DigiLife, Telecom’s venture to enable smart homes in New Zealand, is targeted for market launch in FY 2015.
“The idea is to have a wireless, self-install, plug-and-play model to enable smart homes. Our entire design principle is focused around this, and we have around 95 per cent self-install success so far. We are in active customer proof of concepts currently,” said Rod Snodgrass, CEO of Telecom Digital Ventures.
He was addressing an audience gathered together as part of business cluster, Auckland ICT’s, monthly event.
DigiLife intends to provide Kiwis with the ability to control elements in their home, from security and monitoring, to home automation and energy management.
Qrious, Telecom’s standalone entity, focusing on Big Data solutions, business insight and data analysis, will be launched to the external market much sooner than that.
“Qrious has the potential to be really awesome or turn into a huge disaster,” Snodgrass said. “It is a smart data hub with four-tiered service catalogues. Internally there have been divisions using the Qrious platform. Our first external customer has been secured. Business build is almost complete and it will be in the external market in the next couple of months.”
He said the division’s goal is to create $1 billion shareholder value by 2020 by innovating and investing in disruptive technologies across six focus areas, connectivity, smart life, content, commerce, data or applications and verticals such as healthcare and education.
Speaking specifically to new business ventures in the audience, Snodgrass said, “Lean and agile approaches must be adopted when working on new ideas. Pivots and shut-downs should be embraced, though efforts must be made to limit it to the earlier part of the development cycle. Design in terms of UX and CX should be top of mind. Diversity of thought and experience should be encouraged to bring new stuff through and out.”
He also touched briefly on the investments made in Vigil and App La Carte, stating that stakes in external partiers are deliberately prevented from becoming a majority holding, to allow founders and original innovators freedom in following their ideas, while providing essential support for further acceleration of the business.
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Telecom Digital Ventures, which selects, incubates, launches and grows digital businesses, will be called Spark Ventures, following the brand change on August 8.