Category: Featured News

Mobile technology helps police issue tickets more quickly

Several departments have been upgrading their systems so that e-citations can be issued for traffic violations.

Issuing the traditional type of traffic ticket can take a tremendous amount of time, but with the use of mobile technology, several police departments have been making it possible to speed up the process by quite a bit.

The idea will help to save time for the officers and will make the process at least a sliver less painful for drivers.

According to the clerk of the Circuit Court for DuPage County in Illinois, Chris Kachiroubas, the average amount of time that is required for a police officer to pull over an offender, speak to him or her at the side of the road and then return to the cruiser in order to write the ticket is eighteen minutes. After that, the officer is required to send the ticket to the office of the clerk, where other employees must enter it into the system. A court date must be issued and a notice must be mailed to the offender. It takes a full 10 days before the offender will even learn what his or her court date will be. By that point, the date could be within two weeks. To speed up the process, many departments have looked to mobile technology.

Using mobile technology has made it possible to skip many of the manual processes involved in issuing tickets.

Mobile Technology - PoliceBy using mobile devices as a part of the traffic enforcement process, it becomes possible to issue e-citations. That has reduced the average amount of time required to create the ticket from having been 18 minutes to a much smaller 6 minutes, said Kachiroubas.

The new system allows a police officer to use a handheld mobile device or laptop in order to scan the driver’s license of the person who has been pulled over. The information on the license automatically populates the digital ticket so that it does not need to be entered manually. The officer can then select the offence(s) and that information is automatically entered into the system of the police department and the country. A court date is automatically generated.

The mobile technology device of the police officer is connected to a special printer located within the cruiser so that the ticket can be printed out, including the court date for the offender.

Activision Blizzard acquires the mobile games firm behind Candy Crush

Reports have stated that the purchase of the app developer has now been made for $5.9 billion.

The tremendously popular mobile games developer behind Candy Crush Saga, King Digital, has now been acquired for a reported $5.9 billion by another developer, Activision Blizzard.

Activision Blizzard is the developer of popular video games such as Destiny and Call of Duty.

By way of this purchase, Activision Blizzard will be obtaining all the outstanding shares of King Digital for $18.00 per share, in cash. This is a premium of 20 percent over the closing price of King on October 30, the day the deal actually went through. Once this deal officially closes, it will mean that two of the top 5 top grossing mobile games in the United States (Candy Crush Saga and Candy Crush Soda Saga) will be brought together with the leading console video game franchise (Call of Duty), as well as the largest franchise in PC games (World of Warcraft).

This mobile games developer acquisition has the potential to be a highly powerful one, heading forward.

Mobile Games - Activision Blizzard Aqauires King DigitalOn the first trading day after the acquisition, the shares of King Digital spiked by 15 percent in pre-trading, while the shares of Activision slumped slightly by 2.6 percent. In terms of the revenues of the companies, during the 12 months that ended with the close of September, King had brought in $2.1 billion while Activision Blizzard took in $4.7 billion.

According to the CEO of Activision Blizzard, Robert Kotick, when discussing King, “They built an incredible business.” He explained that “When we think about people who create compelling content and satisfy large audiences, they’ve been brilliant at it. We thought it would make a great opportunity for us to enter a new market.”

The team of CEO of King, Riccardo Zacconi, COO Stephane Kurgan and CCO Sebastian Knuttsson will be continuing their operations of King as an independent unit of operations. Zacconi said that they will be pooling their expertise in free to play mobile games with the world-class brands at Activision Blizzard, a company that already has a solid history of building and sustaining some of the top video gaming franchises.