilst public transport providers are required to produce ever more extensive networks. Given a finite supply of transport infrastructure, one of the many proposals for reducing road-traffic congestion is to provide “better” public transport. However, the increase in the complexity of the public transport network and the operational delays incurred particularly by buses due to road traffic congestion, causes difficulties for both the public transport provider, in deciding when and where the new services should operate, and for those travelers who wish to use the system, both in planning their journeys and in accomplishing them.

The way people move is changing daily. Ride-sharing apps, the car-sharing economy, and autonomous vehicles (also known as driverless cars) contribute to the urban mobility infrastructure. However, with eight billion people and one billion cars on earth, most people rely on transit. Among the reasons for the non-optimal level of awareness of public transit is the trade-off between the level of dissemination of information and the cost to the public transport user or provider. As long ago as 1984 information technology was heralded as a possible solution to the problem of providing low-cost personalized information. It is only in the 1990’s, with the exponential growth of both Internet and sophisticated mobile communications devices that the true potential for providing readily available, fully understandable and relevant data to the prospective traveler. The nature of the problem thus leads to two distinct solutions at present. Firstly, there is the requirement for planning any journey using one or more modes. Secondly, it is also necessary to provide reassurance to the traveler that his chosen service is running according to the schedule which he has been given.

Enter Moovit—the heroic savior disguised as a transit app—simplifying your urban mobility in more than 2,200 cities around the world in 80 countries and 44 languages. Being the biggest repository of transport data and analysis in the world, Moovit

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is by far the largest and most downloaded transit app, making getting around town via mass transit easier and more convenient for over 200 million users.

All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim Roy Bick, a software technologist and a native of Tel Aviv, Israel, faced the monotonous trouble of time delays while traveling by the local public transport. He realized there was no accurate information for public transit available on the smartphone or on the Internet. Being tech-savvy as he is, Roy mapped all the public transit stops in Tel Aviv for his convenience. He then developed a software program to develop an application. Roy had the technical expertise. He then collaborated with entrepreneurs Nir Erez and Yaron Evron, who brought together the technology, investors, and the management to create Moovit,

providing expert solutions for transit riders around the world.

On a mission to speed-up the transit for commuters worldwide, team Moovit started their operations in Israel in 2012 and grew very quickly to include other cities. The first city that Moovit was launched in 2013 after Tel Aviv was Madrid, Spain. Today, six years after its humble beginning, the local transit app is available for free in 2200+ cities along with the growing user base of 200million+ users, and has generated a total funding of $131.5 million through four rounds of VC investments. Moovit is continuously advancing itself in offering a real-time picture of public transit, including the best route for your journey, by combining information from public transit operators and authorities with live information from the user community.

Yes, the user community! It’s the magic of crowdsourcing. Moovit generates up to four billion anonymous data points a day that comprise the world’s largest repository of transit data. The Big Data gathering is aided

by Moovit’s network of more than 350,000 local editors, called “Mooviters”, who help to map-out and maintain local transit information in cities that would otherwise be unserved.

Excellence is a continuous process that comes from expertise Owing to his extensive entrepreneurial experience, Nir Erez takes up the crucial role of the CEO and CoFounder at Moovit. Roy, in his role of the Founder and VP Operations, brings his extensive experience as a software developer and R&D manager in local and worldwide organizations to Moovit. Roy is the “all-around” player, orchestrating collaboration between the

43 with an increasing user-base. Their first big achievement was marked by the first million downloads, which has quickly grown to 200 million users as of July’18. So, each one of the incremental gains of users is a validation that Moovit is a world class company, which is doing good for people. Recognizing the power of Moovit, major cities garnered to partner the initiative. Moovit became the official transit app for the City of Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil. The company has since been the official transit app for more than 100 venues, activities, games and matches like the top football club in Rome, AS Roma. Each time Moovit generates another worldclass partnership, the team believes that they are providing something unique or something very special.

company and its transit partners around the world, and between in-country managers and local editors. He is also responsible for keeping Moovit at the cutting edge of transit trends the combining software, hardware, crowdsourcing and transport infrastructure.

Moovit provides different services to public transportation commuters, such as trip planning, line schedules & maps, favorite lines, and service alerts.

