“QR code” transactional systems and touch-based holographic interfaces. Inter-Africa Telecoms has a team of only half a dozen people, but the SA start-up clearly has big — and rather geeky — plans.

Until now, the company’s core focus has been providing prepaid solutions such as point-of-sale terminals and bulk printing solutions in countries like Botswana, Angola and Nigeria.

Now it’s branching out into new business areas. One of the most interesting is a plan to sell “holographic light projection” technology into places like fast-food outlets. The technology turns any surface into a touch screen by means of projecting an interface onto it (see image).

“We’re the sole distributors in SA and Nigeria for Light Touch, which is a holographic projector designed and manufactured by Blue Light Optics,” says Inter-Africa Telecoms co-CEO Francois Schwartz. “We’re talking to a major fast-food chain about using it for express ordering or self-service applications.”

LightTouch_1 — Click image for larger version

They’re also talking about building the devices into tables in the outlets. “The units have Wi-Fi, so you could integrate Internet-based services like buying movie tickets or similar.”

The small projectors offer up full-colour, high-definition images. The images they project are about the same size as the screen of a 10-inch tablet computer.

Meanwhile, the company is also launching what it calls “business in a box”, which is essentially a mobile phone and a thermal printer that allows anyone to become a reseller of prepaid services, from airtime to electricity.

“Sellers can print vouchers, display them on-screen or SMS them to the end user,” says Schwartz. He says the whole package will cost no more than R500, or even less if the reseller already has a Java-enabled handset and only needs the printer.

Schwartz says Inter-Africa Telecoms is working to take the product to low-end devices via unstructured supplementary service data so that it can work on just about any handset. He says resellers will keep between 2% and 5% of the value of the prepaid vouchers they sell. The “business in a box” will be launched at the end of November in SA.

Also on the radar is a QR code transactional systems project and one that offers prepaid fuel solutions, but Schwartz says he’ll only be able to talk about these later in the year. QR codes, or quick response codes, are similar to barcodes and are increasingly used by smartphone users to access information on the go. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral