Operations and Company Update
Perth, Aug 3, 2015 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Yonder & Beyond Group Ltd (
ASX:YNB), a portfolio of synergistic technology assets with a focus on mobile businesses, is pleased to provide an update in relation to its operations.
Yonder and its companies have had a fantastic quarter, with three launches of products and the majority of companies now heading firmly into revenue and customer acquisition phases. There is now increased interest in investing in the portfolio companies as well as Yonder, with the evidence that Yonder and its portfolio companies are now starting to come into the delivery phase.
Yonder also has a suite of products that it is working on internally that it expects to announce by the end of the next quarter.
MeU Mobile - successfully launched in July
MeU Mobile, a new mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and Australia's First Social Mobile Network(TM), has successfully launched in the last week - offering Australians simple and transparent competitive month to month mobile plans utilising the Telstra Wholesale Network.
It has four plans, known as 'Oodles', which provide members with talk, text and data at highly competitive prices. Additionally, MeU will advise its members if they are over-spending on the service at the end of the billing cycle, ensuring they are on the right plan for them.
Members can keep their previous mobile number, have access to free voicemail and calls to 1800 numbers, as well as access to its network - Kevin - which provides a 3G footprint of 98.5% of the Australian population, covering 1.3 million square kilometres, using part of Telstra's 3G mobile network.
MeU will be Australia's first Social Mobile Network(TM) using a bespoke and innovative socially connected platform enabling members to connect both socially and with MeU's customer centric service representatives in a cheaper, faster and more intuitive way.
MeU has received tremendous press in recent days, including in publications such as The Australian Newspaper, IT Wire, Business Spectator and Ausdroid, which should help bolster brand and recognition as it pushes for customer acquisition growth.
Prism Digital - Record revenue quarter
June marks the end of Prism Digital's most successful quarter to date. The fast-growing digital recruitment agency, based in London, experienced revenues in excess of $600,000 for the quarter. Focusing on the rapidly growing start up sector in London, Prism has benefited from its innovative approach to recruitment in the digital space.
Prism is continuing to develop relationships with top talent and influential IT and technology companies, as well as understanding the needs of businesses. Part of this can be attributed to the incredibly popular "London DevOps" meetups, co-organised by Prism. The June event attracted over 500 developers to the Facebook London offices, where representatives of Google and Facebook presented with Prism on technical projects and methods.
Events, like London DevOps, have expanded Prism's network and relationships with top talent in the industry, enabling it to make placements at leading technology companies. Recently, Prism has been engaged by Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), a leader in CRM, and Rackspace (NYSE:RAX), one of the world's largest cloud computing companies, to provide top IT talent in very specific and demanding technology areas.
MySQUAR - successfully listed on AIM
MySQUAR (LON:MYSQ), Myanmar's only local language social media platform, successfully listed on London Stock Exchange's Alternative Investment Market ("AIM") on 1 July 2015. MySQUAR had a market capitalisation at listing of AUD$37m.
The successful listing comes of the back of MySQUAR's significant growth within the Myanmar telecoms market. Its MyChat app was recently ranked 5th in Google Play's top free applications store, with over 680,000 accounts on the instant messaging app. By the end of the year, the company expects the figure to have increased to 1.5 million users.
MySQUAR's mission is to inspire creativity, entertainment and a better standard of living in Myanmar by offering world class consumer technology solutions that connect Myanmar people with local businesses, products and each other. Myanmar is one of the world's fastest growing telecom and technology markets, with large infrastructure investments paving the way for continued growth in the coming years.
Yonder owns 4,133,303 MySQUAR shares, valued at $845,000 on listing, which represents a value up-lift of 24 per cent in four months. In addition it provides the firm with access to a network of social media, gaming, entertainment and ecommerce technologies.
Boppl(TM) - secured two global partnerships
Boppl(TM) is a leading technology platform allowing venues to be discovered and seamlessly accept mobile orders and payments. Boppl(TM) allows consumers to search for restaurants and menu items by location and order ahead in an easy and secure way, with a single touch.
It has won multiple awards including the UK Mobile & Apps Design Award in 2014 and named App of the Day by Mobile Entertainment, Top 50 Mobile Innovator in 2013. The Boppl(TM) mobile app for iPhone and Android puts discovery, ordering, payment and receipts into a single app. Using Boppl(TM) the user can track their order at any time, so it is always in control. As a result, the user will have what they want, when they want it.
In June Boppl(TM) signed a partnership with leading Italian IT reseller Apptica to deploy Boppl(TM) across Italy.
The partnership will enable Boppl(TM) access to existing and future clients of Apptica across key regions in Italy. Apptica will help localise Boppl(TM) for the Italian market and propose Boppl(TM) across the board to hospitality venues, starting with the main regions around Turin and Rome.
Apptica is the exclusive distributor of iKentoo in Italy, which serves a number of well-known venues including, Re Di Coppe e Piatti in Milan, Spasso Food in Rome and Gina la Piadina in Asti. Excitingly, also the first Italian gourmet food truck, The Rolling Star, and the upcoming first venue of the internationally known food guru, Paolo Parisi, in Tuscany. Apptica is also partner with the major Italian group iRiparo, with over 100 stores covering all of Italy, as well as soon to be launching in France. The partnership allows Apptica to resell Boppl(TM) through its existing network of retail food and beverage clients, including point of sale clients, with Boppl(TM) sharing revenue from venue deployments with Apptica.
In April Boppl(TM) secured an integration partnership with Omnivore. Through Omnivore's advanced technology system, Boppl(TM) will be available on virtually all venues globally that are using Micros, NCR Aloha or Positouch as a Point-of-sale system. Micros and NCR Aloha are two of the largest Point-of-sales systems in the world, with an estimated combined deployed base in excess of 200,000 venues globally. The partnership and seamless integration will enable Boppl(TM) to gain unprecedented depth of potential deployment and to be easily deployed in any venues using of those POS systems, allowing customers to order and pay easily, with their smartphone.