The intelligent transit model gathers the static data from the feeds or websites of transit agencies and the company adds the real-time information whenever available as well as the data gathered through crowdsourcing. Moovit Urban Mobility Analytics (“MUMA”) is the world’s leading urban mobility analytics tool that combines multiple data sources, including anonymized aggregated data from Moovit users,

with advanced algorithms to provide detailed insights into the way people move around cities.

The app provides various options for intermodal transit. In a major city, there are many different transit lines; bus lines, subways, ferries and commuter train lines. So, the user gets all their data, their timelines and arrival information in one single app. This also includes bike-share and ride share.

More users of Moovit’s appmeans better data, and Moovit has more users than any other transit app in the world.

Moovit aides in the use of public transportation, perfected in part by the public it serves.

The secret is to just keep moving.

With Moovit, you’re on the right track.

From their humble beginnings, starting out as a small app piloted in Israel, Moovit has spread across 2200 cities

The third validation is the quality of investors who have participated in Moovit fundraising. From Sequoia to Intel Capital, it has been a wild ride delivering on expectations from investors and communities believing in Moovit. Also, Intel Capital provided a strategic opportunity by enabling Moovit to partner with Intel’s Mobileye, another major transit company based in Israel that has cameras mounted on vehicles to give traffic information. So, if you look at it from the user growth, partnership growth, or the financial investor’s point of view, Moovit has had positive proof points all along the way.

Moovit is well-recognized as an early pioneer of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). The company helps people change the way they consume mobility by fully integrating other forms of transport. Moovit recently launched its Smart Transit Suite of products to help cities, governments and transit operators improve urban mobility for the benefit of the community.

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Invoking Emotions

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Landon Curry Partner & MD

Red Cartel

Owning a business is very challenging and takes a lot of hard work but it is also very rewarding when it is running well.

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dmit it. You have whittled away minutes, if not hours, playing Farmville, Words with Friends or Candy Crush on your phone or tablet. If this guilty joy sounds common, you are not the only one. Today, more consumers are playing games and, subsequently, creating a new market opportunities for advertisers.

Not surprising, the greatest opportunities are on mobile phones as this market fragment is by a wide margin the biggest and fastest developing with regards to gamers. The total value of global animation industry was whopping USD 254 bn in 2017 and is projected to reach USD 270 bn by 2020. Most of the segments in the animation industry are growing at the rate of 2% YoY. The need for animation, VFX and gaming has expanded with the upsurge in targeted broadcasting hours by cable and satellite TV, penetration of mobile devices, availability of low cost internet access along with the growing popularity of streaming video. What’s more, the demand for Animation and VFX content to power immersive experiences such as Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality is growing exponentially. One of Australia’s leading 3D Animation and game development studios with over 16 years of experience servicing the Gaming and Advertising industries, specializing in creating dynamic visual content for Gaming, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality is Red Cartel. The company delivers cost effective graphics and application solutions including Virtual Reality development, Cinematic Sequences, Mobile applications, Augmented Reality and Casino/Club animated graphics.

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The journey that spans almost two decades Like every other renowned company, Red Cartel was also founded in a garage by Landon Curry. In 2001, Landon and his two work-mates started a 3D animation studio called Twitch Studios which re-branded in 2008 and became Red Cartel.

Initially, Landon and the team created content for console games, TVC’s and property visualization.

During downtime, they were always looking for new technologies which led them to their first international VR for Red Bull Brazil in 2014. Red Cartel has utilized many new technologies as they have evolved including Hololense, Meta,

ARkit/ARcore and a wide variety of VR headsets including its recently opened large scale - free roaming VR arcade called Simosity.

Prior to Red Cartel Landon worked in the 3D industry as a freelancer, which is still very common in this industry. Working as a freelancer, the work was somewhat unpredictable for Landon, which made it difficult to plan too far ahead financially. The upside is there are freedoms with freelancing that you don’t get as a full time employee and often you get paid a slightly higher rate. However, Landon always had a bit of entrepreneur in him, which was partly inspired his parents having their own businesses. He has also

been inclined to think outside the box and take risks in situations where others would take the safer path. And this was the stepping stone for Landon to start Red Cartel.

