BT has selected three start-up companies to develop digital solutions to help manufacturers cut carbon emissions. The chosen start-ups will help develop solutions based on their expertise in factory designs, sensors to eliminate energy waste and emissions monitoring

RIIICO 3D scanning uses digital versions of physical environments augmented by artificial intelligence to enable people and computers to remodel and enhance that environment.

Sensorfact works with small manufacturers to reduce their energy bill and carbon footprint by eliminating energy waste through sensors. Sensorfact says it has helped over 1,000 manufacturing companies across north-western Europe save up to 1 per cent on their electricity bill.

Circularise  helps suppliers to trace materials and share sensitive using blockchain software. A  joint report by BT and Accenture has forecast that tech, including 5G, can help reduce carbon emissions from the manufacturing sector by 13% by 2030. David Wrout, Principal – Digital Supply Chain, Enterprise Digita Solutions at BT, said: “We have set a target to avoid 60 million tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2030/ By using the power of digital, we can help our customers with the transition to net zero”.

BT Group uses 100 per cent renewable electricity worldwide and aims to transition its commercial fleet to electric or zero-emission vehicles by 2030. Since 2016 BT Group has reduced the carbon emissions intensity of its operations by 55 per cent and has reduced carbon emissions by 28 per cent in its supply chain.

Virgin Media O2 Business has switched on the UK’s first 5G-connected hospital with South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust at Bethlem Royal Hospital.

The switch on marks the start of new digital health and innovation trials at Maudsley Digital Lab funded by the NHS- using a private 5G network to produce connectivity for use cases for clinicians and patients. 

The Maudsley Smart Hospital and Maudsley Smart Pharmacy 5G trials are live across two wards at Bethlem Royal Hospital and will investigate the benefits of using 5G connected technologies. 

The e-Obs (e-Observations) app means clinicians monitor patients vital signs, as well as using handheld devices to update patients records.

An IoT innovation lab and platform will look at smart, connected use cases including tracking air quality inside wards and remotely monitoring fridges so medicine is stored at the correct temperature.

‘Remote Expert’, Virgin Media O2 Business’s AR connected headset will allow a specialist in another location to lead on-site workers when completing complex tasks.

Using Spatial Insights, AI will be used to create heat maps to identify movement patterns in the hospital so staff can get a better insight into waiting times and busy hotspots in the hospital.

Virgin Media O2 Business large enterprise and public sector director Mike Smith said: “We’re proud to announce the switch-on of the UK’s first 5G-connected hospital – showing how next-generation technology can help create a smarter, modern healthcare service for everyone. 

“Our aim is to map out the rollout of wireless and smart hospital connectivity across the NHS estate over the next three to five years. 

“Trials like this are the embodiment of our mission to upgrade the UK, and a clear sign of the role we can play in helping to shape the NHS of the future.”

The Court of Appeal this week has granted permission for a case brought by anti-5G pressure group Action Against 5G case to proceed .

The Court of Appeal decided there were two grounds for the case to go ahead. One was the
the alleged failure to provide adequate or effective information to the public about the risks and how, if it be possible, it might be possible for individuals to avoid or minimise the claimed risks

The second was “the failure to provide adequate and sufficient reasons for not establishing a process to investigate and establish the adverse health effects and risks of adverse health effects from 5G technology and/or for discounting the risks presented by the evidence available; and/or failure to meet the requirements of transparency and openness required of a public body”.

These grounds were claimed in Court to “advance a breach of the Human Rights Act 1998 by omissions and failings in violation of the positive obligations to protect human life, health and dignity, required to be met by Articles 2, 3 and/or 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights”

Action Against 5G describes itself as “groups of individuals nationwide, including doctors, scientists and engineers. They are supported by lawyers headed by Michael Mansfield QC.

“We have joined forces to commence legal proceedings to challenge the UK government’s failure to take sufficient notice of clearly identified health and safety risks of wireless radiation and the increased exposure from the deployment of 5G” the Group claims.

Court of Appeal findings HERE

Telefónica O2 UK is to merge its consumer sales and customer service teams under a single directorate position, reporting to UK chief executive Ronan Dunne.

