Australian IT innovator Netbox Blue has won the highly coveted National iAward for Communications technology at the gala dinner in Melbourne. The award is for Netbox Blue’s unique and patent-pending SafeChat technology. Netbox Blue will now go on to represent Australia at the Asia Pacific competition, APICTA in Kuala Lumpur.

Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) runs the iAwards to encourage, nurture and recognize the most innovative technology in Australia. The awards are now in their tenth year and there were a record number of nominees for this year’s awards with the judges describing this as the most competitive year. 

Netbox Blue Chairman, John Fison, described Netbox Blue’s win as a tremendous honour for the company and recognition of the relevance and uniqueness of the company’s technology. SafeChat competed in a highly competitive category against a strong field of innovative technologies.

“SafeChat represents a breakthrough in helping schools and businesses to embrace social media in a safe and appropriate manner,” Mr Fison says. “It helps prevent bullying on social networking sites, Instant Messaging, chat, webmail and even Twitter, by blocking and alerting on inappropriate language use. SafeChat can be used at school and on school-owned laptops, even when these are used outside the network. It can also be used in a business environment to tackle cyber harassment and prevent damage to a company’s reputation.”

“Social networking, instant messaging and other Web 2.0 type communications are now an integral part of education and business. Yet they have also become the ‘virtual toilet wall’ of the modern world – a place for anyone to get their grievances off their chest, bully other students, teachers and to criticize colleagues. SafeChat enables administrators to control the language used on popular sites to block bullying and other anti-social communications.”

“SafeChat also enables administrators to prevent people posting negative comments about their school or business. In this way, SafeChat can help avoid reputational damage.”

“SafeChat provides a means of ensuring applications like Facebook, Windows Messenger and Twitter can be used positively, flexibly and securely,” Mr Fison says.

SafeChat is the result of tens of thousands of hours of development by staff at Brisbane-based Netbox Blue. SafeChat scans the traffic stream on popular Web 2.0 applications against a highly customizable list of dictionaries to determine what action may need to be taken. Communications can be blocked and an administrator, business manager or principal alerted.

John Fison, Chairman of Netbox Blue (left), and Trent Davis, CTO (right), being congratulated by Glen Boreham, MD of IBM ANZ (centre): Netbox Blue is a longstanding partner of IBM and uses custom built IBM systems as the hardware platform for its world leading appliance range of solutions.

The technology also allows control of search engine queries. This is used to help alert managers on inappropriate use and in many cases for self-harming risks, for example a student looking for information on drug use or suicide. In this way preventative action can be taken before the situation worsens. 

SafeChat extends the anti-cyber bullying features of the Netbox, which already provides keyword scanning on internal and external email. Netbox solutions include a range of security and internet and email filtering and management features in one easy-to-use appliance.

Netbox Blue also recently won at the national Consensus Software Awards for its education solution, SecurED.

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