Achieving triumph over struggles while staying honest with the goals The triad that founded Red Cartel has specific skills; one person specialized in animation, other in compositing and the third in technical animation (Particles/VFX). However, over the years, these roles have grown and evolved to the point where Red Cartel has teams that specialize in these tasks as well as a large team of programmers.

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devices and what is possible with these technologies.

There has been numerous moments since the inception of the company, when the team felt their work has finally paid off. Some of these moments stand out that include landing high profile projects like Red Bull VR and eBay VR, and being asked to demonstrate VR on live television was a notable moment too.

The team always look forward to receive such awards for their work, because seeing your work on television and on the big screen is quite an achievement, isn’t it?

Landon says there are many risks with starting new businesses. The foremost is that you need initial funding to purchase equipment. You also need to gain credibility and promote your services which can be very difficult if you have no content to show. The team solved this by creating a series of short clips (a demo reel) that showcased the various skills they had. However, the biggest risk Landon faced was cashflow, waiting for payments whilst paying freelancers and getting new projects in was particularly challenging in the first few years.

Apart from these, the financial strain was very high when they started Red Cartel, which eased off over time, but

it took years before there was some solid stability. “Owning a business is very challenging and takes a lot of hard work but it is also very rewarding when it is running well,” Landon says.

Leading from the front with new technologies In the mobile technology bracket, Red Cartel does a lot of work for Mobile Virtual Reality (Gear VR, Google Cardboard etc) as well as Augmented Reality projects, particularly in the field of ARkit and ARcore. These mobile VR and AR technologies are constantly improving which allows the company to push the limits of the

Going beyond, Red Cartel expects lots of growth. They are opening an office in Brisbane and will be looking at opening an office in Macau in the coming years. They will also be developing many more large scale Virtual Reality games as well as AR applications both for consumers and B2B. Nonetheless, they always aim to be at the forefront of new technologies and are looking forward to future challenges and new ventures.

Fun fact: The nomenclature of the company was conceived by one of Landon’s business partners at the time. The Cartel part of the name signifies a group of people working together and Red seemed to work best out of the colors they tried.

Moreover, it’s also difficult to find an appropriate name for a new creative business that still has a free domain available.

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Mobile Security — Multiple level starting points

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Peter Hewer Enterprise Mobility Expert & Management Consultant

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T

he augmented usage of mobile devices has meant that mobile security risks and threats are experiencing a staggering increase.

Businesses have recognised this, which means sensitive company information is under threat. Mobile interactions have become an extension of who we are and its more and more customary in our daily lives to access social media, banking and using your favourite coffee location finder to name a few. Curse the day when your secular device ends up in the wrong hands and your private life and all its secrets is accessed but the real trouble starts when the breach is broadened to your business profile.

Security risks for mobility devices are similar to the threats that are being considered for corporate networks and internet hacks.

Mobile security is top of the enterprise mobility hierarchy which means that access management and identity management are the starting points to close the hatches for any unwelcomed threats.

These are my recommended ways to secure these devices together with your MDM solution.

Single Sign On Solutions Single Sign-On (SSO) provides the ability to log into an app using a single or federated identity like Microsoft AD. Without SSO, users need to remember complex passwords for each app, or worse, they easily remembered weak

passwords. This results in a frustratingly tedious workflow having to sign in separately to dozens of different apps during the workday. A suitable solution should enable end-user satisfaction and streamline workflows by providing a single identity to access all business apps. It should also unify and deliver access to apps from all end-user platforms — desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

Software upgrades Businesses should follow basic security practices such as accepting the latest OS upgrades and security patches. The main reason anyone has for downloading and installing the latest update is to stay protected from security threats. Older software will continue to have the same bugs and vulnerabilities in the code that allow cyber criminals to get up to no good. This is made even more serious by the fact that all of these exploitable entry points have generally been made public after the release of updates.

Network Access Control (NAC) management for mobile devices NAC’s essential function is to pass user and device credentials to a policy control point, where permission to connect to the network is approved or denied and sent to the network switch, which then takes the desired action, such as allowing or denying device access or sending devices to a controlled guest network. With modern NAC systems, organizations can identify and apply security policy to all types of

users and network devices attempting to access network resources.

