Off to the pub to create a winner

Eyemagnet's Paul Treacy wants to develop his product all over the world without leaving home. Picture / Mark Mitchell

Paul Treacy admits "spending a lot of time in bars" helped him come up with a prize-winning way of enabling pubs, retailers and other businesses to manage video they display to customers.

Treacy is managing director of Eyemagnet, a three-year-old company with a staff of six selling software that enables internet-based control of what is appearing on multiple screens in different locations.

It also enables viewers to download content to their mobile phones by sending a text message to a number displayed on the screens.

Eyemagnet is this year's New Zealand winner of telecommunications company Ericsson's annual transtasman Frontier competition for innovative mobile and converged technology applications.

"I've spent a lot of time in bars, and I couldn't help but look at the prevalence of plasma and LCD televisions and monitors," says Treacy.

"I realised that the price of those screens would only come down. We really wanted to tap into what those bars and restaurants were playing. Today they're playing Sky Television. If I'd made that investment [in screens] I'd like to have a lot more control of my content, so I came up with a way to control more of that content."

Telecom is an Eyemagnet customer and uses the content management system to control displays in its network of retail stores.

"They've effectively got 'Telecom TV' running throughout their retail channel, all controlled via the Eyemagnet solution which is a web-based interface," says Treacy.

"The content is managed by the marketing team in Telecom then Eyemagnet controls the scheduling, playing and deploying of that content out into the retail stores so that they can be playing the correct content for the correct location.

"For example you might play different content in Queen Street than you would in South Auckland."

The prize for winning Ericsson's Frontier competition is a trip to one of two big Asia-Pacific technology conferences - 3GSM Asia or CommunicAsia - plus a Sony Technology start-up pack and one-on-one consultancy to develop Eyemagnet's technology.

Treacy said the win would be a boost to Eyemagnet's export strategy because Ericsson had useful contacts in the overseas markets the company is targeting.

While it has yet to finalise an American distributor, Eyemagnet has signed a US university as a client.

"In this IT world we can base ourselves anywhere, and New Zealand has as good an IT infrastructure as anywhere," Treacy says.

"Our intention is absolutely to stay New Zealand based. There's no reason we can't be managing all these sites remotely from New Zealand."

Ericsson New Zealand's strategic marketing manager, Jeremy Hope, said Eyemagnet's application appealed to the Frontier competition judges because it was a converged application which had the flexibility to connect to the internet through fixed-line, wi-fi or cellular technology, and also allowed retail staff in stores using the technology, as well as customers, to interact with the system via mobile phone.

Hope said Ericsson ran the annual Frontier competition - in which finalist companies presented their ideas to a panel of judges in Sydney last week - because it wanted to promote leading-edge mobile technology.

"These applications are paving the way forward," Hope said.

"The reason we're there is that we want to see growth on operators' networks. We want to see revenue growth for our customers and we believe doing something like this really does grow the industry in a positive way."

Treacy said Eyemagnet was receiving increasing interest in its application from advertising agencies.

"They see it as another new channel for them to develop content for. Traditionally the agencies have been dealing with TVCs [television commercials] and printed media, and this is a whole new medium for them."

This year's two other New Zealand Frontier finalists were M-Com, developer of Mobile Terranet, a mobile phone application for home buyers wanting to access property information while on the road, and Saturn Media which has developed Radiotones, which enables radio stations' music TV channels to sell music content to their audiences through mobile phones.