Kiwip decreases latency of smart wearables for children

Nearly all parents have experienced at least one incident where they’ve lost track of a child. Whether it’s in a crowded shopping mall, an amusement park, on a beach, or at a playground - children tend to wander off. This is especially true for parents of children with very curious minds, parents of special needs children with autism or other cognitive variances, or children who need to get themselves to and from school. After the founder of Kiwip lost track of his child inside Disneyland Paris, he began looking at the question of how to build a child-friendly smart wearable. He reasoned that giving children a trackable smartphone wasn’t a viable solution, because children tend to misplace things, so he decided that a smart watch would be ideal. 

Kiwip’s child smartwatch had many design requirements. Just to name a few: it had to leverage reliable voice communications between the parent and child, offer location reporting and geofencing, ensure the ability to define points along a path, and generate alerts when the wearable passes those points. Their solution allows two-way voice communication so that a parent can use a phone to call the child through the watch.

For Kiwip to create the product they dreamed of, they needed an unparalleled connectivity platform that could handle the vast needs of a cellular connected wearable. The wearable had to work in several countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, without Kiwip needing to reconfigure the SIM for each device for each country. Furthermore, they required very low latency so that the quality of two-way voice was not disrupted by delays in traffic. This is where a multi-IMSI and a Distributed IoT Mobile Core approach matters most. With Multi-IMSI, connected devices no longer have to be reconfigured as they traverse network boundaries from one operator to the next. That multi-IMSI functionality can only be achieved by leveraging a Distributed IoT Mobile Core. As a result, Kiwip was able to achieve better device performance - and better customer experience - while minimizing configuration challenges when the wearables are moved across country borders. Without a multi-IMSI approach, Kiwip faced challenges to scale and profitize their business due to the cost of operations. Most importantly, the experience of using their product would suffer and likely result in poor customer satisfaction.

To meet these goals and needs, Kiwip leveraged Twilio’s Super SIM, supported by Twilio’s Distributed IoT Mobile Core. Twilio provided Kiwip with a well-supported and inexpensive global data connectivity solution with a multi-IMSI approach. This solution allowed Kiwip to scale as they moved from concept to deployment and global deployment. With one SIM that worked anywhere in the world, Kiwip didn’t incur massive roaming charges when operating outside the family’s home country. As a result, they are able to adjust the connectivity configuration of in-use devices, without human support. Best of all, their customers had a better experience with reduced latency for two-way voice calling.

Telemax scales international fleet tracking solution

Vehicle telematics enable fleet managers to monitor vehicle safety and remotely diagnose problems, creating efficiencies in operation and reducing costs. Fleet managers want telematics, but in a highly competitive market they cannot afford to be debugging and resolving telecommunications issues in the telematics system – the solution must be “plug and play”, highly reliable, and capable of working in all locations where cellular data connectivity is available. In short; a good telematics solution solves problems, and does not create different problems. Telemax, a provider of vehicle telematics systems for car rental and car-share companies in the Pacific region, leveraged Twilio’s mobile core and Super SIM to enhance the value and efficiency of their solution.

Telemax wanted to remove the complexity of cellular connectivity for their rental car and care-sharing customers. Consequently, Telemax found themselves in uncharted territories as they navigated the cellular world. From pre-launch to fleet management, they needed to ensure they could adequately troubleshoot connectivity issues. They also needed to ensure connectivity – with optimal performance – for vehicles as they crossed country lines.

Twilio’s IoT-focused mobile core provides Telemax visibility into the data usage of each deployed device, enabling them to track costs and predict financial impacts. It also helps Telemax understand how their devices are performing, and to troubleshoot issues quickly. This includes everything from including real-time analysis and tools that easily scale to large numbers of vehicles in geographically separate regions, to the analysis of the edge-toedge behavior of individual devices. Finally, Telemax can easily manage situations where customer assets are stolen or hacked. In fact, this happened to Telemax at the start of the pandemic. A vehicle was stolen while it was not activated on the network. Thanks to the flexibility and visibility of Twilio’s Distributed IoT Mobile Core, Telemax was able to locate and recover the stolen vehicle. Overall, their new business model was a massive hit with customers – and it wasn’t long before Telemax earned almost 50 percent market share of the rental car and car-sharing market in the Pacific region.