MDM working with NAC NAC can integrate with mobile device management (MDM) tools to secure corporate and personal mobile devices. This integration allows for a more uniform view of all users, devices and applications on a corporate network. It also allows organizations to apply a

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level of security appropriate for the type of user and degree of risk which you are comfortable with. By employing NAC with MDM, organizations can achieve better security and operational efficiency, because the technologies complement each other. NAC protects the network while MDM protects and secures the devices themselves.

Multifactor authentication Multi-factor authentication provides a constructive element of layered security by requiring users to prove their identities using two or more verification methods before they can be authenticated. The use of multifactor authentication goes a long way toward protecting mobile credentials. It also gets around some of the problems associated with passwords, such as the use of easy-to-guess passwords or excessive use of the same password.

Putting security first is a sure way to protect your business. Security vulnerabilities change all the time and the cyber criminals are doing more to access your sensitive company information. So revisit your security strategy regularly, there is no doubt that multiple layers are recommended but don’t take the user experience way.

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In Conversation with the Newsmaker

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.Y. Technologies is a shiny, mobile development and web application startup in Vancouver, B.C. Started by founder Amin Yazdani in January 2016. Small, but mighty, A.Y. Technologies prides itself on its talented and flexible team, while their strong communication and rapid iteration have contributed to their initial success.

Beyond Exclamation recently had the pleasure to be “In Conversation” with Amin Yazdani, Founder and Director of Technology at A.Y. Technologies, in which, he took us on the journey of A.Y. Technologies and beyond.

What seeded the vision to ease the process and build efficient and maintainable software? Can you give us a little background on ‘A.Y. Technologies’ and where it stands today?

A.Y. Technologies started 3 years ago, when I left my job as enterprise software architect to bring my knowledge and expertise to help startups and businesses. Throughout my close to 20 years of experience with software, I have seen a lot of mistakes in the way software development is approached by companies and by entrepreneurs, so I wanted to bring my experience to help entrepreneurs make fewer deadly mistakes. We started helping startups with their web and mobile app needs as well as building a secure and scalable systems and infrastructures. Inside less than 3 years we’ve been able to show our expertise working with many customers. Our expertise has been recognized by Clutch when we got awarded as top 10 app developers in Canada and by Agency Spotter as the top 20 mobile developers in the World.

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Amin Yazdani Founder & Director of Technology A.Y. Technologies

60 What inspired you to take the entrepreneurial plunge? What was your journey like? Also, tell us what is the most important quality/moral that you sticks to?

My entrepreneurial journey started when I sold my first website at 15. I was fascinated with computer since 10 and after just a few years I was able to put that in works. When I arrived in Canada, I felt I need some experience to learn the business culture in Canada, so I joined a startup in Vancouver. After 5 years, going through 2 startups, one acquisition, and one spin off, I thought that I’m ready to take the plunge and so I started A.Y. Technologies. To me the main reason to start and keep up with A.Y. Technologies was to help entrepreneurs and startups with scalable Solutions. The dread of code rewrite was one of the startup killers in my experience. The reason startups get to that point is the fact that they start on a non-scalable foundation. They will go down the route of getting to market fastest and easiest, without noticing that the route they chose is a dead-end. I wanted to change that. You can get to market just as fast if you choose the right technologies and keep the scalability in mind.

The team of software developers and architects at A.Y Tech have an extensive experience in software development. You must have witnessed a tide of unique situations which required strategy, approach and implementation.

Kindly share a few experiences which might help our readers to learn to sail the disruptive tides better.

In the world of enterprise software, there are a few keywords that any software firm should get themselves acquainted with very well: Security, Compliance and Policies. These were some of the challenges we faced delivering software that was going to be used by enterprise or government.

The best tip I can give is to start early on, and expect long processes and diligent reviews. When it comes to enterprises or governments, the time has lower priority and the security and compliance will always have more weight. Make sure you understand that, build your solution based on those requirements and engage with the review teams early and often. This is the biggest difference, in my opinion, between startups and enterprises.

