Incubatee graduates as Associate company

The Expertron team (ltr) Walter Smuts, Frikkie Thirion (back), Justin Schoeman (front) and Gavin Ehlers. Not in the photo: Johnson Shek and Andrew Cooks. A South African patent has been granted for the underlying Cell-ID technology, with patents pending in the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia.

Expertron Group (Pty) Ltd, the first company to join the Business Incubator at The Innovation Hub in September 2000, recently graduated to Associate tenant status.

During its almost four year participation in incubation programme, Expertron notched up a number of significant achievements, including the design, development and maintenance of the networking infrastructure for The Innovation Hub in its temporary premises on the CSIR site. One of the challenges was ensuring that the architecture made it possible for start-up companies in the incubation programmes to share the networking infrastructure while maintaining required levels of privacy. Expertron met all expectations in this regard, and the architecture has proven to be dynamic and sufficiently scalable to meet all the requirements of the start-up companies.

Products out of the Expertron stable during its time in the Business Incubator have included:

• Cell-ID - identity authentication technology using mobile telephones as authentication tokens to log into computer systems
• Cell-Power - using mobile telephones as point of sale devices for prepaid electricity and airtime
• GSM Gateway - middleware to connect internet-based servers to the GSM network, such as email-to-SMS and SMS-to-email
• Security Hub - a device to make secure voice and data calls over PSTN, GSM and satellite links.

In May 2002, Grintek - a leading empowerment electronics and telecommunications solutions company - acquired a 30 percent share in Expertron. The Innovation Hub was instrumental in introducing Expertron to Grintek.

According to Expertron founding members, Walter Smuts and Gavin Ehlers, "The Innovation Hub has provided us with office infrastructure in an affordable and flexible way and helped us to present a professional image to clients. One of the most important advantages of being part of The Innovation Hub, however, is being in close proximity to other entrepreneurs. Sharing ideas and learning from the experiences of like-minded people who are facing similar challenges has been of great benefit to us."

The Innovation Hub congratulates Expertron on its many achievements and commitment to excellence in all their activities.

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