DHL has a problem. Over the last few years, it has noticed an increasing amount of its parcels going missing in its South American markets. A parcel will go undelivered. And when the driver is asked why, he casually replies that he has been the victim of an armed robbery.
Now maybe these trucks are getting targeted by gun-wielding gangs – some of these districts are quite violent. But DHL bosses suspect that their driver’s friends and families are taking regular delivery of a large number of cardboard boxes. The trouble is that DHL has had no way of proving it.
But now, thanks to advancing technology, AIM-listed penny share Servision (SEV) reckons that it can solve this problem. ‘Technology’ does not quite have the same power to thrill penny share investors as it did ten years ago, but it is still the basis of many exciting young businesses. Today I want to tell you about two of them.
One is Motive Television (MTV), which could radically change the way TV is transmitted to your home – a potentially great penny share.
But first let me continue with Servision, a company facing a remarkable series of opportunities in the security sector.
“Put that down – we are watching you!”
What Servision has come up with is a way of transmitting live streamed video over cellular networks. And this has a serious range of applications in security.
Take DHL. Servision’s solution is to fit tiny cameras to the van, which do more than just record events for later viewing. They actually transmit live images to a remote monitor. And it has some clever extras. For example, rather than running continuously the cameras can be prompted to run by a specific trigger. If somebody drives through a red light, the camera can switch on instantly, recording the offending driver.
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Servision is also working with providers of cash dispensing ATMs. As soon as the ATM vibrates as perhaps somebody tries to rip it out of the wall, a tiny camera lodged inside the ATM starts to run. And an audio channel can be attached so that the ATM-buster suddenly hears a voice saying ‘We are watching you!’ When I spoke to Servision’s chairman and chief executive Gideon Tahan, he made the obvious point that people tend not to commit crime if they know they are being observed.
Servision has fitted its digital video cameras onto buses, police cars and trucks, but a big hope for the future is the home. If you are about to go on holiday you might like the idea of being able to see what is going on inside your home, especially as the direction of the cameras can be guided via your mobile handset, which also will display the pictures.
Mobile phone operators are keen to offer this as an additional service and T-Mobile, Verizon and Orange are already testing the system. Servision is not alone in this field, but its claims to have superior technology are to some extent validated by recent contract wins. After six years on AIM has just reported its first profit. This could be a hugely rewarding story – and I’ll be following the progress of this company very closely over the next few months.
Another great penny share I’ll be following is Motiv Television.
How ‘the Ryanair of pay TV’ could treble your money
When I met Mick Pilsworth, chairman of Motive Television, in the suitably media-land surroundings of Soho’s Groucho Club, he told me how a chance encounter with American TV entrepreneur Leonard Fertig had changed his life.
As a result Motive was able to give up the unequal struggle of making television programmes for cash-strapped broadcasters, and invest instead in the development of Fertig’s software platform, BesTV.
Developed in Barcelona, and already rolled out in Spain and Italy, BesTV overcomes a competitive weakness of traditional broadcasters who have to send programmes from the TV station to the home via the TV aerial.
Unlike transmission via cable or satellite, this does not offer a ‘return path’. So viewers cannot call up programmes that they wish to watch at the time they wish to watch them. The way that BesTV works is to ‘push’ programmes via the TV aerial into a set-top box.
The selected programs – probably films – are regularly refreshed and can be viewed at any time. The viewer simply has to pay via a text message or by inserting a card into the box, with BesTV receiving fees from the manufacturers of the set-top boxes as well as from the broadcasters.
Describing this as ‘the Ryanair of pay TV’ Pilsworth told me that this is suitable for the many countries that do not have transmission networks with a return path, including such giants as China, Russia and Brazil. I understand that Motive has a promising list of potential customers and that Pilsworth believes that it could sell the software to almost one hundred broadcasters over the next five years. A tentative forecast from Equity Development suggests that Motive could make earnings per share of 0.08 pence for 2011. If it does so the shares could easily hit the heady heights of one penny.
• This article was first published in Tom Bulford’s twice-weekly small-cap investment email
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