Tell us about the moment when you realized that your hard work has finally paid-off.

As software architect and solution builder, there are moments when we can stop and enjoy a success. They come often when we release a project successfully. The bigger the project and the more complex the problem, the bigger the joy of success. For me personally thought, one of the moments when I truly realize that the hard work has paid-off is when I can see the systems we released in use by end-customers and when I see their good feedback. This could be a mobile app or a web application or anything else. When you can solve a problem for an end-user, that’s the true joy of building software.

What business advice would you like to give to the budding entrepreneurs and keen readers?

They say that entrepreneurship is a

roller-coaster. I didn’t realize that fully until we started A.Y. Technologies and now after a few years I can see the truth in that statement. Knowing that, and more so understanding that, will help entrepreneurs in their journey. When you know what to expect, you can get ready for that. Perseverance and commitment is what you need as an entrepreneur to make it through the low points of the journey. That will get you to the height that you work so hard for.

What’s the current scenario, breakthroughs and disruptions, in the industry? What benefits does ‘A.Y. Technologies’ provide over its competitors?

At A.Y. Technologies, our main goal is to make the software development uncomplicated for the decision makers. We understand that software development is complex by nature, but we believe that making the right decision about software should not be complicated if the projects are understood by teams working on them and by the decision makers.

That’s what we bring to the table that is different from our competition. We do this in an ongoing basis in each project, but we also package this as a starting service for new clients. We call this The Roadmap Workshop.

The goal of the Roadmap Workshop is to clarify the goals of the project for all parties and make sure that we are all speaking the same language when it comes to each feature. We achieve that by a mixture of text, user experience flows and user interface design.

What can be expected from the company in upcoming years?

61 In the ďŹ rst 3 years of A.Y. Technologies, we have received more recognition from the industry than our competitor with more than 10-15 years of experience. We are planning to continue that and to help entrepreneurs and startups build quality software in a way that is scalable with their business. We will expand to more markets in North America in near term and to Europe and Asia in the future.

Meet the Newsmaker Amin Yazdani is a software architect and the director of technology of A.Y. Technologies Inc. Amin has more than 15 years of experience with software development and 5 years of experience with software architecture and design.

He is an advocate of new wave of software development and operation management (devops) and has been a volunteer and organizer of DevOpsDays Vancouver for the past 3 years. He has a B.Sc. degree in Software Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University.

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A Complete Rethink

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Darren Besgrove Founder, Director & CEO

OneBlink

We aim for the moment when clients become our main advocates, singing our praises to their colleagues.

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ccording to reports, out of 10 organizations, 8 are struggling with app delivery for a variety of reasons including – skills shortages, confusion amongst tools and vendors, and their inability to quickly prime and evaluate a range of potential projects. And despite the plethora of vendors, app development tools and frameworks, and pricing models, this situation still exists some 8 years after enterprise mobility became a Top 5 CIO priority. Here is BlinkMobile – recently rebranded to OneBlink – which has a brand new approach to solving these long held problems.

OneBlink develops and markets a truly collaborative app development environment. The fully managed suite of services focuses on enterprise customers across industry segments such as Transport & Logistics, Education, Financial Services, Government, Construction, Utilities, Mining and Healthcare.

OneBlink is an established 100% Australian owned company, with more than 50 ‘brand name’ enterprise and government clients. OneBlink is both a developer of software tools, and a provider of hosted/managed services that streamline the custom development of mobile and app style solutions. The directors – Darren Besgrove, Anthony Harris and Alan Williams (with backgrounds in Tibco and SAP) – always envisaged a company where mobility would be more than consumer apps, and would become a mission-critical enterprise requirement. The directors lead a team of experienced developers and cloud infrastructure and operation experts, having made a decision some 8 years back to adopt a cloud only infrastructure.

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The beginning of BlinkMobile Using SMS as a universal and reliable transport protocol was BlinkMobile’s prime focus when it was first established 13 years ago (before iPhones and 3G/4G networks). The schools, sports clubs and local government authorities started using products that included online message boards replacing traditional recorded message services. Instead of joining a queue of people ‘on hold’ users could text a keyword and instantly receive a return message with the information they needed – they could then forward this message to friends and colleagues.

