New ideas welcome at business plan writing competition - winner

THE contestants who expect to vie for the THiNK BiG business plan writing competition should treat the opportunity to expose prospective business ideas in order to attract potential investors rather than writing just to compete and win.

This is the advice from the leader of last year's winning team Rafiqun WDSI.

Haswandi Hj Sahari, operations manager of the iCentre start-up which bagged first prize in the competition for its IP-based wireless mesh solution, 'BruMesh' said that the major contributors towards victory in the general ICT category were his team members those brought in their experience and skills.

But more importantly "strong teamwork together with contribution by each members helped us win," said Haswandi, whose brainchild is currently being deployed in regional cities such as Davao in the Philippines; Surabaya and Bandung in Indonesia; and Bangkok in Thailand.

BruMesh is essentially a combination of hardware (a router) and software that allows users to extend the coverage of private and public Wi-Fi hotspots and bring them into home or the workplace.

"It is a complete end-to-end solution for high coverage with low cost deployment and maintenance.

One of the key features of BruMesh that offers to the average user is true plug-and-play functionality with zero-configuration requirements," said Haswandi.

"That is why BruMesh concept is working because we are using several key important features.

One of them is the zero-configuration feature.

Another one is the upgrading facility, which enables the developers at Rafiqun to push latest firmware and software updates to users efficiently," he said.

Service providers will also be benefited from such a design as it would help them to reduce operation expenses and "tremendously lower ownership costs".

"Not only that, the service providers can expand their hotspot coverage more efficiently," he said.

The device automatically receives the latest configuration file and associates it with other nodes within the closed network, thereby expanding coverage and network capacity for the user and other nearby network users to be connected.

Its strongest feature is the ability of the system to self-configure and manage the system remotely.

This will ensure the running costs to be kept at lower level while maintaining the high standard of user experience, which sometimes, is higher than some traditional methods, Haswandi said.

Earlier in July, the start-up entered a collaboration with global security group G4S Security Services to develop an enhanced version of BruMesh and combined the technology with G4S' CCTV system.

Rafiqun will be developing a second version of its 100 per cent plug-and-play wireless routers to go with G4S' cameras and the new system will lower the costs and long distance installations.

It will also feature Virtual Private Network capabilities, an important cyber-security feature, as well as a 3G sim card slot.

The Brunei Times