Telekom Austria Group To Launch Vodafone Consumer Services in Austria and Croatia

Vienna, April 2, 2013 - Mobile devices such as Smartphones and tablets are considered to be the basis of today´s mobile communication, both in private and business live, for children, teenagers and grown-ups. The mobile devices are available any time any place, but the usage can lead to tricky consequences, when used without any deliberation. Customers leave their footprints and data traces throughout the net, allowing unintentional insight into private and business live.

A1, Austria´s leading telecommunication provider, from an early stage on, has committed itself to make customers’ lives easier and at the same time keep mobile communication safe and secure. Thanks to the deep understanding of consumer needs the Telekom Austria Group is able to keep pace with ever changing preferences of its customers.

This is the reason why the Telekom Austria Group today announced the launch of a new breed of Vodafone consumer services in Austria. The Croatian subsidiary will also launch the services in a modified way.

In Austria, the following consumer services from Vodafone - Vodafone Cloud, Vodafone Protect, Vodafone Guardian and Vodafone Contacts - will be available for A1 customers only and will be launched within the framework of a new tariff scheme which has become effective as of end of March. In Croatia the services will be available for Vipnet customers only.

“We are more than happy to launch in cooperation with Vodafone this new generation of consumer services in our own markets. We managed to implement a seamless integration of the new services into our existing platforms and product portfolio. Thus we offer our customers innovative and extremely easy to use services that can be quickly adapted to personal needs and preferences. I am convinced that the new features will boost the user experience of Telekom Austria Group’s customers”, comments Reinhard Zuba, Group CMO of the Telekom Austria Group. Enhanced data safety and security, a higher level of privacy protection as well as stronger interoperability across different platforms and multiple devices are further key factors for a positive user experience.

All these new innovative consumer services demonstrate once again the strategic importance of the Group’s successful partnership with Vodafone, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2013 and has just been prolonged for another three-year term.


Broad range of innovative services

With Vodafone Cloud, the Telekom Austria Group’s subsidiary A1 will launch the first mass-market cloud service of the country. Vodafone Cloud allows customers to access any content from any devices, anytime and anywhere. Photos, videos, music and other files can be down- and uploaded from smartphones, Tablets, iPhones, PC or Mac. The service is easy to sign up and use, it covers multiple platforms (Android, Apple, Desktop), and provides both manual and automatic (wireless) backup of all files according to customer preferences. Up to 50 GB of stored data are included dependent on tariff.

Vodafone Protect is an easy and quick solution powered by McAfee to keep smartphones safe and secure. The service includes some free and premium features. The free features allow customers to plot the location of their lost or stolen phones on a map (FIND), lock the lost or stolen device to prevent others from gaining access to their personal data (LOCK), remotely wipe it clean of all private content (WIPE) or locate their misplaced devices within a short range based on a beep function (BEEP). The premier features include an ‘Antivirus software’ to block malware and spyware, auto-scan all downloads to ensure they are safe as well as protect the phone against virus threats; ‘Call and SMS Firewalls’ to filter call and text messages in such a way as to preserve customers’ privacy, allowing to block outgoing and incoming calls, block incoming SMS and set personal blocking rules; ‘App Alert’ to scan new and existing apps to ensure they are safe, make sure that apps are not associated with risky sites, provide privacy information about apps, rank them by privacy sensitivity or remove unsafe apps.

Vodafone Guardian is a free tool designed to help parents and children to use smartphones in a safe and responsible manner and to support anyone who is being bullied or receives unwanted calls and messages. The main features include the possibility to blacklist and whitelist incoming and outgoing voice calls, SMS and MMS, block private or unknown incoming calls or block all communication during specified time periods (except for parent, child line & emergency services), archive blocked SMS and MMS on the device so that they can be accessed with the parent’s password or delete unwanted messages straight away.

Vodafone Contacts is a free service that backs up Vodafone customers’ address book and contact details safely and securely online. Customers can easily synchronize their contacts between different devices and manage them online, thus protecting them from loss or damage. The service is easy to sign up, it supports multiple platforms (Android, Apple iPhone, Blackberry) and devices and enables smart data transfer as only changes to the address book are synchronized on an ongoing basis.