The new ‘sales and service’ unit will cover all retail, web and telephone sales functions, as well as customer service. O2 continues to search for a director to head the new division.

O2 general manager of retail Richard Bayliss, leading O2’s retail business, and head of mass retail James Lambert, handling relations with Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U, will work within the new unit and report to the new sales and service director.

Until O2 recruits for the new role, the old consumer sales and customer service divisions will run as they are, with Cheryl Black serving as customer service director until a candidate is identified to lead the new division.

Black will retire from the industry when her position becomes redundant.

Business sales director Ben Dowd will continue as interim consumer sales director also, following the exit of incumbent Stephen Shurrock to lead Telefónica O2 Ireland. Dowd will take a redefined role as ‘business director’ when the sales and service directorate is filled.

Dowd’s new division will handle all business customer sales and marketing, from small business through to large corporations, signed via both O2’s direct and indirect channels.

Under Dowd, head of SME sales David Plumb is handed the newly-created role of ‘general manager for enterprise’. Plumb will be responsible for sales and marketing.

O2 head of SME marketing Simon Devonshire effectively replaces Plumb in a newly-defined role as ‘general manager of SME and LME’, or small, medium and large enterprises, covering business accounts of up to 2,000 connections. He will be responsible for sales, marketing, customer support and partner support.

As well, O2 has scrapped its old ‘customer’ division and replaced it with a ‘new business development’ unit to cover its vertical market interests, such as O2 Money, O2 Health, M2M, MVNO and wholesale. Tim Sefton, who headed the old unit, takes charge as new business development director.

O2 is also recruiting for new heads of M2M and MVNO, to report in to Sefton.

Head of brand strategy Gav Thomson will take a role as ‘head of brand innovation’ in Sefton’s business development team.

O2 UK marketing director Sally Cowdry has been put in charge of an expanded division as ‘consumer and marketing director’. Her role covers bottom-line profit-and-loss of core product sales, as well as marketing across O2’s consumer sales activities.

Meanwhile, O2 has confirmed UK chief financial officer Ramon Ros, who joined the UK business in May 2008, will return to parent company Telefónica in Madrid. His position will be replaced.

O2 UK’s communications team, headed by Glenn Manoff, will now operate as a standalone unit, instead of a function of Sefton’s old customer division. Manoff will report to Dunne, although he does not take a seat on the UK board.

The operations division, headed by chief technology officer Derek McManus, and the HR division, headed by Ann Pickering, go unchanged.

The restructure sees the O2 UK board reduce from nine members, plus non-executives, to eight, including Dunne, Dowd, Sefton, Cowdry, McManus, Pickering, plus the incoming sales and service director and incoming chief financial officer.

Meanwhile, O2 UK will begin a consultation process with staff and unions from January as part of wider restructure, which will result in redundancies.

However, O2 UK said it will increase the number of its in-store technical specialist ‘Guru’ staff from 150 at present to around 400, effectively one per store next year.

It refused to comment on the possibility of redundancies within retail. Significant redundancies are expected across the UK business, however.

An O2 spokesperson said: “We are streamlining our management structure to create greater focus, accountability and efficiency so that we can invest more in the experience we deliver to our customers.

“We are doing this from a position of strength. Just like any large business, our structure evolves over time as business requirements change. The changes will ensure that the customer remains at the heart of our decision making.”

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) has innovation, foresight and good timing.

Its success in the past decade is down to the functionality, security and cost aspects of email delivery on its handsets.

For corporations, public and private, these matters are crucial.  It is now looking to repeat its trick in the business market in very specific vertical market sectors within it, such as healthcare, and to bring additional niche services to a broader base.

RIM won major share of the business market in the first place because it caught Microsoft napping. Microsoft had charge of the IT element and could have, and should have, produced a killer Microsoft Exchange mobile solution for its base of IT customers.

Instead, it messed around with mobile, failed to deliver, and has paid the price in the business market as second or third string ever since. RIM was smart.

It got into Microsoft’s servers in the business market, hooked up its platform and delivered stripped-down and encrypted email to clients’ staff in the field.

Only Google, very recently, has come up with anything that matches RIM’s service for the business market.

