Netgen Custom Software – South Africa

From Concept To Code

Netgen Releases Mealfor2.mobi

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Netgen has recently released the Mealfor2 Mobile site developed on behalf of The Unlimited World. The premium Mobile site has been developed using the latest in Mobile technology and works on all internet capable phones and tablets. The site has been specifically designed to ensure that people on the move can access retaurant information and vouchers at any time. This ensures maximum convenience and also vouchers can be downloaded and verified instantly online.
By using special libraries developed for mobile Netgen was able to deliver the project ahead of schedule as well as provide a lower rate for multiple devices than just writing a single application. The Technologies are compatible with Android, IOS, Windows, Nokia and Blackberry. Each phone that run the application has unique abilities which are tapped into with the software. The approach of writing a web/wap based system has a tremendous cost advantage and also allows updates to the software to be made centrally and across all handets.

Technology employed

The system was developed using .net Framework 4 with C# and included the 51 Degrees suite of software. This allowed Netgen to use the latest WURFL information to look up phone information and ensure that images and page sizes are properly sized and displayed on all screen sizes and device types. The databases are SQL databases and web services to move data fast and efficiently between the servers and handsets.


System Design

The system has been designed to be simple and quick and allows users to take a step by step introduction through the system. This methodology used by Netgen has worked well in web sites and mobile alike and takes some of the hesitation away from users in the early phase. Once the user is logged in the system validates the information against the mast databases and allows the users to get vouchers online to provide restaurant discounts. The Vouchers are produced and validated real-time and the restaurant is also notified of the voucher requested by email and SMS.

Netgen is excited to be producing software for The Unlimited Group and as early adopters of the new technology they are able to offer their clients advanced features not yet available from other companies.

For more information on Mobile programming contact Netgen Sales

Netgen Mobile POS system

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The Provide-A-Voucher POS (Point of Sale) system and has now been expanded with the addition of a mobile terminal solution. The company has rolled out about 400 terminals since November 2011 and is dispensing airtime, electricity and various other electronic vouchers. The existing system was developed by Netgen over the last 6 years and the mobile solution is added to the current stable of software and compliments the touchscreen Windows POS system and the web based back-end and real-time deposit system.

The POS terminal connects via the GSM network and communicates its requests and transactions to the central server at Netgen. The server verifies the terminal identity as well as issues stock and transactions for the terminal. Once the stock is validated it prints automatically on the terminal. The back-end system maintains an exact audit trail of each transaction so in the event of the unit being disabled for any reason a full sales and stock summary is maintained on the server. The unit has quick function keys for easy selection of popular stock. The terminal software is also updated by the OTA (Over the air) Software easily and quickly. Bar coded slips also easily assist retail stores in selling the downloaded voucher and allow cross platform selling.

Netgen believes that as the price of these terminals drops lower we will see more and more applications open up and be developed by us. Netgen will also be releasing a new Internet Based Browser Point of Sale system early in 2012.

The advent of HTML5 has allowed us to develop a offline/online POS application that runs in a browser. We will be posting more information on this and release details shortly.

For more information on mobile or POS systems contact Grant.

Netgen Switches Critical Services

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Netgen has over the last few months looked at technologies to further assist clients with redundancy and hosting across the networks and servers we maintain and support for our clients. A number of these services have been migrated to our new cloud servers and are running very well and we have been more than surprised with the speed increases over the last 2-3 months.

In addition to the cloud services we have been introducing we have also moved some of our infrastructure from Johannesburg to Cape Town Hosting. We had a few outages that affected only the Johannesburg network this year so this has been a good move for clients and systems. The dual hosting centres allow Netgen to quickly move systems and also in the case of critical applications to have a mirror running on these servers.

If you believe you need a replicated solution for high availability we have just that for you. We have also increased all client contracts, at no additional cost to have 200% more bandwidth than originally contracted for the same price. The decrease in the bandwidth cost has allowed us to pass this additional bandwidth on directly.

Cloud computing allows us to easily scale systems that are in their early stages and as the requirements increase and change we are able within a few hours to increase memory disk and processor capacity of these servers. Also due to the nature of cloud servers we are able to switch machines immediately and seamlessly on the systems without any interruption of service. We have a host of options available with our cloud services starting at dual core servers expanded to sixteen core servers with 16TB SAN and 64 GB of memory. As these technologies grow we are also seeing price reductions in the cloud environment.

Remember all Netgen hosted servers – hosting centre or cloud services – are fully backed-up and maintained by Netgen 24/7. These servers are all monitored by external and internal agents and monitor systems. We look forward to discussing any new requirements with clients on any of these topics above and demonstrating these services.