Bizzsms’ customer Safmarine is among the few shipping companies that have a mobile application or mobile website. A recent benchmark by Seaintel Maritime of the 53 biggest shipping company shows that 87% of the large shipping companies does not have a mobile solution. Seaintel foresees an increasing market “Based on developments in other industries, it appears inevitable that the carriers’ customers will increasingly want easy mobile solutions at their disposal”.

In the article special attention is paid to Safmarine:

“As a side note, it will be interesting to see if anything changes regarding Safmarine’s mobile website and apps once their internal support and management functions are integrated into those of its sister company, Maersk Line, as a consequence of the closure of the Safmarine headquarter functions in Antwerp. As it stands now, Maersk Line‟s mobile device offering is not up to par with Safmarine’s.”

Following a meeting in Geneva, the Swiss Airline company PrivatAir chose for Bizzsms as a partner for developing an iPad and web application for the purpose of auditing. The PrivatAir auditing application will serve as a tool for their service division and allows auditors to have offline audits and enables the management to create custom reports based on the results of the audits. 

PrivatAir has it’s own fleet of airplanes for Business Aviation, a division for schedules services and a the PrivatTraining division. The PrivatAir headquarter is located in Geneva, PrivatAir also has registered offices in Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Brazzaville (Republic of Congo).

By Eelco van de Wiel

This week Bizzsms launched two new mobile applications.

Safmarine

The iPhone app of Safmarine, a subdivision of the A.P. Moller - Maersk group, was accepted by Apple by Friday evening. Safmarine is an international shipping business offering container and break-bulk shipping services worldwide and has over 200 offices worldwide. 

The application offers the following functions:

• Search for Schedules: select a from/to location and display all possible sailing schedules. 
• Track and trace: track the current container location of a booking. Also using the hotlist the users get automatic notification upon changes. 
• Agencies: find the most nearby Safmarine agency or find by search term
• News: the latest Safmarine news

Heyello for Android

The second application that was launched was the Heyello! application for Android. Bizzsms developed the iPhone application before for postcard company DmCards and now there is an Android version of the same application. The application allows users to send a postcard by regular mail from their Android device. Users can select a picture, add a frame and add text to personalize their postcards.

Within two business days the postcard reaches it’s destination.
The Blackberry version of the application is soon to come.

By Eelco van de Wiel

The latest version of the Android SDK has full support for NFC functionalities.
NFC means Near Field Communication and allows mobile phones to communicate to nearby objects. Chances are that if you buy a smartphone towards the end of this year, and most certainly in 2012, it will be equipped with a NFC chip. This technological advancement introduces a new era in mobile communication as it allows mobile payments, location based mobile advertising and communication with local objects to launch a URL, call a number, open a map to a location or launch an  application. 

The NFC chip will replace all of the cards in your wallet and is expected to be the future payment medium. Google focussed their API on mobile payments and is working with MasterCard and Citigroup on a near field communication (NFC) based mobile payments system. 

Even though the technology has been around for a long time it’s only now that the large scale introduction is announced. The long delay has been a result of the economic crisis in combination with the large shifts in the operators - software - hardware powerfield. Now one of the major players, Google, included the NFC technology the technological shift finally takes place.

As happened with all previous technological developments it will take a long time for the leading design to emerge. The next period will be dominated by a power struggle among the big players in the ecommerce and payment playing field to gain the largest market share. As it took almost a decade to introduce the new PIN card in the Netherlands, it might also take as long for mobile payment to be fully supported. 

The image below shows a possible solution that uses RFID: