School messaging platform developer focuses on wearables

School messaging pioneer MGM Wireless has changed its name to Spacetalk and is ramping up production of its family wearables technology.

Co-founder and Executive Chair Mark Fortunatow said the new company name reflects the significance of the market for smartphone watches designed to keep families safe and connected.

With two products currently in-market, including Spacetalk Kids — a mobile phone, GPS tracker and watch in one — the company aims to take its wearables technology into the seniors market next year. New, related hardware and software apps for the families market are in the pipeline, with the Spacetalk App and Spacetalk Kids 2 launch set for early next year.

Fortunatow said the company had pursued a strategy of continuous innovation since its foundation in 2001 as one of the first developers of mobile SMS services for business markets.

“In the tech industry, you need to keep moving just to keep pace with the market, and our mission has always been to stay ahead, to own any market we enter,” he said.

“That’s led to many new product launches and expanding our customer base throughout Australia, New Zealand, India, the US and now the UK.”

The company developed messageyou, the first SMS student absence notification system, nearly 20 years ago. As the team developed new products, including electronic roll marking and cloud messaging, its customer base grew to encompass whole-of-government education departments as well as independent and Catholic schools.

“As more and more schools adopted messageyou, parents would receive a personalised text from their school to say their child was absent without an explanation.

“The parent’s next question was ‘where are they?’ This led to the development of a GPS tracking app, which had limited use as not all children carried mobile phones. But we knew from the demand that we were on to something,” Fortunatow said.

“We needed an ultrasecure device, one that children could safely carry, without the ability to access social media or internet. The idea of a mobile phone built into a wristwatch began to emerge and that’s how Spacetalk started. We hired a dedicated security analyst with a specialty in smartwatches — in fact, everything has been built with the child’s safety in mind.”

Already familiar with the families market through its schools business, the team were able to quickly interpret those needs in the development of product features. Next came the trial and error of developing hardware for the first time, the technology breakthroughs and the launch of the first Spacetalk model in 2017 — something Fortunatow sees as a natural progression.

“We have the common purpose to keep families safe and connected and the same ethical values for our new Spacetalk business as we did when we founded our school communication business when text messaging was still a novelty,” he said.

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