Auckland company secures grant from tech giants

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland start-up Network Technology has secured one of the first technology grants in the KiwiStartUp.Net initiative launched by Compaq, Clear and Microsoft to support local developers.

Nettec managing director Kerry Harris said its a welcome boost as the four-person company tries to find financiers or development partners so it can complete and market its product, a system for working out the physical location of cellular devices.

He is still negotiating the contents of the KiwiStartUp.Net package, which is a 90 day free trial of Compaq hardware, Microsoft ecommerce software and a high speed internet connection from Clear.

The other two companies to benefit from the initial round were Traxium, a Christchurch company making a business to business exchange for the freight industry, and Climate Dynamics, whose developers in Wellington and Queenstown are working on specialised weather forecasting applications to be delivered over the internet.

Mr Harris, whose experience is in building process control systems, said the genesis of Nettec's technology was a request from a client about six years ago for a low cost application which would tell where things are.

"GPS (global positions system) would do it, but you'd have to have a GPS receiver and some means of transmitting the information," Mr Harris said.

The growth in cellphone networks since then suggested other possibilities Nettec is exploring. Mr Harris said the Secure Net Unit (SNU) technology works by loading a piece of firmware onto a GSM mobile phone or a cellular modem. When a connection is made, the SNU triangulates from the cell sites the phone is connecting to and gives a location range of between 50 and 100 metres, less in the central city.

Where it differs from competing systems being developed overseas is it doesn't need access to cellphone network data, or for extra equipment on the network.

The introduction of GPRS networks will allow the technology to work faster and cheaper, and Nettec also intends to develop it to work on CDMA and CDPD networks.

SNU will work as an internet application, which can be sold as a service by network or service providers, or as a standalone application to sit on PC within a company.

While the backbone application is written on Linux, it must interface with a graphical information system, which runs on Windows NT. The internet version uses Intergraph, while the standalone version uses GIS software from ESRI, which has a smaller-footprint.

Possible customers include companies wanting to know where their reps or vehicles are, firms shipping valuable packages they want to be able to track constantly, companies wanting to market goods or services to people in locations, taxi firms and emergency services.

Mr Harris said a US survey found of the 100,000 emergency 911 calls made each day, only 60 percent of callers were able to say precisely where they were. The US government is already talking about requiring phones to be locatable, opening up a huge market.

Nettec is currently putting together some machines to test its technology, including a device for a car which will send an SMS message to the owner's cellphone if an alarm goes off.

Mr Harris said the project has cost more than $1 million so far, with funds coming from private investors as well as grants from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.