Yesterday we had our pitching session, 6 minutes presentation in front of an audience of other innovators, journalists, carriers and handsets manufactures representatives, etc.
Today we has the speed dating session with carriers and VC reprensentatives inside the Mobile Innovation Programme and tomorrow we will attend at our booth.
We promise further coverage after event, but just as an appetizer our booth-pic :-)
solaiemes team
When coming from a multinational huge company, it is difficult to become entrepreneur with not initial VC backing your project, and it is a difficult change not only regarding financial risk but working enviroment. Working in facilities with 300 colleagues and the day after working alone, or with 1 or 2 people, it was hard at the beginning, but the week ending we had our first town-hall with more than 10 people, partners, employees, thesis developers and Java university researchers involved with our project. I was happy, even realizing that till now tidy office is now being under the entrophy :-) and then some kind of combat will take place between jedi's and dark side of the mess.
But the important thing is that Solaiemes is taking off, we attract talent, we got clients, our technologies are being recognized, and the critical mass point is being achieved.
Solaiemes team
It is hard to start-up a company from scratch, you know... finding right partners, recruiting enthusiastic people, making the business plan, reviewing the business plan, correcting the business plan ;-), research funds, bureaucracy, develope fast first prototypes of product portfolio, the challenge of getting first customers, got customers happy after trusting us.
Just arriving to our first "birthday" we just received the good new about being selected as a 'Top Innovator' for the GSMA's Mobile Innovation Summit at Asian Mobile Congress in Macau (12-13/November).
We will be showcasing our LiveServe VideoShare Suite 1.0 line of products and participation in the pitching session.
our PR: http://www.solaiemes.com/index.php?id=45
and the website of event
http://www.mobileasiacongress.com/english/mobileinnovation.htm
We will post our comments about the event, mobile trends we watch from the global exhibition during the event.
solaiemes team
The succesful Web 2.0 concepts, well-know ones as youtuve and social/professional networks facebook, linkedin, blogging sites, microblogging sites as jaiku and twitter too far from Mobility.
Fair to admit some of the web 2.0 allows to introduce posts from mobile with easy user interfaces but we need additional steps to build up "seamless comunities".
The succesful company SpinVox just walked one of these additional steps needed
http://www.spinvox.com/social-networks-facebook-twitter-and-jaiku-all-gain-voice.html
now it will be possible to post in blogs or microblogging sites using voice calls and real time converted in text in your blog sites....
Congratulations SpinVox...
Solaiemes will unveil shortly solutions to create a new concept for communities using video...just working to put together mobile and web 2.0.
Soon the beta-demos, be patient ;-)
We just recorded with a better camera than a simple handset as in the past :-) the new videos featuring our VideoShare infrastructure example of use cases and our demo enhancing mobile usability with our AVISG platform. We know we are not Spielberg but keep trying :-P
ITU-T hosted in Geneva during the past week a workshop on "Multimedia in NGN". Interesting topics discussed but mainly from a technical point of view.
Everybody talks about the same services as the "NGN services":
Killer applications?: Video Blogging, Sharing, Video Ring Back Tones, Video to voice call continuity, innovative AMS applicationsIs this what the mass market wants?. I very much doubt it. These services need expensive devices, user experience are very complex, and will probably also generate expensive bills, as carriers will want to recover investment very quickly. Users can do most of these things now using on their PCs without any NGN.
[From the summary notes from session "Using NGN capabilities to deliver multimedia services"]
Heavy Reading has just published a report on IMS status in carriers. "IMS Deployment Update: Promise & Challenges" (executive summary here). It shows that two perceptions I have already heard elsewhere are really quite widespread:
First (quoting from TMCnet), one of the conclusions from the report's author: "After several years of unvarnished hype, IMS has moved from hero to zero faster than the average telco panacea [...] IMS is a dying issue."
But, strinkingly, operator representatives also admit to be "struggling to find a position in the Web 2.0 world," and that "we don't see any other way to go but IMS."
On one hand we see that there is some perception that IMS is not only going down the hype curve, but actually dying. This is somehow expected. It will take some time to overcome all the issues of an over-hyped, very complex and new technology. And it remains to be seen how different will be what it is now IMS (in specs and drawing boards) from the result of that distillation process.
On the other hand, the carriers are desperate to embrace IMS' promise. But are they adding the non-technical components that are needed to make it a success? I am talking about imagination here. Migrating existing services to IMS will not provide much benefit, market needs imaginative services, but there is no much creativity yet. New services (like PoC) are not launched because of concerns about cannibalisation or revenue erosion ... Why not create new business models (such as PoC person-to-machine / machine-to-person, etc)? Risk is negligible for carriers, and much better than desperation anyway.
