Monthly Archives: February 2014

Mobility for innovation

The importance of mobility is revealed by figures on use gathered in our environment: mobile traffic accounts for 17.4% of total web traffic, and growth in this area is exponential. In a country like Spain, there are 22 million app users, and 4 million apps are downloaded per day. Readers who are interested in this kind of data can find more information here.

From 24 to 27 February, Barcelona will host the Mobile World Congress, an international event that brings together manufacturers and developers, and has made the city into the world capital of mobile technology since 2006. CIT UPC, the UPC Technology Center, will be there.

The concept of mobility is one of our main areas of activity, within the technological capabilities and developments on which we work. We focus on 4G solutions, operating systems, NFC, Wifi and cloud computing, among other technologies, which are applied in fields as diverse as e-commerce, smart cities, e-health and geolocation systems.

As a result of this work, the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya has registered 29 patents and launched five spin-offs, in addition to collaborating with a considerable number of companies to develop mobile technologies.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, we will present three new products that are ready to be marketed by companies interested in their implementation. The products are SportALERT and uTalk, both developed by inLab FIB UPC, and SPARKsee, which is the result of the work of DAMA UPC. inLab FIB and DAMA are members of the CIT.

SportALERT is an application designed to monitor the movements of sportspeople through geolocation via a mobile phone. The application detects unplanned stops and sets off an alarm. If the user does not cancel the alarm, the system will send a message with the sportsperson’s exact location to previously indicated recipients. This tool has already been tested in collaboration with a company dedicated to winter sports and with an open sea swimming club.

The second of the applications is uTalk, which is conceived as an instant corporate messaging system that similar to WhatsApp. UTalk is a multiplatform, multidevice tool that functions without the personal data of the individual using the terminal. It is managed by the company’s head office, and functions as a channel of communication with employees. The possibilities of this application range from training to the sectors of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, among others. UTalk has been developed by inLAB FIB in collaboration with UPCNet.

The third application is SPARKsee, a high performance, graph-based database with a small software footprint and high compression. SPARKsee enables data to be managed in a compact way and provides graph analysis in mobile devices with limited resources. The latest version of this application, SPARKsee 5 mobile, improves the performance of other applications that use databases, such as social networks, and enhances the safety and analysis of the data. The application has been developed by DAMA UPC.

We will take part in Mobile World Congress 2014 to present these and other mobile tools, and to make contacts with companies and organizations that are interested in their commercial development. We hope to see you at stand 8.1K48 in the App Planet Hall (Hall 8.1).

CIT UPC: Technology made real.