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| Smart Community |
I have to use more than half of this page to introduce
i-Neighbour, our smart community solution because of the excitement it garnered
during its development phase last year. When i-Neighbour first started around
two years ago, it was merely a cloud residential visitor management system with
innovative QR code as credential to verify pre-registered visitors. But
interestingly, more amazing ideas ushered in afterward, and the solution
evolved. None of our other products have such opportunity to break away from
its initial boundary; only i-Neighbour evolves and changes, and eventually
turns into a smart community solution with variety of Internet-of-Things, IoT
stuff attached to it.
Besides visitor management, i-Neighbour smart community system
offers payment gateway, e-billing, e-polling, facility booking, panic button,
event management, incident and defect reports, yard sale, and etc; its IoT
stuff consists of smart barrier, smart alarm, smart reader, smart lock to smart
lift system and etc., and all of the services, pierced together by using a
single App at the user end and Web at the admin end.
It doesn’t stop there. i-Neighbour, continues to evolve, crosses
over the enclave, establishes an in-App link with another in-house developed
App, i-Merchant, to connect the residents to the nearby merchants to get to
know their offers and eventually places orders.
And it doesn’t stop there. In our effort to reach the low-income
group in high household density communities, we developed an advertisement
platform, i-Ad hub, which they can use to offset their subscription fees.
And it doesn’t stop there. Instead, it continues to evolve.
TimeTec VMS for commercial buildings is a spin-off from i-Neighbour’s
residential system, with more IoT capabilities to turn turnstile and flap
barrier into smart devices accessible via smartphones.
It doesn’t stop there. TimeTec Access, another cloud platform for
access control is in the making and it will be debuted anytime this year. We
definitely wouldn’t left our pillar, the access control system behind,
cloudless. With the introduction of TimeTec Access would only our cloud
solutions be full circle in meeting the demand of comprehensive access control
requirements, connecting buildings from residential to commercials, integrating
i-Neighbour from home to workplace.
“Explosive” is the best term to describe i-Neighbour sales. Yes,
there are incessant inquiries pouring in, non-stop appointments and product
demos to attend to. Town planners, consultants, housing developers, properties
management companies, and resident associations, all eager to see with their
own eyes our amazing solution. Price quoted. Deals sealed.
Of course, I won’t forget to mention our workforce management
system, especially TimeTec TA, the cloud-based time & attendance
application that is starting to generate steady income since last year.
More features were added in 2017, NFC, GPS and Time Beacon are
offered as clocking methods. The counterpart, TimeTec Leave, a solution that
handles employee leave management, has been launched to complete the workforce
management solution recently. We expect the one-plus-one-equal-to-three formula
would apply in our offering of workforce management and this year, TimeTec Hire
for talent acquisition will make its debut; another big leap for us in this
workforce area of expertise.
And for our vertical niche market solution, TimeTec Patrol, a
partly workforce management and a partly security system, since it launching
has been gaining its momentum amongst security guard companies with more and
more sign ups.
Our long time partners might ask, “What role would FingerTec play
in the cloud future? Retire and pass the baton to TimeTec or revitalize and
sing along with TimeTec?“ My answer to that was, “Definitely the latter.” The
push technology as intermediary of IoT for our existing biometric and card
products would further be transformed into truly IoT products.
Our customers can expect more new IoT hardware from us in these
two years. Some of them will still carry the same name, FingerTec, where
fingerprint and biometrics technology are applied; some of them will
straightaway be branded as TimeTec when App and Bluetooth are involved without
biometrics. In these two IoT product lines, either we offer it as standalone
products, or go together with our cloud applications as some core and optional
components.
One question that enlightened us when designing IoT hardware was,
when smartphones came loaded with strong computing power are used for
credential authentication, why shouldn’t we lower the computing power in the
access controllers or readers? So that we can design and produce much
cost-effective and simplified new breed of hardware. Yes, the once lingering
idea now becoming our new direction to unlock the treasure of our future.
For sure, the ecosystem we built for FingerTec such as warranty,
training, support system and etc, would continue to be the core components for
our IoT platform, with widening Big Data and artificial intelligence
capabilities at the same time to benefit larger customer base.
We will continue singing the same theme song for a very long time.
