Okhos
Design and development of a smart shopping trolley, loadable into the car, designed to minimise the physical and mental effort of supermarket shopping.
R&D services · Clients
Who has used the service, and what we did.
Already established companies for which Volcano has provided direct R&D services: the declared exception to the main model, explained in Services. Some clients appear by name; others, by their own preference, only by sector. They fall into two groups: external startups (not born inside Volcano) and already established companies.
4 min read
External startups
Startups we served, not ones we built.
They were not born inside Volcano, they are not ours: they are independent companies to which we provided direct R&D services. In both cases the starting point was not a blank page: they asked to take to their market a variant of a technology we had already matured in an internal project, and we worked on that basis. How that route works, in services.
Solid Flows
Tracking and certification technology applied specifically to the public transport service, an evolution of the automotive tracker developed at the time for JC Decaux.
Before Volcano: three cases from the founders.
Volcano was incorporated in 2023. These three cases belong to the founders' companies and tell, with three different competitors, the same thesis: the big player proposes the generic; the tailored suit wins because it starts from the client's exact requirement.
Banca Mediolanum
Banca Mediolanum had to decide who to entrust with developing the core of its banking application. The alternative was Accenture. It chose one of the companies of Volcano's founders: it preferred to trust whoever demonstrated command of the situation, capability and ideas, rather than delegating everything to a large consultancy. That core sustained Mediolanum's banking services for more than twenty years.
JC Decaux
Transit advertising is worth a third of JC Decaux's revenue, and it was losing ground year after year: advertisers preferred digital, where exposures are measured. Nobody could know whether the vehicles carrying a campaign were really on the road or spent days in the depot. JC Decaux went to Google, which proposed a battery tracker: sporadic positions, and the route reconstructed by interpolation over the planned itinerary. IGP Decaux, the Italian company 60%-owned by the group, called one of the companies of Volcano's founders, experts in geolocation, to assess that proposal. Their reading was different. The simple and definitive solution was not more software, but a dedicated device giving the position second by second and in real time: complete data, which the advertiser could verify live, watching the vehicle leave and the exposure of their campaign. With the problem and the solution identified, JC Decaux entrusted them with the whole development, hardware and software. The physical medium thus recovered the measurability that was pushing its clients towards digital.
Field GIS for Fibria
The client was Fibria, the world's largest producer of pulp. Its people work in the field, on the plantations: they measure, mark anomalies, record data. The systems ESRI proposed were generic and designed for workstations: small windows, many steps to enter or read a specific datum; hardly usable on the ground. The founders' company developed the opposite: a dedicated GIS and a tablet readable in full sunlight, with only the necessary functions, large buttons and text, integrated GNSS receiver and several georeferencing methods.
Would you like more detail on a case? Write to us through the contact form or by WhatsApp. And if what you want is to resolve something specific in a working video call, there is the consultancy.
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We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
John F. Kennedy, 1962
John F. Kennedy, 1962