Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Seven Brightstar businesses have entered this year’s East of England Business Awards, all in the ‘Innovation: One to Watch’ category.

Qariba is a focused Independent Software Vendor that will ultimately be targeted for sale to one of the large communications companies but will build revenues from software licensing and support.

Its core products enable the sale of bandwidth in access networks to content providers, including ASPs, for their communications with their users - termed Broadband 1-800 services.

Qariba is targeting the residential and small business market in fixed and wireless networks. It provides a set of components to the major players in the value chain so that a remote content provider can purchase Broadband 1-800 services in multiple access networks and an access network provider can sell these services to many content providers.

The initial products will be content and traffic management tools targeted at content distribution providers and ANPs for corporate and residential users. In time they will be applied to 3G wireless internet access and inter-network QoS.

Azure specialises in revenue assurance solutions. A liberalisation of telecoms has created a huge market for operational support systems and services.

Collection of revenue has always been a challenge for communications operators and with narrowing margins and high network utilisation it has never been so important. Revenue assurance solutions from Azure protect operators from non-malicious and malicious revenue leaks.

Cinnamon River provides software to enable employees to quickly and cheaply access the information they need to do their job while on the move, using voice. By dialling and speaking, users can quickly navigate to, hear and update the pieces of information they need, making them more productive and responsive.

Cinnamon River has a corporate voice portal product called Portia that has been generating revenue since March, backed by 18 months of extensive trials and underpinned by 12 years research in BT into voice recognition and applications.

Portia fully integrates with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, enabling users to access applications including their emails, corporate news, calendar and contacts, tasks, news feeds, share prices, currencies and voice mail systems. Its next application will automatically repurpose any web or wap pages for users to call up, navigate and complete using speech recognition.

Cinnamon River is negotiating with several global distributors to ensure the full market potential is addressed. The user market just for voice access to Exchange or Domino hosted information in the US will be worth $1bn in 2003.

APSolve technology cuts the cost of delivering products and services from the internet to the home office - in fact, anywhere.

Using its advanced planning and scheduling (APS) tools and services, APSolve is bridging the gap between the digital world of e-commerce and the physical world of delivery.

More than 1,000 man years and £110m of investment represents the commitment made by APSolve to overcome the barrier to market entry.

Aiming to be the global leader in managed solutions for mobile workforces, APSolve has finally cracked the so-called last mile problem of ensuring that goods and services are efficiently and effectively delivered to home. The market for the company’s service is currently worth £1.2bn.

Rocking Frog specialises in personalised and localised information on mobile phones, palmtops and PCs.

It starts from the premise that the consumer is being bombarded with too much information. This becomes especially apparent on devices with small screens such as mobile phones and palmtops where any necessary information is immediately obvious.

Rocking Frog personalisation allows the consumer to quickly build up a profile of their needs and preferences such as specific interests, alerts and locations.

This personal profile is then used by Rocking Frog-enabled applications to deliver personalised, location-dependent information. The consumer receives just the short, precise information they desire rather than scrolling and clicking through overwhelming amounts of information.

Evolved Networks addresses the market for e-based physical network design and planning for all networks - telecoms, datacoms and later cable & utility services using state-of-the-art expert software tools based on advanced techniques such as genetic algorithms which rapidly evolve the optimal network design for a given scenario.

Telopsis supplies software for managing advanced call handling services on next generation platforms. Its vision is to make these services as easy to manage as they are to use, providing what the customer wants and not what technology dictates.

The Telopsis solution managers services across virtual private networks, corporate private networks and corporate contact centres.

It delivers server-based software and web-based PC software clients for:-

• Service providers offering turnkey solutions for managed advanced services on behalf of corporate customers

• Service providers offering advanced services for corporate customers who wish to configure and provision their own call handling requirements

• Corporate businesses operating and managing their own advanced services via private networks.