NI enterprises beat a path to Barcelona

Written by David Brunnen

Tuesday, 16 February 2010 12:52

NI exhibition stand at MWC 2010

The annual industry mobile-fest in Barcelona was enlivened this year by 18 enterprises from NI.

For some of them, like APTX, it might have seemed modest by the standards of the mighty Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas where earlier this month they beat global competition to win the Best in Show Award. But in Barcelona marketing manager Sarah Thornbury had even more news to shout about. sound like business - MWC 2010

The successful acceptance testing by of a new custom-engineered APTX audio codec will now make a huge difference to the quality of the 2-way voice-chat feature for Microsoft Game Studio.

Keep talking ……

…. and, for the makers of mobile handsets around the world, another APTX development will change the design rules.

For years designers have needed to balance voice quality with battery drain. Having great audio is no benefit to the consumer if the handset dies.

In a brilliant design move APTX are engineering an adaptive or scaleable approach to sound quality – high quality voice without time lags is the ideal but, as the battery fades it gradually lowers the quality to save power.

And keep clicking…

From high-definition audio to better designed Call Centre systems. Tackling the horrors of those voice response systems (press 5 if you are about to give up) SpeechStorm from Belfast were busy demonstrating how their 3G video graphics system allows callers to see and choose the options on their mobile handsets.

speech storm at MWC 2010 According to Jakub Pawelczak of SpeechStorm, the system is selling well into Middle Eastern markets and is getting a great reputation for making the consumer experience better and speeding up transaction times.

And keeping the traffic flowing…..

intune networks at MWC 2010 The top news story in Barcelona for intune networks was the announcement of a major project with Telefonica – the design of an advanced network architecture for Cloud Computing.

Data traffic is growing so fast that there’s a real problem in the backbone networks. The backhaul carriers for both fixed and mobile networks need an entirely new way of handling rapid traffic growth while keeping costs down.

Jayne Brady, General Manager of intune, spent her time in Barcelona explaining to the major network providers how the selection of intune’s technology for this prestigious multi-partner European project will completely change the conventional view of network costs but also make rapid expansion of new mobile services a worthwhile investment.

These were just three of the 18 enterprises that appeared in Barcelona. For more details of all the NI exhibitors see list below.

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The editorial was produced for Northern Ireland's Business First magazine.

NI companies exhibiting at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona were:

4Real Group International Pty: www.partner4real.com

Air-Net WiFi: www.airnetwifi.com

A J Power: www.ajpower.net

ANAEKO: www.anaeko.com

APTX : www.aptx.com

Arca technologies : www.arcatech.com

Aepona : www.aepona.com

Consilium Technologies : www.totalmobile.co.uk