Following a long tradition, operators are turning to vendors to provide some "mojo", but incumbents suppliers are also worried about erosion of established businesses. Startups are more likely to provide the innovation the market needs.
Hi, we will issue a PR and add to our website the product description next week but just in advance for our blog readers: we extend our portfolio with our new baby.tech !!!
Solaiemes LiveServe MediaServer
This product completes our 1.0 release of our IMS based portfolio. The LiveServe MediaServer is a server designed to build downlink based (server to mobile ) VideoShare use cases.
Highly scalable, proven integrated with ConverG application server for standalone solutions or as IMS AS the LiveServe MediaServer could easily manage by remote servers/applications with a command bus, then it is licensable by third parties to build compelling solutions for their customers.
Solaiemes will provide their own use cases with the new product combined with ConverG and LiveServe but states their commit with the open architectures to make feasible third party solutions.
Our LiveServer VideoShare Suite Infrastructure Suite 1.0 (IMS & standalone) finally includes
We are happy to announce we just joined the Mobile Innovation Programme http://www.mobileinnovation.org/
As we said in the previous post we think very useful these kind of initiatives and aligned with our objectives of portfolio awarenes, industry networking and speed up the adoption of innovations.
We recently joined OMA as supporter member also and we believe in all pieces of this industry (telecom) needed each others and then trying to work together and create sinergies: carriers, big infrastructure vendors, huge services companies, and small/middle sized innovation start-ups.
At least a very good new in the IMS industry, AT&T (formerly named Cingular) launched in several US cities the commercial service of Video Share.
The link to press release is
http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=23983
and their specific website
http://www.attvideoshare.com
the pity is they only talk about use cases mobile to mobile.
Remember please that video share has a lot of amazing use cases mobile-to-server and server-to-mobile to be offered to your customers (public security, enterprise, media companies and even personal blogging services)
juan mateu
We are being mentored by investors or public institutions mentoring pilots. One of the concerns is about sales & marketing and the right website style according our company vision. As we do technology we tried to reproduce the technology company style, but as we talk about new ways to do mobile marketing and CRM they asked us to introduce more "pic" component. As responsible soldiers we did. New look:
After several posts regarding technology and mobility trends we come back to post about the start-upping road.
The subject today is how to face the "rules of VC and analysts". When Venture Capital people or just possible customers/analysts visit our website or read our BP they say:
..."you have to many products/solutions" ..."you should focus in one thing"
Even when asking for advice using social networks as LinkedIn we notice a lot of people sharing this view: "it is needed a very sharp defined focus"
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/startups-small-businesses/starting-up/STR_STP/59851-6076999
It is hard to explain that our product is Mobility, (know-how and technology for mobility). To create more mobility use cases we build some technology and to make easier other existing mobile cases we build some other technology, and to help carriers, MVNO's and other companies to extend mobility we offer consultancy....
And ALL is our product, SOLAIEMES product is MOBILITY !!!
I understood the "rules" coming from VC firms are based on their experience and we respect that, but when reading BPs we should abstract the "idea" from the implementations, our "idea" needs several legs, but the idea is ONE.
juan mateu :-)
We work now around core network and services enabling platforms, but our past was linked to wireless access technologies as gsm, 3G, and HSxPA, new radio access network are being developed, we just found a very interesting and useful article/port to understand frequency bands, distance and bandwith for legacy, current and soon coming wireless technologies. We place this link to the post of Padmasree Warrior Blog http://blogs.motorola.com/author/padmasree-warrior/default.asp?item=631033, hope you find it useful.
A lot of people in carriers, internet companies are thinking about how to extend the online marketing/advertisment to mobile and it seems it is not a succesful task.
The successful Google model (AdSense/AdWords) faces difficult constraints with mobile: display size, not too extensive mobile browsing by users due to usability & concerns and uncertain conection costs, etc.
