​EyeVi, a start-up unit within Reach-U has been selected to showcase its services and technology during the 6th EU-Africa Business Forum, on 27 November in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. This unique opportunity enables to showcase EyeVi services and technology to investors and decision makers during a Startup Fair and attend a number of side events dedicated to entrepreneurship, digital economy, energy and agriculture.
 
Ülo Säre, CEO of Reach-U commented: “We are excited to present EyeVi at such an important event. EyeVi technology, offering unique digital GIS referenced and measurable spatial data, opens up completely new possibilities to a broad spectrum of professionals, ranging from road engineers to country and county governments to urban planners and business revenue collection. Africa is important market for us. The response that we have encountered for EyeVi services shows that there is a need for accurate, verifiable and virtually available spatial data."

On October 11, Reach-U launched its first pilot project of EyeVi technology on African continent. Altogether about 50 km of streets around Jogoo Road in Nairobi were captured for a further digitalization.

The pilot was implemented together with ITEC Engineering Ltd., a leading regional consultancy firm specialized in transportation engineering planning, design and management in Kenya.

This is a first step in Reach-U and ITEC Engineering cooperation in making EyeVi permanently available on Kenyan market next year.

The digitalised high-quality images create road attribute and road objects’ inventory and provide stakeholders a measurable understanding of the environment. This will further increase the quality of modern infrastructure planning and execution in the area.
 

​On October 4, Reach-U Business Development Director, Rait Raal and Estonian Honorary Consul in Kenya, H. E. Kadri Humal-Ayal had an honor to meet Mombasa Governor, Honourable Ali Hassan Joho and his team in Kenya. The meeting was held to discuss mutual cooperation possibilities and solutions for transforming Mombasa into a Smart City – a project for creating innovative urban environment. City planning, traffic management, smart street lighting and tourism were the main discussion areas.
 
It was agreed that during October 16-20, Reach-U will carry out a pilot project by mapping, collecting and digitalizing the data from Mombasa streets with its innovative EyeVi technology. EyeVi combines up-to-date 360° panoramic images, LIDAR scanning data and integrates city’s existing spatial database into 3D city environment. During the pilot in Mombasa, information regarding road conditions, businesses and advertisement spaces in the city are collected in order to identify companies that have not paid their annual business license or advertisement space fees. As a result, the gathered data will enable more effective governance and has a direct impact to County’s revenue.
 
Ülo Säre, CEO of Reach-U commented: „We are thankful for the opportunity to work together with Mombasa County. During the time Reach-U has operated in Africa, Mombasa County has shown the most interest for innovative technologies that improve the services and overall wellbeing in the county for citizens and visitors. As the members of ICT Cluster and Smart City Lab Cluster, we are able to help Mombasa County benefit from the solutions developed by Reach-U and other companies in Estonia. I would like to thank the ICT Cluster and Smart City Lab Cluster for the continuous support and help in this matter.“
 
EyeVi is a web-based application developed by Reach-U that allows its users to observe city environment, perform measurements, collect data and share information without leaving the office. There has been a strong interest for EyeVi technology in Kenya and numerous possible usages for creating more efficient city governance have been already noted.

Until today Reach-U has been a brand of Regio Ltd. With our brand name we are already active in 34 countries globally and we were using our legal name only in Estonia. Now we have decided to change our legal business name to Reach-U Ltd. All our activities and commitments are continuing as previously.
 
We kindly ask our partners and clients to make the relevant changes in their records.
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The uniqueness of Reach-U is the ability to deliver custom made solutions by combining software together with the data that is fit for the purpose. With more than 20 years of experience we have gathered skills in location based solutions, GIS and cartography.
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We are creating world-leading solutions for different industries like energy, forestry, security, smart cities, tourism and transport. Serving more than 343 million subscribers of 25 operators globally makes Reach-U one of the largest provider of LBS to mobile operators. 

In addition, this Sunday we will celebrate our 25th birthday!

​The Christmas Party for the children of our employees has always been important. In addition to the mandatory visit of the Santa Claus with the sack of presents, we have always had a children’s play.
For the second year in a row our employees have acted in the play.

Why?

We decided that this would be a perfect training for our sales persons – to be at the stage in front of the most critical audience. To rehearse how you will act even when you know your lines by heart, but someone from the audience interrupts. Or how to speak up loud enough for everybody to hear you and understand what you are saying. How to control and show your emotions, etc.
It was a great team event during which we learned how talented people are working in Reach-U.
 
As the last year’s play was very well received by both the children and the parents, we decided to repeat it this year. In addition to sales persons, this year we also invited project managers, analysts and support people to join.
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With confidence we can say that this year’s play „Timbu-Limbu, Her Courtiers and Snow-millers“ was a huge success. Here are some pictures to show how much fun a team event can be.

Finally the anticipated event is here – Smart City Expo World Congress. Why are we so excited? Well because our project done in Chile was chosen from 279 other projects to be discussed on stage at this huge event. 

One of the main objectives of the project was to show Transport Ministry of Chile our capabilities in smart cities and transport planning. You can read more about it from our last blog post HERE.

The session took place today and Pedro Vidal, the Undersecretary of Transport for the Government of Chile was on stage and introduced what benefits they received from our cooperation. The following video gives a brief overview of the project done together with the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, Entel and Ericsson:

Reach-U origins from Tartu and we are proud that we have helped our hometown to become a smarter one by using our solutions.

When Tartu officials were planning a visit their twin city Tampere in Finland to exchange ​knowledge on Smart Cities, we were also invited. Our CEO Ülo Säre gladly joined the delegation.
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As these two are twin cities, we decided to introduce to Tampere the solutions that are already familiar to Tartu. 

If I would be writing this as a news article, I would start off with explaining the heading. But it isn’t. But don’t worry, I promise to get to it. Eventually.

But first. Reach-U has had the ISO 9001:2008 quality process certificate for software development since 2006 and we pay great attention to our quality of work. Even though I find it to be very important, there are more things that I appreciate in our projects.
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In my subjective opinion successful projects are made of different things. Of course being in budget and deadline is important. But also it is good to have a clear purpose. That the work that is done by team members is effective. To have excellent communication with partners and customers. That the solution helps our customers and it will be useful for people. 

​Speaking of successful projects.

It seems silly to be excited about a management report, but I have a confession to make - I really do like the idea and outcome of ours.

For sure I would not be so enthusiastic if it was a typical report, containing 1-2 pages of text in Calibri, size 11. Our management reports combine the best of Reach-U and Regio - skills of the software team and the cartographs, rendering all information into the form of maps. 

Each year we have an internal contest for choosing the theme that addresses the previous year the best. This year we chose it to be a physical map and I am thrilled to let you know that the new report is ready!