The days of walking around like a wine steward with a birding field guide or two perched in your hand are over. A South African company is bringing birding e-guides to ornithologists the world over, and has also created many more lifestyle and commercial products. SOUTH AFRICANS have been responsible for more high-tech innovation than we realise, including technology to accurately forecast floods, called "nowcasting", the low-earth-orbiting satellite, Sunsat, RFID, set-top boxes which decode digital broadcast signals, cellphone banking, and prepaid electricity and water meters. Now, one of the latest local contributions to innovation is bringing technology to the world of ornithology.

Any birder who has ever trekked around with several heavy guide books and a weighty pair of binoculars will know the value of an electronic field guide, or two or three, that could be displayed on a PDA or smartphone. This one piece of kit can combine half of what you need for a bird-watching trip: your phone, GPS, e-mail, Internet, digital camera, and photo album, among others.

PDA Solutions, a Johannesburg-based mobility application development company, has slowly but surely been cornering the global birding and wildlife electronic field guide market for handheld devices.

Partners Otto Werdm ller Von Elgg and Rob Hannaford launched their first electronic birding guide, Sasol eBirds, in 2002. Werdm ller, who has always had an interest in birding and wildlife, describes how he once had the idea of taking a birdcall disc and guide book to Hannaford, his colleague of nearly 20 years, to digitise and install them on his PDA. The project turned out so well that they realised that they had a product on their hands with commercial potential.

Sasol jumped at the chance to sponsor the company`s first product, which, says Werdm ller, turned out to be a world first for a PDA-based e-guide, incorporating images, birdcalls, text information and distribution maps, and a search facility to help identify birds while out in the field.

The Sasol eBirds guide met with much success, and other e-guides soon followed: eWildlife, Mammal eGuide, eTrees, eSnakes, eTracks, eInsects, and later eMaps and the Collins eGuide.

It has also just completed two other lifestyle products, the John Platters Wine eGuide and the Eat Out eGuide.

THE EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE WORM

During this time, the partners also decided to strike the overseas market while the iron was hot. They approached the UK`s Harper Collins, which publishes the bestseller Collins Birds of Britain and Europe, and were given permission to turn it into an e-guide. The Collins Bird eGuide was launched at the British Bird-watching Fair last August, and Werdm ller and Hannaford have since met with Collins to discuss further e-guides.

In what must be yet another coup for the company, late last month saw it sign an agreement with US author David Sibley for the production of a single e-guide to his three best-selling field guides to the birds of North America, following nearly three years of negotiations. "It is estimated that the US has 20 to 30 million people who are more than casually interested in birds, compared with SA`s 8 000 registered birding people," points out Werdm ller.

While PDA Solutions` foreign earn-ings currently constitute about 50% of the total, he expects the US e-guide, which is to be launched in about six months, to push this up to 95% in the future.

"We`re also doing a book for Australia, which means that our products have covered the range of Africa, Europe and the UK, North America and Australia," he adds.

"We have designed all our field guides to install automatically upon insertion of a secure digital memory card, without the need for a PC and without using any of the mobile device`s internal memory for storage," explains Hannaford. The software will run on any PDA or smartphone with Microsoft Pocket PC 2003 or Windows Mobile 5 OS.

While the products are available directly through the company, they are also sold at Exclusive Books and Incredible Connection branches. Standard packages retail for R500, while the software is also available for R275 without the SD card.

FROM LIFESTYLE TO COMMERCIAL

PDA Solutions is also involved in the development of commercial mobile applications. It has various applications for the taking of fast-moving consumer goods orders in the field, which then automatically generate picking and returns slips. The company recently completed the development of a Web- and RFID-based event management product known as Digital Excursion, for softdrink giant Coca Cola in SA, which allows its event co-ordinators to capture and view real-time data on attendees to an event, including their ID, travel ticket, and attendance data.

Although the company is focused on software development, with most of its 15-man staff made of electronics engineers, and the company has just become a licensed Microsoft service provider, there is also a hardware element to the business, labelled Darro Electronics, which maintains and services mobile devices, including HP and Acer products.

Hannaford, who recently returned from the Microsoft Mobility Developers Conference in Las Vegas, remarks on the fact that there were a mere six South Africans in attendance. "Yet, a recent Forrester survey determined that between 50% and 60% of IT spend in companies in the future will be dedicated to workforce mobility. We`ve got very good developers in South Africa, but they haven`t exploited the mobility aspect of software at all," he maintains.