Most Innovative Mobile Company? – Nearly!

Hi all. Back from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and time to update you on our progress in the competition. Sadly we did not get the crown, but from the comments of the judges we are pretty certain we were very close.

Are we disappointed? A little. Are we disheartened? Not at all!

Firstly, credit where credit is due, and well done to Seene for nosing ahead of us at the final hurdle and claiming the prize. With a natty little app for creating 3D photos - with all the processing handled on your iPhone - we certainly can’t argue that this isn’t a very creative use of the technology. Congratulations chaps.

One of the many MWC networking "gardens"

 

But enough about them; what about us? Well we found the MWC to be an absolutely amazing event in an amazing venue. Having been dropped off at the North entrance we were quite shocked to find that to get to the South entrance we would have to walk for 18 minutes, and that was without stopping to look at anything in one of the 8 aircraft hangar sized exhibition halls (counting 8.0 and 8.1 as one).

RouteShoot check out Telefonica's Connected Car

And what a lot there was on show! Nearly all of the major manufacturers and network operators were there with new tech on display and the list of speakers featured many of the leading lights of the industry including one Mister Mark Zuckerberg. There really is too much to describe here and too many names to drop, but we’ll just mention one that drew our eye; an amazing “connected car”. I’m not sure if it was the sleek design of the electric Tesla car, or how much tech Telefonica had crammed into it that impressed – but we would certainly have liked to have seen RouteShoot used on the central display console, which was simply huge.

But enough about the show; what about us? Well we came away with a few decent leads to follow up including with a couple of new-to-us businesses and a couple of extra contacts within the UKTI. We won’t mention names yet, but needless to say we are very pleased and looking forwards to some frantic business activity over the coming weeks.

RouteShoot MD Gary Wilson at MWC Barcelona

Finally I can say that the event has generated a great sense of feeling good about just how far we have come in just a little over 12 months. Thanks Barcelona, thanks MWC, thanks SmartUK and the UKTI, and finally thanks to the judges who had some very kind and encouraging words to say about our product and our performance in the competition. Keep an eye out for us, maybe we’ll exhibit at MWC one day!

Finalists for "UK's Most Innovative Mobile Company" 2014

Hooray! We have made it to the finals for the Smart UK Project - UK's Most Innovative Mobile Company of 2014.

Having been whittled down from a starting group of around 60 companies to make it to a shortlist of 22, we have beaten off some pretty strong competition and now find ourselves in the top 6.

Our prize for getting this far is to be entered into a final "pitch battle" which will take place at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. There we will feature in an official UKTI event where final judging will take place and the winner announced - with the award presented by Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries.

For anyone attending MWC, you can come and see us at the finals on Tuesday 25th February by registering for the event here.

When I say "we are delighted", I think that might be an understatement. Thanks to all our users, customers and those who have shown faith in us so far - you really have helped to get us here.

Now all we need to worry about is having less than 2 weeks to sort out flights, hotels in an already packed city, getting our promotional items up-to-date and being press/PR ready. No stress there then.
☺

Premier SVC saves money, improves customer service and streamlines business processes with RouteShoot

Hi All,

For anyone engaged in business, you will know how difficult it is to generate good content - feedback from customers, white papers, endorsements etc. With that in mind we have to say a very, very big thank you to Chris Bartlett of Premier Utility Services for taking the time to respond to a few questions we posed to him about his experiences with RouteShoot. We are extremely pleased to receive his endorsement and would like to share his answers with our blog readers everywhere...

What does Premier SVC do?

Premier’s corporate office is located in Hauppauge, New York with over 800 employees operating in 22 states across the United States. Proud member of the Willbros Group (NYSE:WG), Premier provides various services to our utility partners across the country. Some of the many services provided include Damage Prevention (Underground Utility Locating), Gas Services (Gas Leak Detection, Atmospheric Corrosion Inspections, Corrosion Testing), Electrical Services (Contact Voltage Testing, Electrical Inspections, SF6), Emergency Services (Storm Support, Work Contingency Planning) GIS Services (GIS Mapping & Management Programs, Asset Inventories) and Speciality Services (Vacuum Excavation, Ground Penetration Radar, Flagging and Traffic Control).

What issues were you looking to address?

Prior to Premier engaging RouteShoot there were several issues we were faced with using our previous video capture system. A few of the major concerns were exponential disk storage growth in a 17 month period (30TB’s), accurate search functionality, ease of use for our field technicians and most importantly the delivery of video footage to our clients in a timely manner. Choosing RouteShoot as our video content management system has helped us lower our total per technician costs. RouteShoot has also allowed us to scale this deployment very quickly to over 480 remote technicians.

Has RouteShoot helped you to improve service to your clients?

Since deploying RouteShoot at Premier we have been able to meet all client contractual requirements with regards to providing field video footage. If a damage does occur in the field our clients now know they will have the video footage in their hands very very quickly.

