Ooredoo has announced a new partnership with Portuguese mobile application development company iMobileMagic at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
The ‘Ooredoo Family Safety’ service based on iMobileMagic’s PhoneNear cloud platform will enable people in Qatar to track, alert and communicate with their loved ones in real-time over smartphones, tablets or computers.
This new personal safety service will be the first-of-its-kind in Qatar, enabling Ooredoo customers to locate and know where their family members are at all times.
iMobileMagic, which creates innovative products dedicated to family and child safety, has customised PhoneNear specifically to cater for the needs of parents and families in the country, based on research provided by Ooredoo.
Ooredoo’s service has been designed to provide peace of mind for customers with small children, vulnerable people in their care, or elderly relatives. The service provides a location feed direct to mobile devices, and is also equipped with a panic button feature, so that the child or dependent can alert their whole family immediately if there is a problem.
“Ooredoo is striving to introduce a range of ‘Smart Services’ for Qatar, and this family-focused service fulfils an important need for the whole community,” said Waleed al-Sayed, chief operating officer, Ooredoo Qatar.
“We believe in using mobile technology to enhance people’s digital lifestyles, and we know that safety and security are key issues for every parent,” he explained.
Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad bin Nasser al-Thani, chief new business officer, recalled that Ooredoo has been working with iMobileMagic for almost a year, since first sitting with them at Mobile World Congress 2014.
“We recognised that this was a solution that would appeal to families across Qatar, and have strived to ensure that this new service fully meets the needs of Ooredoo customers,” he observed.
Pointing out that the theme of this year’s GSMA Mobile World Congress is ‘The Edge of Innovation’, Marco Leal, CEO, iMobileMagic, said the Ooredoo Family Safety service will demonstrate how mobile technology can improve families’ lives.
“Our mission is to deliver high quality mobile experiences through consumer focus, and this new service from Ooredoo will offer new levels of security and peace-of-mind in Qatar.”
Ooredoo Family Safety will be the only service in Qatar that offers all its features in one easy-to-use product. Customers will be able to visit a dedicated website and connect their family phones to a shared platform.
Features include real-time location and pre-set safety areas, so that people with young children can define safe spaces such as their home, school, and grandparent’s house. If a child moves outside of the safe spaces, the service triggers an alert to the parents’ phones. The service will also enable family members to send help requests through the panic button, which will deliver the message to all family members connected to Ooredoo Family Safety.
Additional safety features include the facility to protect smartphones connected to the service in case they are lost or stolen. The feature will allow customers to remotely ring their devices, lock them with a custom message, and delete all information on the phone.
To activate and manage their accounts, Ooredoo will provide a dedicated website and smartphone application for iPhone, Android and Windows phones. The application, together with the service’s website, will offer a complete family location and protection solution. To ensure personal security and privacy is available at all times, the phones can only be part of the service with the permission of each individual owner.
 lOoredoo and Telefonica, a leading Spanish telecommunications provider in terms of market capitalisation and number of customers, have announced the signing of a strategic partnership agreement that will allow Ooredoo to optimise its affiliates purchasing costs in selected types of network and customer equipment.
Under the terms of the agreement, Ooredoo will become part of Telefonica’s partners programme, which enables telecommunications operators to work together and to benefit from Telefonica’s scale and knowledge, Ooredoo said in a press release issued yesterday.
The two companies agreed to work together to capture synergies in procurement, the main area of co-operation. Both groups will focus on leveraging the economies of scale and the broad experience in centralised procurement of Telefonica. They will work towards coordinating selected purchases “end to end”, including technical alignment of specifications, selection of vendors and synchronised negotiations.  
Ooredoo and Telefonica will also engage in other business areas under the scope of the partners programme such as alignment in key technology projects, common approach to multinational clients for M2M, managed mobility and data services, staff development and training programmes, and international wholesale.
The partnership is expected to reinforce the positions of both groups in the areas agreed and further accelerate Ooredoo consolidation as an international group by sharing Telefonica’s proven experience on cross-country co-ordination and synergies generation.