Later on, the connections that the founders made with local government authorities (Councils) proved pivotal for the expansion of the company. A number of agencies desired the SMS service as an

efficient and effective service for citizens, but didn’t want to update information in multiple backend systems – they wanted to maintain a ‘single point of truth’. This led BlinkMobile to work with a number of Councils to connect with and repurpose information from their existing websites – making them available via the SMS ‘ask & receive’ system.

This development occurred in early 2009 (around the time of the first smartphones) and it was a small jump to build the integrations necessary to pull a wide range of high demand information from Council and 3rd party websites (public transport, traffic alerts, etc) for citizens to consume in a mobile format. Since then, the company has continued to evolve from services citizens largely consume, to services tightly integrated to pull/push data

into core/legacy systems; and also providing services focused on making employees and contractors more productive by enabling mobile devices to become valuable work tools regardless of the mobile capabilities of legacy systems.

Offerings that suit a very specific style of customers BlinkMobile has always traded off its enterprise grade cloud capabilities (guarantee of service, full failover provisions and SLAs) that underpin the mobile solutions organizations rely on. Beyond this, the company excels in the offline operations it provides for customers mission critical apps and the extensive integration capabilities with core/legacy systems.

Moreover, the company has built a service offering that suits a very specific style of customer, being mid-

67 projects (app backlog) that plague many organizations. This is the breakthrough that OneBlink brings to the market. A single collaborative development environment that spans business users and IT, to serve the needs of the entire organization to both de-risk and accelerate app delivery. As the only end-2-end App development environment that truly spans business users and IT, OneBlink is unique in its ability to scale ‘grass-roots’ development efforts into strategic projects, thereby de-risking and accelerating app development/ delivery.

sized private and public-sector organizations. Those large enough to seek the measurable efficiencies and increased productivity that can be derived from new technologies in the workplace. But not that large that they can bring in-house, specialist teams of app developers, enterprise integration architects, cloud infrastructure technicians, IoT engineers and data analytics experts.

It’s not just about devices any longer!

The foremost reason behind changing BlinkMobile’s identity to OneBlink is because the world of mobile solutions is not just about devices any longer, so much of it is about server-side processing and back-end (mBaaS) services. More importantly however is the unique position OneBlink has established in uniting an organization’s people and processes in app development.

Collaboration amongst different groups and unification of your application development efforts now lies at the heart of the OneBlink Suite. This is because most organizations development efforts are hampered by the incompatibility of toolset ‘silos’ - each directed at different skills and capabilities within an organization.

Business level users can’t use the code centric environments that developers love, and the ‘point & click’ builders or low/no-code environments that business users flock to, leave an organization stranded as these systems never produce code that can be further ‘hardened’ by developers into compliant corporate solutions.

OneBlink contends that these development silos are the major contributor to slow or stalled mobile

With OneBlink, business users can quickly get ‘grass-roots’ projects off the ground and tested, and able to pass that early work to developers with a clear set of requirements to turn a good project, into something great. Not only is such scalable development faster, it’s also far less risky, as IT is only investing time in those projects where the business has done the leg work and has data to support a use case.

Future roadmap Not content with this most recent innovation, OneBlink has established relationships with innovative IoT companies such as Spotto to offer ‘out of the box’ integration into their simple ‘things management’ services.

Further development will see the toolset able to cater to the needs organizations will have for multichannel development, such as bots and the incorporation of AI and machine learning.

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Keys to make your partnership thrive

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Jamin Brazil Managing Partner Vine Partners

72 hen Jayme and I decided to start Decipher, 100% of the counsel we received predicted grave outcomes of our partnership.

Absolutely no one told us it was a good idea.

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Just focus on the first point above. Say you have 60% of the shares and your partner has 40%. If you sell the company for $1 million, the $200k difference between you might seem fair. But, what if it is $10 million? That is a $2 million-dollar difference. Is that equitable?

Partnerships can have many issues that may be boiled down (at least in part) into these two themes:

Because you have conversations like the above ahead of time where you are both splitting your hard-earned future treasure, it will be much easier to split the spoils when the time comes and you can mostly avoid the emotional inputs vs outputs.

Alignment Conflict management By some miracle we had the forethought to address and document both areas at the onset of our business relationship. Ÿ Ÿ

Key #1: Get in front of contentious issues I believe this is the Super Glue of any long-lasting partnership. These are some of the items you’ll want to flush out: Ÿ

Ÿ

Ÿ

Ÿ

Ÿ

Clearly divide your futuristic fortunes. A way to do this is to create a cap table and run a few waterfall scenarios so that everyone can clearly see how much each person gets.

How will debt be distributed? If necessary, who will assume personal guarantees? If things crash around you, who is left holding what accounts payable?

Once you are cashflow positive, will you have salaries? If so, how much for each of you?

Once you are really cashflow positive, will you do distributions to owners? If so, what proportion will stay in the business?

Set a time horizon on your endeavor. If you are willing to give it a try for 2 years and then reassess, make it known and follow through on your commitment.

Key #2: Cultivate self-awareness Say this out loud 3 times, “It is ok to admit when I am wrong. People will still respect me.” Hopefully you have chosen a partner who has complementary strengths and weaknesses. The more different your partner is from yourself, the more likely you are to have different views.

However, the greater your relative differences are, the faster things can get cantankerous. These differences are woven into the fabric of founders who usually have strong personalities, are highly intelligent, and competitive…you can see how your partnership has the ingredients for a major explosion.

To combat this, Jayme and I both start w/the premise that we know we are likely right but the other person has a valid opinion, and we must attempt to incorporate them into the issues, idea, solution, etc. While difficult (see my previous blog post on, Is My Baby Ugly) because we all think our ideas are perfect straight out of the box, the net impact always yields a more comprehensive and positive outcome.

Key #3: Be piggish, not hoggish This was a key that was given to us by our accountant and has stuck with us

through thick and thin. The initial context of “Be piggish, but not hoggish,” was in regard to our tax deductions. Once we started making money we started feeling the sting of taxes. I know, I know…great problem to have. But it still hurt and when it came time to look at our deductions, we were both a bit overzealous.

Fortunately, we had a good tax person who kept us on the straight and narrow.

Since those early days we have used this axiom in many of our negotiations including those with venders, staff, clients, and each other. If we start with the premise that everyone needs to make money for a business to be long term successful, then our self-interest takes into consideration other people.

This is vital as it has a halo effect across your organization which fosters a culture of trust, transparency and loyalty among employees and customers alike.

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By applying the 3 keys above you’ll be equipped to successfully navigate the difficult times in your business partnership. Below is a list of disciplines which will naturally fall out if the above is applied: Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ

Communicate regularly Know each other’s values Don’t let feelings fester Identify your strengths and weaknesses Pick up the phone <- This is IMPORTANT. Never have an argument over email.

Take full responsibility for your actions and their outcomes Support one another Discuss your long-term goals Define your roles explicitly Remember that no one likes surprises Respect one another Put things in writing

In conclusion, partnerships are powerful mechanisms that I have found improve your startup’s opportunity for success.

Working w/someone else is fun. Even treading through fields of manure can be fun if you are both focused on the same thing…

“ACK! This stinks! Let’s get out of here…NOW!” About the Author Jamin Brazil serves as Managing Partner of Vine Partners, responsible for all aspects of the organization. Jamin is a seasoned chief executive with a background in leading high growth organizations from inception to exit. Previously, Jamin was the CEO of FocusVision. His passion and energy to deliver fanatical global customer support is coupled by his desire to help leading brands find answers to important customer insight questions. He’s served many of the world’s top brands including Twitter, P&G, LinkedIn, Wells Fargo, AT&T and Eli Lilly. In 2000, Jamin founded Decipher, a survey platform used by all large research agencies and many of the fortune 100. Under his leadership, Decipher experienced year over year growth of high double digits. Additionally, Jamin drove the integration of several strategic acquisitions. His leadership balanced the need for infrastructure, automation and creative collaboration resulting in consistent top and bottom line growth. Prior to founding Decipher, Jamin worked at Macro Consulting in Palo Alto. A native of Fresno, California, Jamin holds a B.A. from Fresno Pacific University and an MBA from Fresno State.