South African company provides LBS in Ukraine — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Look4help provides mobile safety} South African company provides LBS in Ukraine

1 Nov 2005 at 20:10 GMT Timo Poropudas

South African Cellfind, a location based cellular service, has increased to 46 000 user base registrations for mobile safety services such as Look4me and Look4help in the last three months.

In their first year of business in 2003 Cellfind signed up the same number of customers in South Africa, reports MyADSL.

Services like Look4me “find-a-friend” service is provide to consumer Vodacom.

Only Vodacom is able to offer this service as they are the only operator whose network can support location based services in South Africa.

Cellfind has secured a contract to launch these services in Ukraine.

“Ukraine’s cellphone market is similar to that of South Africa boasting a population of 48 million people of which 28 million own a cellphone and 85% are prepaid subscribers. There are three existing network operators supporting this market and we’ve identified a gap to provide mobile safety services,” says Alan Knott-Craig, MD of Cellfind.

The entire application necessary for this service is based in South Africa and it takes around 2 days to install the system.

The only requirement is that the host country with which CellFind forms a partnership has the right demographics and is able to support a subscription billing system.

According to Knott-Craig it is more cost effective to run the service from within our borders and with information taking only 15 seconds to transfer it is also efficient.

Ukraine are currently working on adapting their infrastructure to support this service which will take around 5 months to be completed.

Other countries on the new development radar include Poland, Russia, Romania, Argentina and Mexico.