The privately-owned company made it a mission from the outset to retain within Finland the competence developed over the years at Nokia, by motivating employees with global-scale product development opportunities.
Haltian began by developing wireless devices for customers. “All development is undertaken in-house and we outsource production, under our supervision, to another Oulu-based company,” says Marketing Director Heini Tuorila. “We can undertake the whole process for our clients, from the idea to the end product, or they can come to us for help at a particular stage of development.”
A perfect example of such a partnership is the Ouraring, a wellness ring which analyzes how the body responds to daily life; it monitors activity levels and sleep quality and, via a smartphone app, helps the wearer to adjust their behaviour to attain a better balance.
“We created the electronics and the client undertakes the sales and marketing,” explains Ms. Tuorila. In 2014, Haltian began developing its own products and created the Thingsee One for the B2B market, a platform with ten different programmable sensors which is used by developers when designing IoT devices.
More recently, the company has produced its first IoT product for the end user, which was initially conceived as a way of demonstrating what can be done with the Thingsee One.
Snowfox is a small, colourful, user-friendly trackerphone with inbuilt location tracking and voice call functionality, designed for children too young for smartphones. It was launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2016 and will be available from October.
There is currently a crowdfunding campaign through www.indiegogo.com to support the worldwide launch of Snowfox. “It will be available at the end of 2016 in the UK and US, and we plan to launch the Snowfox in up to ten countries in the coming year, and to continue developing new products,” adds Ms. Tuorila. “We have significant experience in our field, and have learnt a lot of valuable lessons. We are flexible and our quality is superb. We will continue to hire the very best people; to fulfil our global aims, we will need to double our staff to 150 in the medium term.”