Research and Development (R&D)

Research and Development has been one of Atinco’s key values from the outset. In the world of mobile telephony the technological dance must form a part of the overall strategy of any firm seeking to position itself strongly in the market, especially in the transition to the data traffic model.

Atinco has been and remains an R&D benchmark for the major players in mobile telephony. For example, our investment in Research and Development enabled the launch of the first video streaming platform in 2003, which was immediately taken up by Telefónica, Spain’s leading and the world’s third-ranked operator.

If the video streaming platform is Atinco’s flagship, our firm has also developed many other projects for the industry’s major brands, such as Nokia.

A number of major technological pilot projects are currently in progress, as follows:

Affinity

The Atinco Affinity project was especially designed for launch of the Nokia 3650 phone in 2003. Nokia was seeking an application directly aimed at young people that would at the same time draw on the 3650’s full communications potential (Bluetooth and GPRS), personal communications capability (video camera) and functionality (highly versatile Symbian operating system).

Atinco designed Affinity to meet all of these requirements. The Affinity approach was simple. It was a matter of creating an application that would allow users to enter their personal profile (age, height, weight, looks, hobbies, etc.) and a search profile. The application would then identify other people fitting the profile. Upon locating a candidate, it provides the opportunity to make contact anonymously and exchange text or voice messages, photographs and even short video clips.

The application also features the option to segment searches geographically in three groups:

• Short Range: if a user is in a discotheque and wishes to search for nearby people, the bluetooth segmentation is activated, locating people within a radius of 10 to 20 meters.
• Medium Range: users in a city neighborhood can activate cell segmentation, locating people within a radius of a couple of kilometers.
• Long Range: this feature consists of GPRS segmentation, which can locate any person wherever he or she might be (even in other countries).

The Affinity application was very well received by Nokia, although it was used only as a technological pilot and was not finally included in the presentation of the terminal because it was ahead of its time and could only be a minority option due to the small number of handsets powerful enough to run it.

VoiceMMS

When MMS technology finally became more familiar, handset manufacturers were disappointed to find that users did not take to MMS in the same way as SMS.

Nokia again turned to Atinco to develop an application that would facilitate the task of creating MMS messages without the multiple steps required by the standard handset applications.

The Atinco R&D team responded by creating VoiceMMS. The idea was simple: three clicks would create a voice message:

• Click 1: Record voice message
• Click 2: Stop recording and select the contact
• Click 3: Select the contact and send the message

In this way, users could compose an MMS compatible with all handsets supporting the technology in three quick steps, sending voice messages even more easily than text.

RemoteView

RemoteView was the Atinco Research and Development team’s answer to the need for an application that would not only be practical for users but would help handset manufacturers to sell their devices two by two.

Once again the idea was simple. Imagine a couple leaving their children at home while they go out shopping or to dinner. What if they want to keep tabs on the kids? Easy: they leave a handset with a camera at home and take the other with them. When the parents want to know what is going on at home, they click the image capture button and the phone they have left behind records a short video clip, which it relays to the handset they are carrying via MMS or streaming.

This straightforward procedure (leaving one phone at home and taking the other with you) allows you to see what is going on at home (or wherever you may have left the first handset) from the phone you have taken with you.

In 2003, Vodafone awarded the Atinco R&D team a prize for the development of this highly innovative application.