Lady Luck or similar sought for Locate Global expansion

By PETER GRIFFIN

An Auckland m-commerce provider saved from collapse after its directors bumped into a cash-laden punter at Sky City Casino, hopes for a similar lucky break as it seeks the $2 million needed for its next stage of expansion.

Locate Global Technologies, a provider of travel and entertainment-related content for Wap phones and palmtop devices, is on the hunt for venture capital to finance an expansion into Australia and the recruitment of up to 90 salespeople.

Locate director Allan Caldwell said the company had been getting along on its initial cash injection of $250,000, but needed a more substantial amount to raise awareness of the service and expand the database to over 50,000 entries.

In 1998, frustrated at his inability to attract a major investor for Locate, Mr Caldwell was a hair's breadth from walking away from the business altogether.

"I was literally down to my last fifty bucks. I went to the casino to see what I could do with it as a last resort. I watched a scruffy-looking man hit the jackpot. It turned out he was a property developer and investor. That's where our seed capital came from."

The Loc@tor mobile service provides information on everything from where to eat out to where to catch a taxi, through a web-based database of 21,000 New Zealand businesses.

Users can download the database to their Psion personal digital assistant (PDA) or Ericsson Mc218 palmtop for free. An agreement with mobile content provider iTouch allows Wap phone users to access the database on a fee-paying basis.

Vodafone operates a similar mobile content service - Close2U - which works by identifying the mobile phone user's location within the mobile phone cell area.

Locate hopes to generate revenue from advertising, charging the businesses listed on its database for displaying contact information and a short blurb about each. Five hundred subscribers are listed, paying between $180 and $630 depending on how many lines of text they want displayed.

While Wap-based location services were billed as the next "killer-application," mobile users have shied away from the technology claiming it is slow, unreliable and awkward to use. Mr Caldwell believes those concerns will soon disappear as the roll-out of Vodafone's 2.5G network will give faster access speeds allowing easy download of text and pictures.

"A lot of people have been put off Wap because it is associated with slow access. But Wap has nothing to do with data speed. It's a system which converts HTML to a code suitable for a mobile device. We'll be using the same Wap technology with GPRS (general packet radio service) but it will be ten times as fast."

Locate plans to boost its database with new information categories including categories for farmers, home decorators, builders and the auto industry. The company has been invited to take part in GPRS trials with Vodafone.

Links:

www.locatenz.com

www.auckland-airport.co.nz

www3.vodafone.net.nz


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