Red Button: a new paradigm for mobile applications?

Stuart Corner
Friday, 04 December 2009 01:58

Business IT - Technology

Telecoms industry veteran Reg Coutts has co-founded Red Button Technologies, a company that offers through its Connectivity Server a means of developing, hosting and delivering value added applications independent of device or network.

Red Button announced this week that it had secured investment from Victorian based Optimation Software Engineering to develop the first commercial service on its Connectivity Server. This follows Red Button securing a Federal Government COMET grant of about $60,000 earlier this year.

Coutts told iTWire that, with the COMET grant, Red Button had commissioned another software company, Unico, to develop a demonstration prototype, and would use the Optimation investment to take its business to the next stage.

"We did a deal with Optimation under which they undertake development to the value of about $0.5m and that can be converted to equity on a number of trigger points. They will develop the first commercial product on the Connectivity Server and that will be a service to enable people to get valued added capability out of any mobile phone and on any network.

"It will be launched on the web in Q1 2010 and will be offered by Red Button direct to the consumer market. And we have a number of other applications we are developing."

Coutts described the Connectivity Server as "A platform to host value added services that will be accessible from a mobile phone without needing any functionality to be installed on the phone...It is a different way to provide value added services independent of phone and operator...It offers both voice and SMS and email and cuts across both mobile and fixed phone services."

He added that Red Button was in the process of acquiring a patent to its technology in Australia and a number of other countries.

Beyond the initial application, Red Button intends to make access to the Connectivity Server available to other application developers via the web. "We are calling that the sandpit phase. We will use viral marketing to give different people a chance to play with the platform, because certainly we haven't thought of all the applications," Coutts said.

However he acknowledged that, to achieve significant scale with the business more investment would be required. Beyond the sandpit phase he said that the telcos themselves could be major customers. "They could contract us to develop things on their behalf, they could licence our technology, or they could buy us."

Coutts said that a telco would need to make no modifications to their networks to use the Red Button Connectivity Server. "Telcos would see it as a standard interface to the network. It would look just like a multi-line PBX."