Helsinki City Transport receives the Most Mobile Enterprise award

^{MobileMonday competition} Helsinki City Transport receives the Most Mobile Enterprise award

A shining achievement. Sun shines on Matti Lahdenranta (right) while he receives the award.

24 Apr 2008 at 09:33 GMT Timo Poropudas

Helsinki City Transport was awarded today the Most Mobile Enterprise title in a competition organized by MobileMonday. The winner, a very mobile company by nature, understood early the importance of mobile information and service offering to its customers.

HKL, as the company is k known in Finland, was one of the very first transport systems anywhere in the world to sell tickets via SMS and provide time tables over the air.

Now HKL is in a process of hooking up all of its rolling stock to a wireless network and GPS service. The company plans to provide both drivers and commuters with wireless connection to the Internet. Buss stops will be informing in real time the waiting people when the next bus will arrive. This system is already being tested on tram stops. Real time bus and tram movement information can be queried also on the Internet.

Great benefits are expected from coordination of the transport and traffic light systems. This will speed up mass transit and save in the number of needed, expensive vehicles.

According to HKL CEO Matti Lahdenranta his company is working in tandem with other capital area cities and their transport authorities.

The Most Mobile Enterprise award was sponsored by Microsoft Finland and Vamos Program. Vamos is the mobile business program of Tekes, Finnish technology funding agency.

Honorable mentions were granted to Finnair and Assistor. Finnair has been an early pioneer for SMS bases flight checking service. Finnair mobile strategy director Matti Alanne emphasized the importance of everyday terminals as a base for the new services.

"The end user technology has to be so common place that our customer does not give it a second thought to it while using our services."

Assistor Oy services and stores imported cars for Finnish, Baltic and Russian markets. It has 23 000 cars in storage that have to be moved around in its storage location. The company revamped it’s IT system in order to make use of new, wireless rfid-based system. The new system is among largest in the Europe.