Seeker Wireless Wins Vodafone Innovation Partner of the Year 2008

Sydney, October 09, 2008 - Seeker Wireless, one of the leading location-based service technology companies announced today that it has been named Innovation Partner of the Year 2008 at a conference hosted jointly by Vodafone New Zealand and Vodafone Australia.

The Vodafone Partner Awards were created to recognize excellence in provision of services to Vodafone by its supply partners. This year’s conference focused on the theme “Collective Innovation for Growth”. In keeping with the theme, Seeker’s award recognised the company’s willingness to collaborate at multiple levels to ensure Vodafone was able to effectively enter the fixed-line business with a purely mobile offering.

The contract for which the award was given saw Seeker Wireless providing the world’s most technically advanced and financially efficient zone detection solution in support of Vodafone New Zealand’s recently launched Local Zone product. Created expressly to support fixed mobile substitution strategies, SeekerZone™ allows operators such as Vodafone to motivate subscribers to continue using their mobile phones instead of a fixed line by setting innovative tariffs for subscribers around their “local zone”.

Vodafone has run a joint partner awards between Australia and New Zealand for several years, assessing several hundred suppliers in three categories. This year’s Innovation Award was presented to Seeker Wireless by Ken Tunnicliffe, Vodafone New Zealand’s Director of Technology.

Dr Chris Drane, CEO of Seeker Wireless stated that “making the transition from a start-up with fantastic technology to delivering carrier-grade solutions was a very steep learning curve for us. Our solution moves the SLA bar up from 90% to 99.5% in-zone reliability, an almost unbelievable leap in service level. We are grateful that in Vodafone we had a customer that truly valued what we were doing as a key plank in their strategy for market growth. And by treating our relationship as one of genuine collaboration, Vodafone allowed us to constantly improve our value to them. Along the way, Seeker has become a better rounded partner on which other Vodafone operators can now depend for their key location platform deliveries.”

Under the contract, Seeker delivered its SeekerZone™ solution which enables Vodafone to locate mobiles much more accurately and reliably, allowing Vodafone to offer a fixed-line product that runs on the subscriber’s mobile phone when it is at home or in a nominated location. Operators elsewhere that have launched location based billing products based on alternative, first generation Cell-ID systems have experienced severe revenue leakage because the location was not accurate or reliable enough. SeekerZone eliminates these issues saving some operators tens of millions of dollars in revenue every year.

Seeker’s technology extends beyond home zone solutions and can also be deployed to drive revenues from other location-sensitive services such as location based advertising and local mobile search.