October 25, 2022
The i-Net company, which developed an application that provides alerts to drivers and pedestrians, announced a collaboration with Pango that will introduce the application to millions of users. “After we prove its effectiveness in Israel, we can go out into the world.” [האזינו לריאיון עם סמנכ”ל התפעול]
The Eye-Net Mobile company from Mans-Ziona has signed a cooperation agreement with the Pango company, under which the Eye-Net road safety application will be integrated as a built-in add-on within the popular parking and mobility application. Eye-Net’s application, Eye-Net Protect, which is based on cellular V2X communication, provides drivers as well as pedestrians and cyclists with real-time alerts, via smartphone, about the risk of a collision and allows them to avoid an accident.
Pango has approximately 3 million users in Israel and i-net believes that the cooperation will allow it to reach a critical mass of users, which will prove the effectiveness of the solution in preventing road accidents in various scenarios, especially when the danger of injury is outside the driver’s field of vision or the sensing system, such as an outbreak of a person to the road. The application is expected to be available in the Pango app in the coming months, and Pango users will be notified.
As part of the agreement, Pango will also act as a distributor of i-Net in Israel and will lead the business development efforts in the Israeli market. Also, Pango was given an option to purchase 2.22% of the issued share capital of i-Net according to a company value of 40 million dollars.
The smartphone as a safety measure on the road
I-Net was established three years ago as a project within Foresight, which develops sensing and warning solutions for autonomous vehicles. In May 2018, it became an independent company owned by Foresight.
The i-net application provides a real-time alert to every driver and every other smartphone user, whether it’s another driver, pedestrian or cyclist, about the risk of a collision between them. It is based on receiving GPS samples from the end devices. Every smartphone is actually used as a processing unit that calculates the probability at every moment, and only if there is a probability of an accident – an alert is generated. To date, the company has reported several pilots in Japan and India. In July 2019, i-net carried out a pilot in Israel, in cooperation with an Israeli cellular company.
In a recorded interview with Techtime, I-Net’s Chief Operating Officer, Dror Elbaz, explained that the cooperation with a common application like Pango will help the company achieve a wide spread among users in Israel. “For I-Net to be effective, a critical mass is needed. Critical mass does not require hundreds of millions of users, but a density of users. Based on this understanding, our solution was built as a software add-on, SDK, which can be connected to applications with an existing user base. So to cover most of the world we need to connect to 10-15 top apps. I-Net is looking to connect to any third-party application that is based on location services.”
Elbaz applies this to achieving herd immunity through vaccination. “We are trying to imitate the Pfizer vaccine model in Israel. We worked to find a strategic partner in Israel to replicate Pfizer’s effectiveness model. The characteristics are similar: a closed territory, a high adoption rate of smartphones, population density, and the ability to introduce millions of users through a single integration. The collaboration with Pango will help achieve a critical mass to prove the product’s effectiveness. After we prove the effectiveness of the solution here in Israel, we can take it out into the world.”
According to Elbaz, the success of the collaboration with Pango will be proof of feasibility for the V2X industry as a whole. “Although safety technologies have been entering vehicles in recent years, the number of road accidents is only increasing. This is a defining landmark for breaking the paradigm of how to work to prevent road accidents. V2X solutions must be part of the protection envelope against road accidents.”
Posted in the categories: Automotive, IOT, news, tablet and smartphone, autonomous vehicle
Posted in tags: V2X, Ai-Net, Dror Elbaz, Pango
