Not having to worry about spam, flight delays and making school lunches has become a reality with the aid of the latest technological advances by Ciarán Brennan.

MAIL DISTILLER

On the tail of dubious spam

OFFERS FOR cheap Viagra, penis enlargement, porn, money-making scams - most people spend their mornings sorting through the overnight list of dubious and dangerous spam from their e-mail inboxes.

The latest figures, for example, indicate that spam accounted for 76 per cent of all e-mails and that one in 170 mails contained a virus, while one in 265 featured a phishing attack.

Mail Distiller is the largest specialist e-mail filtering organisation on the island of Ireland and it sorts the chaff from the wheat when it comes to e-mails.

"It has been created by guys that had exactly the same frustration, with inboxes filling up with junk, some offensive, some just plain time wasting, and some, trying to scam you," he says.

"Approximately 80 per cent of e-mails are spam. If you look at that, effectively, for every five e-mails you get, only one of them is of any use or interest to you. Our sole objective is to deliver pure, filtered e-mail and it does that," says Ian Jeffers, chief executive of Mail Distiller.

The organisation offers a managed service so you don't need any hardware or software on your computer.

"You simply bounce your e-mail through our servers, we look for the good stuff, send you the good stuff and quarantine the bad stuff," says Jeffers.

"When we say quarantine it, you can still get a report to see what is held out there, to see if any of it is any good." The company's award-winning technology was created and spun off from BT and generates the lowest false positives (only one in 1.5 million) in the market.

"We are very proud of our record in the false positives," says Jeffers.

"We rarely stop something that is important or meant specifically for you.

"We have one of the lowest false positive rates for the industry. Unlike others, you can go in and check and hit the release key and it will send it down to you."

Its global client base ranges across the public and private sectors and includes health care organisations, government bodies and enterprises with as few as two inboxes, to thousands. Mail Distiller aims to become one of the top five managed e-mail filtering companies globally in two years. The market is currently estimated at €191 million.

MANNA

School lunch for delivery

THANKS TO Jamie Oliver, school lunches are all the rage. And one Irish company is getting in on the act. Manna, the Dublin-based sandwich chain, has announced the launch of a revolutionary online service which allows parents and pupils to order lunch for delivery to their school. The new online service offers participating schools the opportunity to rigorously implement healthy eating policy.

"Originally, our service was geared towards corporate customers who had an obligation to provide staff meals, but did not want to invest in expensive canteen facilities," explains Manna's Conor Jones. "Our unique approach uses the web to capture individual orders which are compiled onto one lunch list for fulfilment. Thereafter we make, pack, label and deliver all orders from our central kitchen in Sandyford. In a way, we act as their 'virtual canteen'."

Looking to expand its service, the company hit upon the idea of school lunches. "We are in the business of selling people lunches so we are just looking at new ways of doing that - and schools were one way we identified of doing it," says Jones.

Parents can organise up to two weeks lunches at one internet session, while the service requires minimal administration on the part of schools.

All the lunches arrive properly labelled and sorted by year, so they are easy to distribute within the school. Each family manages their own account with Manna via the internet and any difficulties are handled swiftly and efficiently.

"There is the convenience side of it, because a lot of people are time-starved and cash-rich. It is just another approach to looking after one of those headaches - the school lunch for the kids every day," says Jones.

Holy Child Killiney in Co Dublin was the first school to sign up for the new schools service. The service is web-based and facilitates lunch orders and payments via a dedicated website for each school. Each order is delivered in smart Manna-branded packs, labelled with student's name and year. The menu on offer can be tailored to the requirements of each school's healthy eating policy.

Manna has ambitious expansion plans. "We aim to roll this service out to other schools in the Dublin area before the end of this year. After that, we will look to licence our proprietary systems to service providers in other major urban centres," explains Jones.

SENTIENT SOLUTIONS

Flight time alerts via text

HAVE YOU ever arrived at an airport to pick up somebody but were not really sure about the details of their flight? Dublin-based Sentient Solutions has come up with an answer to your problem. It recently announced the launch of a new flight-tracking service in conjunction with Ryanair. Most flight information is just a snapshot in time. but Sentient's Flight Tracker is different, according to the company's managing director, Derek Corcoran.

Flight Tracker allows anyone interested in a Ryanair departure or arrival to one of 24 UK or seven Irish airports to get an instant flight status and receive SMS updates on progress including actual take-off time, scheduled landing time, actual landing time and delay alerts.

"We are getting a feed of data from Ryanair ground operations and we can see a change in the status of a flight," he says.

"If you call before the flight has taken off, we will tell you when it is scheduled to take off and scheduled to arrive. When the flight has taken off, we see that in the updated data and pass that to you. That may be the same as the previous data if it went on time. If it was delayed slightly, it will show the change. Once it lands, we alert you that it has landed."

The service is an innovative combination of existing technologies, says Corcoran. "We basically bolted a speech recognition front end to an SMS gateway back end and that is the innovative piece," he says. "There are plenty of flight-tracking services, but you got to register to websites or it's done through e-mail or there may be a Wap url, but you have to register and you have to proactively go looking for the information, it doesn't push it to you.

"The service is accessed by dialling a UK/ROI national number from a mobile phone and using speech recognition to identify the Ryanair flight.

"Ideally for us, we would like to have a flight information portal where you can request information on any flight and track it appropriately. That's the end game. We are talking to a number of airlines to extend the service."

CUSTOMERMINDS.COM

Goal markets

WITH THE advent of multiple marketing channels, a major headache for companies has been to judge exactly how successful their marketing campaigns are.

CustomerMinds.com is a new concept in marketing, bringing marketing channels such as e-mail, mobile, direct mail and web together in one easy-to-use system, through one provider. "We enable users to build data lists, manage their data, target customers based on their past behaviour, and visually measure campaign success across multiple channels," says managing director Mike McMahon.

The system tracks all interactions across traditional and online channels, adding individuals' behaviours to their profiles, and in turn, providing the user with detailed reports on individuals' interests, allowing for more relevant and personalised correspondence, he says.

Having raised a total of €1.7 million in funding - around €600,000 of which was funded by Enterprise Ireland - McMahon expects to yield a profit by the second quarter of 2009. The company boasts such clients as Bachelors, IRFU, FAI, Peugeot and the Dublin Film Festival.