Veea and iFREE Offer International Travelers Convenient and Flexible Packages for Voice, Messaging and Data, Along With a Platform to Connect With Retailers and Restaurants Anywhere in the World on Their Smartphones or Tablets

Friday, May 18, 2018

Tourists With iFREE SIM Card Leverage the Veea Application to Discover Local Merchants and Share Experiences, Including Those Accepting Alipay and WeChat Pay

NEW YORK and HONG KONG, May 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Veea Inc., a global leader in smart applications, including smart retail and hospitality solutions, and iFREE Group, a global leader in e-commerce and connectivity for travelers, today announced that tourists traveling with iFREE’s Mogo S, a global data SIM card with coverage in more than 200 countries, will also have access to the Veea mobile application, a global resource for finding local merchants and sharing experiences amongst a trusted user community. In addition, retailers, restaurants and other venues catering to the visitors from abroad can leverage the VeeaConnect platform to provide targeted promotions and accept Alipay and WeChat Pay, the preferred payment method for millions of Asian tourists. Today, travelers from Asia receive a complementary iFREE SIM card with the first day of data usage for free when traveling internationally. A large number of major Asian airlines are now providing these SIM cards upon check-in at the airline ticket counter as a complementary service to their travelers. Veea and iFREE will be partnering with US-based airlines in the coming months to offer the same services to their passengers traveling abroad.

In today’s digital world, consumers expect access to the Internet and other forms of mobile communications to be reliable and ubiquitous at affordable prices anywhere in the world. iFREE offers convenient and flexible data pricing packages with its SIM card that allow travelers to benefit from the most competitive roaming rates literally anywhere in the world. The Veea consumer application, available for iOS and Android devices, serves as a personal concierge for travelers, including those traveling with iFREE SIM card. The Veea app now enables millions of travelers from Asia, with iFREE SIM in their devices, to locate merchants that offer promotions and deals sponsored by iFREE, Veea and their partners, while accepting their preferred method of payment.

Other benefits include the ability to:

  • Connect with friends and family more often
  • View crowdsourced updates on venues and businesses in real-time
  • Gather information about the most followed venues through user-generated collections
  • Generate their own collection of favorite places based on their experiences
  • Book reservations or get on virtual waitlists at restaurants

“We are always looking for opportunities to bolster our services with new offerings that will significantly enhance the travel experience for our SIM card users traveling throughout the world,” said Steven Loke, Group Chairman of iFREE. “By extending our partnership with Veea, we now offer the most affordable set of solutions for international travelers and have provided them with a resource for finding merchants that ultimately offer the best value to travelers.”

“With the pace of international travel from Asia growing exponentially, our goal is to enable merchants and service providers around the globe, who are most inclined to cater to the needs of these travelers, to connect with them through VeeaConnect merchant app and offer them great value,” said Allen Salmasi, CEO of Veea. “This partnership with iFREE provides travelers with a one-stop solution for all their needs, from connectivity to discovering places and exclusive promotions to simplified payments.” Veea will be offering the iFREE MOGO S SIM cards at Veea booth # 8329 in the Lakeside Center at the 2018 National Restaurant Association (NRA) Show at McCormick Place in Chicago from May 19-22 to international travelers as a complementary gift when visiting their booth.

“My work takes me all over the world and as a restaurateur and advocate of community engagement, I understand the importance of creating a network with prospective and existing clientele,” said Master Chef Martin Yan, iconic American-Chinese Master Chef, host of PBS’s award-winning show, Yan Can Cook, a partner and community leader for Veea and iFREE users. “With the Veea app, not only can travelers find and engage with my restaurants during their travels, but they can now follow my recommendations, which are my favorite places from around the world, in Chef Yan’s Collections on Veea app. More importantly, I’ll now be able to share my experiences every which way with my family, friends and followers, while discovering new places, no matter where I am.”

Master Chef Martin Yan will be demonstrating his special cutting knives and autographing his recipe book in the Veea booth at the NRA show, the event showcasing the latest innovations in restaurant technologies and food and beverage industry services, drawing in over 66,000 foodservice professionals from around the world. To register for the 2018 NRA Show, please click here.

For additional information about Veea Inc., iFREE Group or Yan Can Cook, Inc. visit www.veea.comwww.ifreegroup.com or yancancook.com, respectively. The Veea mobile application is available in the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store.

About iFREE Group 
iFREE Group is a global Travelution company pioneering new ways for international travelers to stay connected in the world of e-commerce and mobile communications. It works with leading airlines, hotels, clubs as well as credit card, insurance and payment companies in offering its products and services. It also provides an OTT app for managing insurance, global payments, travel booking, “roaming-free” telecommunications, social media, loyalty, coupons and travel merchandise. It allows travelers to search and discover among hundreds of millions of merchants and sightseeing places with real-time updates through Chip-INs by social community.  It’s smart digital travel assistant provides speech recognition and natural language understanding for translation, voice to text blog, as well as search, discovery and podcasts for points of interest to travelers. Travelers can also search for their desired products online or at any of iFREE’s iRetail locations at major international airports around the world. iFREE GROUP is headquartered in Hong Kong and has offices in USA (Atlanta, San Diego and New York), Europe (Geneva, Paris and London), Australia (Sydney and Melbourne), UAE (Dubai) and 8 Asian countries (Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu), Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and China (Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen) with offices opening soon in several African and Middle Eastcountries and a majority shareholding in a company listed on the ASX. http//www.iFREEgroup.com

About Veea Inc. 
Veea is a platform company with a suite of innovative products and services for Smart applications. Veea’s platform include an intelligent edge server similar to a WiFi access point, but with the ability to run software applications at customer premises, 4G data failover services with CloudSIM along with highly differentiated iOS and Android-based mobile applications for businesses and their customers. Veea offers Point of Sale (POS) applications and its unique payment services to merchants, service providers and hospitality venues along with highly customized applications, including streaming applications, for restaurants, bars and clubs. VeeaHub platform supports wireless and IoT applications with a unified wired and wireless computing mesh with all commonly used wireless protocols. VeeaHub enables retailers to run their applications dynamically, cost-effectively and most efficiently at the network edge (e.g., at business locations, inside trains, on city infrastructure, etc.), in the Cloud or both, based on a number of business rules with a set of objectives such as reducing latency, minimizing communications with cloud resources to reduce costs associated with the Cloud services, providing for backhaul resilience with failover 4G data services, application data loss prevention or privacy, and ensuring business continuity through running mission critical applications at the edge with optional Cloud back-up services. This platform is further complemented by solutions that augment the real world, providing seamless in- and out-of-store experiences that further helps businesses engage and retain customers through the application of data analytics supported by machine learning and AI. Veea is headquartered in New York City with several offices in the US, Europe and Asia, and is run by an experienced and tenured management team including former senior executives of leading technology, payments and telecom companies.
http//www.veea.com