Have you achieved any tangible savings or efficiencies?

Prior to RouteShoot, technicians were deployed with a laptop, digital camcorder and other devices to capture field video footage. Deploying RouteShoot on smartphone devices to each technician not only lowered our capital expenditures per technician it has also increased productivity per technician. Before RouteShoot members of the IT staff spent countless hours searching for video files on local laptops, network servers and camcorder devices. Now, when a request comes in from a client or supervisor, a member of the claims department can easily search the system and retrieve the video in seconds. We no longer spend our days wondering if we will locate the video we are looking for when a request comes in. Moving the video management system to the cloud has also freed up valuable IT staff resources to do other things, instead of managing on premise hardware. It has also allowed me to spend more time on things that help technology assist the business in generating revenue as opposed to spending my time worrying about if we will find a video.

What features in RouteShoot have been particularly useful to you?

RouteShoot’s ease of use, accurate and effective search functionality has been extremely beneficial to both Premier and its clients. The ability to email a link to the videos to anyone with an internet connection has been just awesome and blows our clients away. We have been able to quickly locate a video and re-route field technicians to follow up in a timely manner on numerous occasions.

Have any other aspects of your business benefitted?

RouteShoot now provides us with a level of reporting we just simply did not have previously. The ability to see the footage in real time has been a tremendous improvement to our QA controls and processes. RouteShoot has also enabled us to provide better training programs to our technicians and provides us with the tools necessary to follow up with technicians much more frequently than in the past. The ability to see the technicians GPS path while shooting video has also enabled us to show clients we are accurately documenting the work we are doing for them.

Chris Bartlett
IT Manager

Premier Utility Services, LLC
100 Marcus Blvd Suite #3
Hauppauge, NY 11788

Occasional Update – Website Changes and Further Business Interest

Hi all, just a quick note to apologise for the fluid nature of our routeshoot.com website over the past week or so.

We have undertaken some work to make the current landing page more focussed on addressing the commercial use of the application. The key reason for this is to support the underlying RouteShoot business – while we are more than happy to continue to offer RouteShoot free for non-commercial use, we do need to make some pennies to keep everything running and our staff in coffee and cakes. Don’t worry, the free-to-use site is still there, just click on the “For leisure” button at the top of the page and you’ll be back to the usual starting point.

Regarding the commercial application, we are pleased to report that things continue to go very well. We have received yet another order from a major UK highways contractor, and we have the app on trial with two more. On top of that we have further interest from overseas – Australia this time! All looking good – fingers crossed.

If everything goes to plan, the next occasional update should appear soon, shortly after our date in London at the pre-Mobile World Congress media event. Watch this space…

Happy shooting.

RouteShoot shortlisted for Smart UK Project’s Most Innovative Mobile Company

RouteShoot Limited is delighted to announce that we have been shortlisted for the Smart UK Project’s Most Innovative Mobile Company. The competition, held by Smart UK in association with the UKTI, looks “to celebrate UK innovation and showcase the best examples of UK mobile innovation”. Having been shortlisted we next get the opportunity to attend UKTI’s pre-Mobile World Congress media event on 6^th February. Last year this event was attended by more than 40 media including the BBC, Sky News, The Times, The Guardian and a host of trade and consumer media. For more information please visit the Smart UK website or follow @smartukproject

Occasional Update - RouteShoot passes 10,000 downloads

Hi everyone. We hope you all had a good Christmas and are embarking on a very happy and prosperous new year.

Having posted many of our previous posts as "weekly" updates and then gone quiet, I thought it was best to rebrand this one as an "occasional update" - it is more honest, and has the added benefit of taking the pressure off me!

Well our first bit of occasional news is a significant one of us - we have now achieved over 10,000 downloads of the RouteShoot app.

Thank you very much to all of our users. Wherever you are in the world, we hope you are having fun recording those never to be forgotten moments on the app. Keep shooting, and don't forget to upload your videos to share with friends and relations.

Weekly update - a couple of quick headline

Wow - time flies. It is nearly going home time, and I have left it a bit late - so just a couple of quick headlines this week.

There is a new version of RouteShoot out for iOS. This deals with a minor bug we had when iOS-7 came out, and the UI has been updated to make it "look and feel" more like the standard Apple applications. We have also included a couple of in app purchases. The first will allow users to "clip" their videos - you can now edit out any unwanted lead-in (or out) bits of video, or you can select just the most exciting part of a journey to upload. The second allows you to record more than 5 minutes of HD video. This is for those of you who just must have HD - and are happy to deal with the larger file sizes and longer upload times.

The second headline is that our MD has flown over to Las Vegas to meet our biggest customer Premier Utility Services at the Amazon AWS re:Invent conference. No feedback yet - other than he is going to breakfast before his first meeting. Look out for more news next week.

Off now for some quality X-box time. As ever, have fun this weekend.