Day: 29 August 2016

Monaco families will very soon have the opportunity to help disadvantaged children prepare for the school year thanks to an innovative initiative created by Click Monaco, in partnership with the Association Les Enfants de Frankie and Stars’n’Bars.

It’s “that” time of the year when children are putting forward their best arguments as to why and how last year’s back pack is no longer suitable for them and a new one is in order. This is why Click Monaco has initiated this unprecedented campaign: #DonneTonAncienCartable (Give me your old backpack), which of course won’t help you avoid rentrée shopping all together but will allow you to do so with some peace of mind.

Kate Powers, co-owner of Stars’n’Bars, says, “We are really delighted with Click’s very original idea of ‘recycling’ to benefit less fortunate children … and also help the planet by reducing waste.”

Based in Monaco, Click Monaco is a unique platform for classified ads regrouping all types of goods and services for sale, but also more importantly in this case: donations. This campaign launches Sunday September 4, from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm, at Stars’n’Bars, in order for everyone to deposit last year’s backpack, while enjoying a sunny afternoon on the Port Hercule. All bags collected that day will be distributed on September 7 in Nice by Les Enfants de Frankie.

BillRun Technologies Ltd., a billing company based in Tel Aviv, specialising in open source and cloud solutions, has set up an advanced billing system for Monaco Telecom (MT). The financial scope of the project is in the order of several hundred thousand dollars.

The Principality welcomes more than 300,000 tourists per year, one-third of which are business tourists, i.e. those attending conferences and meetings. This demographic constraint is a challenge for MT, which chose BillRun to implement its new complete solution for billing and customer service, following the success of BillRun as part of the implementation of its billing system in Golan Telecom Tel Aviv.

Martin Péronnet, General Director of Monaco Telecom, says, “We are driving a profound transformation of our IT tools, moving from an inherited and complex system that was multi-operator and very expensive in CAPEX/OPEX with a simple, fully open-source system.”

Mr Pérronet, who was Marketing Director at ‪Bouygues Telecom before joining MT in 2009, adds, “This is probably one of the very first times in the world an incumbent operator offering a complete solution for B2B and B2C telecommunication services for mobile, fixed, TV, voice, data and hosting has accomplished such a transformation. Our goal over time is to control all the developments internally to reduce our IT costs by 75 percent, and provide an effective, simple and flexible system to our customers.”

BillRun was chosen as a Monaco Telecom partner because “BillRun represents one of the best open-source billing systems, and we have achieved all B2C in a year and a half”.

Ofer Cohen, CEO of BillRun, says, “This is the first project carried out by Israel and this has involved a reassessment and full integration of the central system and ancillary systems MT BillRun.”

The first phase involved implementing the BillRun billing systems and CRM at MT for VoIP (Internet telephony) and broadband while the second phase implemented these applications in the mobile environment and VoD (Video on Demand), Mr Cohen goes on to explain: “The development was conducted in collaboration with IT and development teams at MT. BillRun team managed the migration of the obsolete proprietary system of the company to an open-source architecture, including training and knowledge transfer. This highly complex project of involved close collaboration between several teams of both companies, and the system has been fully operational since May 2015, to great customer satisfaction.”

“By using an open-source system,” explains Cohen, “it means that MT is no longer tied to a particular supplier. Further to our success with MT, we intend to develop BillRun’s international activities.”

Unconfirmed sources have indicated that Matchroom’s Eddie Hearn is expanding his boxing operation to Monaco with a show lined up in the Principality in either October or November, according to the UK boxing press.

Liverpool’s Callum Smith has been mentioned as a possible name for the inaugural show, which is rumoured to be November 12. However, he has a mandatory British Super Middleweight title defence against Luke Blackledge on his plate as well as a date on Hearn’s October 15 bill in Liverpool, which is headlined by Tony Bellew’s maiden defence of his WBC cruiserweight title against America’s BJ Flores.

Hearn won the purse bid for Smith-Blackledge. The British Boxing Board of Control (BBBoC) states that it “will take place on a date and at a venue as yet to be advised” when confirming the successful bid.

Monaco is no stranger to big time boxing, as Rodney Berman put shows together on a regular basis and the Salle des Étoiles hosted boxing shows.

Ruslan Provodnikov was the last fighter to headline at the venue; he beat Jesus Alvarez Rodriguez in four rounds last November. Gennady Golovkin has also fought in Monaco, beating Nobuhiro Ishida, Osumanu Adama and Martin Murray (KO 3, KO 7 and TKO 11 respectively) in Middleweight title defences.

Sheffield-based promoter Dennis Hobson teamed up with Philippe Fondu for a show in 2006. Matthew Hatton (W RTD 6 over Aliaksandr Abramenka) and Femi Fehintola (W TKO 2 over Ivo Golakov) appeared on that one and both spoke glowingly about the experience of boxing in Monaco. If Hearn does make the move a slew of British fighters may benefit from the trip in coming years.