Hour of Destiny

Had a great meeting today with a company called Destiny, who offer a package of b2b solutions for companies collecting data in the field. Think of your parcel company delivering a package and asking you to sign their oversized PDA. The problem with this arrangement for most companies who have staff out in the field collecting data or filling in forms, is that these staff, who are often not technically-minded, then have to get to grips with PDAs or Tablet PCs, not to mention the associated IT support costs. As a result, many don't bother, and stick to paper.
Destiny’s solution uses a Bluetooth-enabled digital pen, which pairs up with a Bluetooth phone. Destiny takes whatever form the field worker is required to fill in and produces a version of it that is equipped with a faint background pattern of thousands and thousands of dots. The dots are a section of a patented design invented by Swedish company Anoto. (The entire pattern is 60 million sq.km, according to Destiny CEO and Founder Edward Belgeonne.)
When the field worker fills in the form with the digital pen, the pen takes 100 photos per second of where the penstrokes are, relative to the dots on the page, and stores the co-ordinates of the penstrokes and the dots in a tiny data file. When the field worker ticks the ‘Send’ box, the data file is sent via the mobile phone to the Destiny server, where a version of the form is hosted. The penstrokes land on the form on the server in exactly the same place they left the form out in the field, creating a replica image of the form. For many Destiny clients, that’s all they want, though the data on the form can be automatically entered into a data file in XML, CSV or other formats at as part of the same process, if required. The data file can also include GPS co-ordinates to provide a record of where the form was completed and sent from.
It takes less than one minute for delivery from the moment the field worker ticks the ‘Send’ box, and the whole thing costs £10 per user per month for licensing and servicing, plus a transaction cost of  25p per transaction, which reduces, the more transactions you send.
Impressed as I was with the concept, I wondered whether this is really mobile marketing, and then, having considered the question, it became blindingly obvious that it was. If you’ve got a field sales or service force out repairing boilers, maintaining lifts, or whatever they might be doing, getting the data relating to each site visit back into the company’s systems within minutes of them completing the job can only be good for the company and its customers. And by cutting down the paper trail and cutting processing time too, who knows, it might even lead to lower costs for customers.
We’ll be running an interview with Belgeonne in the next week or so. In the meantime, you can find out more about Destiny here.

David Murphy
Editor