Boppl(TM) now also allows its users to access menus of more than 1,700 venues in London. Boppl(TM) users can discover tastes and experiences in their local area through the app, with Boppl(TM) allowing venues to enable their customers to order and pay for food and drink via their smart phone.
Yonder owns 72% of Boppl(TM), and has played a key role in securing recent agreements through the work of its management team.
Wondr - v1.0 live on App Store for testing
Wondr, the event based multimedia sharing application with an emphasis on user defined privacy and content ownership, soft launched on the Apple Store in the June quarter, in an expanded live testing. This milestone takes Wondr out of its development stage into continuous customer testing and iterative improvements.
Wondr is currently focusing on validating its core functionality based on the belief that users are yearning for ability to create ad-hoc groups to share multimedia during various life events, and current social media and sharing platforms are too broad-reach in nature to efficiently do so. At the same time, development continues full force for a V2 which brings a state of the art user experience on this functionality and added engagement features to the Wondr ecosystem.
Wondr is being made available for use at a major up-coming Australian sporting event.
Gophr - growing transactions by 10% a week in UK
Gophr is a courier application created to improve the experience for customers and couriers alike. It enables customers to book jobs directly with a courier, track the progress of a delivery and review the performance of a specific courier, all through their smart phone. Gophr successfully launched to the public in May after completing its live testing phase with 100 businesses in March. The application was successful in allowing Londoners to order a courier on their smart phone, watch its delivery progress in real time and pay using their smart phone or, for businesses, as scheduled billing.
Gophr has continued to grow the number of deliveries from its expanded trial through public launch by c. 10% a week.
PlayMeet(TM) - submitted to App Store and waiting approval
During the period Yonder acquired an initial 10% stake in US-based social media application PlayMeet(TM).
PlayMeet(TM) is the most comprehensive social mobile application to ever be designed around music, and was created in collaboration with representatives of JMPM Properties and The Estate of Michael Jackson.
PlayMeet(TM) allows users to create and tune profiles based on their musical interests, then find and interact with other users with similar musical tastes. Users can connect with friends or someone new by searching geolocation, venue check-ins and local concert events. Once connections are made, the app enables various social communication scenarios including song, lyric and interest sharing, messaging, concert invites and even in-venue song dedications via digital juke boxes in over 60,000 locations powered by TouchTunes.
PlayMeet(TM) has built a proprietary messaging and technology framework and integrated best of breed technologies from Spotify, Bandsintown, LyricFind, Facebook, FourSquare and TouchTunes to create the preeminent social music application. PlayMeet(TM) will continue to build out a world class and constantly evolving music matching algorithm that will connect people and spark social communication through the language of music.
Connexion Media - winner in the Smart 100 innovation awards
Connexion Media Limited (ASX:CXZ), an innovator in the connected car market, has two major products being distributed through car manufacturers - Flex and miRoamer. In the quarter to June Connexion achieved particularly important progress with the international roll-out of both the Flex fleet management product and miRoamer radio and music service.
The Flex product has made outstanding progress in the past quarter. In May Connexion announced that it had won a contract with a major USA-based automaker as the supplier for a new small business vehicle management service based on the Flex service. The introduction of the customised Flex service in new vehicles as part of this deal is expected later in calendar 2015. The USA-based automaker will offer the service throughout the USA via its dealer network at over 4,000 locations.
Connexion is being paid to customise the existing Flex service to meet the automaker's market requirements. The revenue generated from the service will be shared by both parties. Connexion received its first payment of $US90k (circa AUD$125k) for the first stages of customisation work for the roll out of Flex in late July. Connexion expects additional customisation revenues will be generated in the coming quarters and that total customisation payments should exceed $US365k (circa AUD$500k). In the US two major automakers are trialing Flex, while in Europe five major automakers are also trialing Flex. These automakers collectively represent 30+% and 20+% of annual new vehicle sales in their respective markets. Connexion is also receiving strong interest from automotive and consumer aftermarket brands, as well as automaker suppliers.
Early in the quarter the digital media platform for music and entertainment, miRoamer, continued its progress. In April Connexion signed a deal with SEAT Leon where miRoamer will be the first app available in the new MirrorLink enabled SEAT Leon Infotainment System. SEAT is part of the Volkswagen Group and a major Spanish-based motor vehicle company operating in 75 countries. SEAT sold 390,500 vehicles in 2014. In late April, Connexion signed its first commercial contract with a South American vehicle supplier in a deal that will see miRoamer in South American production vehicles from 2016. Commercial terms of the deal are confidential, though it can be disclosed that Connexion will benefit from upfront setup fees, per-unit license fees and ongoing support service fees under the 3-year deal. First revenues from this agreement were received during the June quarter.
Connexion's Flex and miRoamer products were collectively chosen as winners in the Australian Anthill's 'SMART 100' Innovation Awards. The 'Smart 100' was developed in 2008 and identifies and ranks 100 of the most innovative products in Australia. It is Australia's largest awards program dedicated to innovation.
About Yonder & Beyond Group Ltd
Yonder & Beyond Group Ltd (Y&B) (ASX:YNB) is a portfolio of synergistic technology assets with a focus on mobile businesses. These include Gophr, Boppl, Prism Digital, PlayMeet and MeU Mobile. Yonder & Beyond's strategy is to identify and develop disruptive applications with high commercialisation and scalability potential.
Yonder & Beyond equip startups with vital capabilities beyond capital. Our philosophy is to invest in people, as well as invest in their business, so they can both grow and succeed. We are dedicated to contributing to the development of businesses through our resources, experience and relationships.
| ||
|