It is, then, unsurprising to find it on the mHealth bandwagon early. Belatedly, its competitors have made up ground on it in the business market, with iconic devices with fancy functionality of their own. Apple is a very real threat to it.

To attack vertical markets such as the healthcare sector now could see it tear away from the competition again.

He said mobile health (mHealth) solutions  offer NHS and other healthcare functions an opportunity to reduce the administrative burden on professionals such as midwives, health visitors and community nurses, enabling them to spend more time in the field.

Said Morrison-Gardiner: “We want to allow health professionals to spend more time with patients to deliver a better quality of care and to remove the burden of their everyday activities. What is telling is the number of clinical system providers and other companies approaching RIM over the last 18 months to see how they can leverage our platform to deploy mobile versions of existing solutions.”

Morrison-Gardiner said BlackBerry-maker RIM is in discussion with a number of providers to the healthcare market about deploying its mobile systems.

At the Healthcare Technology 2010 conference in London last month, RIM, in collaboration with public sector technology solutions provider CSC, unveiled a new application for mobile healthcare workers.

‘Patient in your Pocket’ was dubbed a ‘super app’ by RIM, giving healthcare staff multiple functions through a single interface, including the ability to access and update patient records remotely and in real time, utilise GPS to navigate visit locations, record data with digital pens, capture images and add digital dictation notes. It also includes lone-worker functionality, allowing healthcare professionals to trigger an alarm if considered to be at risk.

Morrison-Gardiner addressed security issues for healthcare bodies in transfer and access to date whilst in the field. He suggested the issue has so far hampered the uptake of mobile technology in the public sector. But he said RIM’s BES is accredited by CESG, the information assurance arm of GCHQ, and is therefore suitable for use in government environments. Notable public sector bodies to have already deployed BlackBerry devices include Portsmouth NHS, Rotherham NHS and West Yorkshire Police.

The CSC system can restrict remote access to information from a BlackBerry handset with a smartcard reader also. A smartcard reader paired with the device can be used to scan a user’s NHS smartcard before granting access to the main system and stored patient information.

“Encryption is important but security also comes down to users showing good governance by controlling devices in the hands of staff. BlackBerry allows that level of control to lock down devices, block applications and to push out new services. The health service recognises the demand to be more mobile. It’s great BlackBerry architecture has been tested and accredited so it can deploy the technology and applications with confidence data is secure,” said Morrison-Gardiner.

Research In Motion (RIM) and public sector technology solutions provider CSC have unveiled a new platform for mobile healthcare professionals.

Patient in your Pocket allows BlackBerry smartphones to be used by mobile healthcare professionals to access and update patient records in real time.

Users can access appointment schedules, use navigation tools to find a patient’s address, upload images and update records, fill in forms and dictate audio notes using a digital pen.

Patient in your Pocket also features lone worker safety functionality through an activity monitoring system allowing users such as health visitors and midwives to register tasks with a call centre which raises an alarm if a response is not given by a predetermined time.

Secure access is facilitated through a smartcard reader paired with the healthcare professionals existing NHS smartcard.

The application was announced at the Healthcare Technology 2010 conference in London where RIM, and O2 Health, are exhibiting.

RIM UK healthcare director Daniel Morrison-Gardiner described Patient in your Pocket as an “innovative super app”.

He said: “Patient in your Pocket can play an important part in transforming the way healthcare professionals work and provide patient care.”

Orange has launched its second healthcare service, Orange Health Gateway, following on from its smartnumbers service.

Orange Health Gateway is a web-based messaging service that Orange said can be used to improve communications between healthcare organisations, their staff and patients using mobile communications. Orange Health Gateway is delivered by mobile healthcare platform developer iPLATO.

The service is available in a number of modules that can deliver appointment reminders, routine tests results, medication updates, staff messages and emergency messages in the event of an incident.

Orange said the Appointment Reminders module enables organisations to send personalised appointment reminders to patients and manage cancellations and confirmations. It claims this could reduce wasted appointment slots by up to 38 per cent, equating to annual savings of £300 million.

Orange head of corporate propositions Michael Lawrence said: “Orange Health Gateway offers the healthcare sector the opportunity to improve patient services and deliver real savings by capitalising on the everyday use of mobile.

