Digital Concierge is one of the key programmes in IDA's 10-year Intelligent Nation 2015 Masterplan to help transform the Tourism, Hospitality & Retail sector.

Businesses and mobile service providers can now reduce their time-to-market by leveraging a whole range of common enablers – from mobile site creation and ticketing to taxi booking and remote payment – to develop rich and innovative mobile services. This has been made possible through the Digital Concierge Call-for-Collaboration (CFC) which was awarded to eight companies by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore in April 2010.

The Digital Concierge (DC) programme aims to catalyse the growth of the mobile services ecosystem and encourage the development of transactional and innovative mobile services in Singapore, in particular location-based and mobile commerce services.

The development of common enablers is one of three prongs of the programme, which is to accelerate the development of innovative, informational, transactional, location-based and mobile-commerce services by IT solution providers, by making available key mobile enabling functionalities such as location positioning, remote payment, ticketing and fulfilment.

The other two prongs are focused on encouraging more pervasive use of the mobile channel by businesses, starting with those in the retail, and food and beverage sectors; and encouraging greater consumer adoption and usage of mobile services by making available a wide variety of richer and personalised mobile services.

The eight companies which were awarded the Digital Concierge CFC were: GTW Holdings, Maven Lab, MobiQuest, PayPal, Smoov, SISTIC.com, SPH Search and Tech Mahindra (Singapore). Among the common services that have been created as a result of the CFC are:

• Mobile Location Positioning Enabler: This is a location positioning platform that enables businesses and mobile service developers to develop and deploy operator-neutral location-based services easily.
• Shared Business Directory: This includes SPH Shared Business Directory, a shared directory service containing comprehensive and regularly-updated information on local retail and food and beverage businesses, and Places.sg, a shared directory service that provides a set of comprehensive and standardised business information on points of interest including retail and food and beverage outlets.
• Mobi-Sites Enabler (Moobify): Moobify is a platform that offers quick and simple tools for businesses to create their own mobile websites without the need for technical or design knowledge, nor infrastructure to support the websites.
• Mobile Ticketing and Fulfilment Enabler (Stubbee): Stubbee is an open-access and standards-based platform that enables third-party mobile service developers to gain access to cinema, event ticketing and fulfilment functionalities, including ticket purchase and electronic ticket delivery for direct auto-gate access to venues.
• Mobile Taxi Booking Enabler (MoobiTaxi): MoobiTaxi is a platform that enables third-party mobile service developers to easily integrate taxi booking functionalities into their services.
• Mobile Remote Payment Enabler: Two PayPal solutions – Mobile Express Checkout and Mobile Payment Software Development Kit – enable businesses and mobile service developers in Singapore to easily integrate mobile payment functionalities into their mobile websites and applications.

These common mobile shared services and enablers will be open and accessible by any businesses and mobile service developers, helping them to reduce development time and complexity in their deployment of mobile services.

The Digital Concierge programme aims to help at least 70 per cent of businesses in the Retail and Food and Beverage sectors to be listed on the shared business directory, 2,000 businesses to reach out to their customers through mobile-optimised websites and enable a wide variety of rich and personalised mobile services accessed by at least one million users by mid-2012.