Pitney Bowes & the Swedish Post & Telecom Authority Create Mobile App to Help Improve Accessibility for Disabled People Throu...
September 08 2014 - 9:15AM
Business Wire
Pitney Bowes Awarded €200,000 from the Swedish
Government Agency for “Öppen Handel” Mobile App
Pitney Bowes (NYSE:PBI) today announced that it has developed a
mobile application to help disabled people find, create and share
information about accessible restaurants, shops and services with
€200,000 in funding from the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority
(PTS), a government agency that oversees postal and
telecommunications services for the country.
People with disabilities have long been challenged to find
accessible locations that meet their daily needs. The “Öppen
Handel” mobile application makes it quick and easy to find
accessible locations, by utilizing crowdsourced data to locate a
list of disability-friendly stores, restaurants and cafes. Users
can easily upload geotagged photos of specific places and search
for nearby venues on a map to evaluate their accessibility.
The solution ensures continual accessibility improvements by
incorporating improvement suggestions (via a checklist) and
enabling users to report inaccurate data. The application is
compatible with both Android and iOS, and leverages Pitney Bowes’
Spectrum Location Intelligence platform to associate geocoded data
with precise physical locations and provides a rich user
experience.
PTS chose to fund this particular project because of Pitney
Bowes’ proposed crowdsourcing approach and the potential it saw for
the app to dramatically improve the lives of people with
disabilities. The application, called “Öppen Handel” (Open Trade),
was also selected because of the precision of Pitney Bowes’
geocoding technology in its Spectrum platform and its proven
capabilities to integrate and manage large datasets with enterprise
stability and performance.
“PTS has a mandate to provide community services to all of
Sweden’s residents, including people with disabilities,” said
Anders Franzén, Senior Innovation Officer, PTS. “Governments around
the world are looking to leverage crowdsourcing and mobile
applications to improve the lives of their citizens. Given our
desire to improve services for the disabled, we looked to Pitney
Bowes to create a mobile app that could combine location
information with collaboration and sharing capabilities.”
“Since we first created the basic platform behind Öppen Handel,
PTS has shown interest in using the underlying technologies to
integrate data from other sources and expand the usefulness of the
app,” added Kyrre Garseth, CES Sales Director, Continental Europe,
Pitney Bowes Software. “One interesting potential example is for
Swedish banks, where many rural bank branches have been closed.
There are still places outside of urban areas that handle banking
transactions, such as grocery stores, but they can be difficult to
find. Öppen Handel makes it possible to help people find where they
can bank or park. PTS is truly a forward-looking government agency
and we are delighted to have the chance to work with them to
develop further applications like these.”
The latest version of the mobile app includes capabilities such
as social media sharing, the ability to show and hide categories of
places, integration with cloud services to store photos and faster
searches for places and map locations.
To download the app on Google Play, please visit:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pb.oppenhandel
To download the app from iTunes (AppStore), please visit:
https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/oppen-handel/id669909043
Connect with Pitney Bowes on LinkedIn.
About Pitney Bowes
Pitney Bowes provides technology solutions for small, mid-size
and large firms that help them connect with customers to build
loyalty and grow revenue. Many of the company’s solutions are
delivered on open platforms to best organize, analyze and apply
both public and proprietary data to two-way customer
communications. Pitney Bowes includes direct mail, transactional
mail and call center communications in its solution mix along with
digital channel messaging for the Web, email and mobile
applications. Pitney Bowes: Every connection is a new opportunity™.
www.pb.com.
About the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority
http://www.pts.se/en-GB/ http://www.pts.se/innovation
Keywords: Pitney Bowes, Post and Telecom Authority, PTS,
Sweden, Innovation, Location Intelligence, Geocoding, Data
Management, Software, Disabled, Accessibility, Spectrum, Öppen
Handel, Mobile App
Pitney BowesHina Sharma, +44 (0) 333 999
6381Hina.Sharma@pb.com
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