“It enables healthcare providers to make better use of time and resources, at a time when efficiency gains are front of mind. Healthcare organisations can transform their entire communications system, proving that technology and partnerships can enable real change.”

The global smartphone application market was worth $2.2 (£1.4) billion during the first half of 2010, surpassing the total value for the entire 2009 according to a new report.

Mobile market research specialist Research2Guidance estimates the smartphone application market was worth $1.7 (£1.1) billion over the 12 months of last year, meaning the first half figure for 2010 is already half a billion dollars more.

The number of smartphone applications downloaded has also surpassed the 3.1 billion recorded over the whole of last year to reach 3.9 billion in the first half of 2010.

Research2Guidance’s Global Smartphone Application Report 2010 also found the average price paid for applications reached $3.60 (£2.31) in the first half of this year.

Research2Guidance analysed 30 app stores, such as the Apple App Store, GetJar and Nokia’s Ovi store, with more than 100 companies contributing to the study, including Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Qualcomm, Apple, AT&T and Microsoft.

Research2Guidance said its results show the application market is continuing to gain momentum as more smartphone users get direct access to app stores. It predicts more specialised app stores to come on stream in the future.

A spokesperson for Research2Guidance said: “Apple’s competitors like Nokia and BlackBerry started to leverage their global reach and increased the traffic on their app stores.

“This trend will continue in the next several months and years. The next wave of new app stores will be niche stores specialising on business or mobile health apps.”

The Mobile Monitor bolt-on reports in real time on all call and text information, including detail of all dialled calls, received calls and missed calls, with date, time and location stamps. It records full content of all sent and received text messages. It also allows employers to set up email alerts to users making or receiving calls or texts to specific numbers.

Mobile Monitor delivers detailed management reports about handset usage in Excel, PDF or email format as well.

Crystal Ball managing director Raj Singh (pictured) said: “In 25 years of mobile, the situation exists where businesses and individuals can receive an itemised bill from network operators with information of outgoing calls and text messages; once a month, normally two-to-three weeks after the month-end.

“With Mobile Monitor, you can see every outgoing call and text, every incoming call and text, the duration of calls, all missed calls, plus the content of text messages. In real time.

“Customers can interrogate and filter that information as they wish, and request to be alerted about certain activity. It gives employers full sight of mobile usage and productivity of staff.”

The Mobile Monitor bolt-on works alongside Crystal Ball’s Mobile Track GPS handset tracking and lone worker application.

Mobile Track is a downloadable application, compatible with Windows and Symbian handsets. It is to run on BlackBerry and Android devices in the next weeks, also.

Customers can retrieve from it real-time reports of the whereabouts and activity of handsets, and gauge also vehicle activity. Crystal Ball reckons the solution works as a formidable alternative to vehicle tracking, and the installation of ‘black boxes’, giving employers some engine information and full detail of staff productivity on the road.

The basic Crystal Ball application also tracks users when they leave the vehicle, and integrates a lone worker function that can be linked to Sitex Orbis’ alarm receiving centre.

Users can punch a button on the application to raise an alert. The command sends a text message containing GPS coordinates of the handset. At the same time, an alarm call is initiated, either with Sitex Orbis or some internal function, as prescribed by the customer according to the hazardousness of the work.

The lone worker solution incorporates session alerts too, so lone workers can be required to check in at intervals, and an appropriate response can be taken if they fail.

Crystal Ball’s trio of handset tracking, lone worker and call monitoring services address employers’ increased ‘duty of care’ obligations with tightening regulation and legislation, besides allowing ways to improve efficiencies within workforces.

Mobile Track is available for £6.94 per month, per handset. Monitor is available as a bolt-on to the tracking service for £2.77 per month. They require the user to take a relevant data bundle with their airtime contracts.

Crystal Ball is working with around 40 mobile dealers. It has also signed up with O2 airtime distributor MoCo. Resellers get  an upfront commission for each sale, and an ongoing revenue share of 20 per cent on 12-month deals, 25 per cent on 24-month contracts and 30 per cent on 36-month subscriptions.