Published on the 27/06/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
A communications start up has showcased an augmented reality app to mobile alliance partners Microsoft and Nokia and secured EUR 50,000 to allow them to complete the development…
When Indigo Telecom’s Australian adventure collapsed late last year, it delivered a phoenix moment for seven of the technology professionals who had worked there. Out of the ashes of Indigo the head of research and development, its CIO and CTO along with four other employees formed a Brisbane-based start-up company called Nubis.
Indigo Telecom had been focused on the deployment of satellite technologies to connect remote and rural Australians with the rest of the world. Communications remains a focus for Nubis, which has led it to develop the Alphega mobile cloud service, scheduled to be launched in August.
It is this app which secured the interest and EUR 50,000 grant from Microsoft and Nokia, through the BizSpark initiative. While the companies don’t get a stake in Nubis for their investment, they do get a 90 day exclusivity agreement meaning Alphega will only be available for Windows 8 phones for the first three months after launch.
Alphega is an augmented reality cloud service which projects onto a smartphone the social network connections of who or what is being viewed on the phone.
The company describes it as a “socioscope,” which allows users to determine how much of their social networking content they make available to other Alphega users.
According to Uzi Bar-on, a co-founder and director of Nubis, the company is currently being financed by three of the seven employees taking on consulting roles to fund the start-up and pay salaries. A three-time start-up founder, Bar-on said that while the company was interested in investment opportunities, it was “not looking just for money, we’d want quality investment”.
Besides Alphega the company is working on an e-commerce platform which has been developed to link directly to the Sage financial application, meaning that information such as stock levels could be instantly available. Developed for toy distributor Bright Spark Enterprises, Nubis expects to launch the solution as a product within weeks.
