IT Link wins Frontier contest

A surprised Oliver Huggins could see the irony straight away when his company, IT Link, won this year's
Frontier transtasman mobile developers' competition.

Competing with futuristic applications that need 3G networks to operate effectively, IT Link's sales automation platform, SalesLink, was the winner although it is based on technology developed in 1999 and, strictly speaking, is designed for Palm Pilots, not mobile phones.

IT Link has been chipping away at the mobile data market in the past few years with SalesLink Mobile, a Palm-based application centred around an eight-step sales process, from acquiring customer details through to totting up their bill, printing their invoice and sending the sales record back to head office.

A huge range of mobile applications featured in the 120 entries in the competition, which was sponsored by Ericsson. The panel of judges included experts from carriers and vendors.

Huggins, managing director at IT Link, said 300 companies on both sides of the Tasman were using SalesLink, which carries a licence fee of $850 a user.

Firmly in the Palm camp, IT Link has no plans to diversify into applications based on Microsoft's Pocket PC platform.

"We've never lost a sale because we didn't have Pocket PC.

"With Palm the cost of hardware is lower and the battery life is better.

"And we're not targeting PC users. It's the truck driver delivering tyres who uses SalesLink."

Cookie Time and Exide Batteries are among IT Link's bigger customers.

SalesLink users were generally road-bound salespeople armed with the Vodafone-supported Handspring Treo, Kyocera Smartphone from Telecom or a stand-alone Palm device such as Sony's Clie.

Sales information could be transmitted to an infra-red or Bluetooth printer so invoices could be printed on the spot.

The sales data was then sent to a central computer for processing.

The other competition finalists were Intermoco Solutions and Surelabs (Australia) and Datasquirt and Hyperfactory (New Zealand).