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Investors may want to pay attention to this.

In the UK, many large organizations, such as Royal Mail and various government offices have been using queue ticketing systems for quite some time. They use them in Germany too. From a machine you get a paper ticket, and wait till your queue number is announced on the monitor to be served. More often than not these machines are made by Qmatic. Yet one would not see similar solutions in, say, a barber shop or even a physician’s office.

Estonian startup Qminder, formed at Garage48, accelerated at Startup Sauna and backed by Seedcamp, has come up with an inexpensive solution for small businesses, which consists solely of a mobile app and a tablet dashboard (iPad, Samsung, Kindle Fire). Needless to say that the operators require no technical knowledge to set up and manage the system.

Here is how it works. A tablet serves as a virtual queue ticket dispenser. A smart phone user can download an free Qminder mobile app (iOS, Android). To get it, they can scan the QR Code displayed on the tablet. They will receive information about the queue progress through the app. A feature phone user can type in her mobile number into the table and receive a text message with queuing ticket. The operator would also need a tablet to process the tickets, and ideally a third tablet to display the real time data and analytics. There is also a web-based dashboard, and a simple booking system included in the solution. More details can be found on the company’s blog.

Founded by Rauno Rüngas, Qminder has been shy of press in the past year, concentrating on developing and testing its solution instead. Having received Seedcamp’s 50,000 Euro funding, the startup has three people working on the product full time, and three more on a part time basis. By now it has nearly 500 test customers in a number of countries, including Brazil and it is in talks with 40 potential distributors.

When I covered Qminder and other Startup Sauna teams in 2011, I was wondering if the emerging partnership between what appeared to be a competing solution from Italian Qurami and Qmatic was much further ahead. What I discovered is that Qminder has made a much greater progress that the team in Italy. Besides Qminder app works with the Qmatic solution as well.

Qminder will be at the Seedcamp Week in the third week of September, and is likely to start fundraising soon.

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