Sometimes when a model is so succesful people tries to replicate it in all "access way" but the answer for the question in the title is NOOOOOOOOOO !!! :-)
For mobile our purpose is re-starting from scratch. Important keys for us:
1/ free for users,
2/ not intrusive,
3/ carriers getting revenue from advertisers,
4/ advertisers getting more for same investment, business intellienge integrated with mobile advertisment
this is our aproach, our model will be explained soon
juan mateu
I live in Madrid, it is a beautiful city and the capital of Spain. It is a nice place to live with lot of public gardens where all citizens can enjoy. But this has not always been so. Take as an example the Retiro (http://www.esmadrid.com/monograficos/retiro/es/monografico.html). It was conceived as a rest place for kings and their kindred around the end of XVII century. Only in the early XIX century, some citizens where allowed to walk inside certain parts of it, and only if they commit to certain "good manners". It was only in the last century when this park was open to the public. And becoming a public garden, allowing all citizens to enjoy it, walking, bicycling, etc., was how it got to realize its full potential. By now, you should be asking what has to do all of this with mobile technologies. Good, let me put you in context: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=45821
Ok, I must say that I totally agree with the article from Eugene. And I must say that the problem he points to is no special case of the US, but is a general one also in Europe. Perhaps not so hard, as it is possible to deploy third party applications on most terminals from any carrier (be it J2ME or Symbian). Although, in practical terms this hardly makes a difference as most subscribers are not willing to download any applet :-(
However, it is true that enhancing the browser capabilities in mobile phones, and making them more similar to what we expect to have on a normal laptop will ease the deployment of mobile applications. This is already happening, as most mobiles include nowadays browsers with capabilities close to those of their PC counterparts. But this will be boosted with the iPhone coming out, including a full featured Safari browser. This will allow to have full web style applications on the phones with AJAX interfaces, including all multimedia elements, also with proven good development frameworks, like those built around J2EE, and allowing to easily integrate with all the IT infraestructure in most corporations. This in turn will reduce development and operational costs of mobile applications.
This looks nice, as it may allow application developers to slip through a hole in the carriers walled garden. However, this is not the end of the story, there is still one important element: usability. And this puts the challenge once again on the application developers side. I mean, having web style applications in the phone is nice. But you cannot expect all subscribers to use those applications in the same way they use web desktop applications. So, new user interaction paradigms must be developed: involving touch screens, multimodal interfaces where the user can navigate through voice and get the result in the mobile browser, and why not, even navigation through gestures (ok, I know, I know, I should get a Wii and forget about all this ;-)
Currently Solaiemes is working in several compelling use cases mobile-to-server with added value use case and no possible SMS or Voice Call cannibalization. We are focused on man-machine interaction to make normal life actions easier with low additional cost for user combined with revenue increase for carrier.
The point is that it is needed a commercial OMA PoC commercial service offered by local carrier to get advantadges of new use cases.
(spanish)
Actualmente Solaiemes está trabajando en la creación de casos de uso para el OMA push to talk (push over cellular) basados en la interacción hombre-máquina (sin posibilidad de canibalización de llamadas vocales y/o SMS) y que permitan simplificar muchas de las tareas diarias por muy bajo coste para el usuario, pero un ingreso agregado para el operador móvil.
Eso sí, necesitamos que se lancen ya los servicios comerciales de OMA PoC en España y los países de nuestro entorno.
juan mateu
Firstly we should distinguis between "hard MVNOs" owning the own Core infrastructure (softswitch, ims, application servers) and the basic "traffic resellers".
Our approach is about the opporunity for hard MVNOs (i.e: in Spain several MVNO are expected to become full MVNO as Euskaltel, ONO, R, because they are fixed communication companies moving to be converged).
Carriers from fixed world extending their range of services to converged/mobility have mass market users and enterprise/corporate customers, they have now the capability to attract them as a mobile customers as well. Typically IMS is an easy infrastructure to integrate ASP mode services or licensed, the ecosystem of providers is becoming important, and new use cases other than VoIP are appearing.
A full MVNOs could offer OMA PoC (push-to-talk) services to enterprise customers with commercial PoC servers with no full carrier grade dimensioning, they can provide new services based on IMS (as video-sharing applications) without investing huge amounts of money in CAPEX and being a platform to test real use of these solutions:
-without compromising the global revenue due a possible not studied cannibalization of other services as SMS (it is being feared by carriers to deploy PoC i.e.)
-study the real appliability of use cases and help to study the right billing model to extend them to residential customers.
-link mobile and fixed branches into a new model of converged customers paying private services, the services could even become hosted as ASP, increase loyalty and reduce churn.
The MVNO are newcomers in a mature market, their mobile branches should have a light staff structure and could be easily linked to sales objectives in current enterprise base of customers.
They have then a good opportunity if they are fast offering new services while incumbent mobile carriers have slower decission cycle to deploy new services because they have to estimate global impact.
Currently, Solaiemes is developing new use cases to be applied to enterprise and public services customers, they need IP connectivity in both mobile and fixed sides, and could be hosted directly by final customers, become ASP from the telecom provider, or use ASP from external provider and use mobile and fixed data connectivity from the carrier/MVNO.
our ConverG+LiveServe SIP/IMS solutions are described at:
http://www.solaiemes.com/index.php?id=11
http://www.solaiemes.com/index.php?id=13
an example is being displayed at the bottom of this blog.
Solaiemes is not only creating technology to create new mobile/converged use cases, is also offering consultancy to help MVNO and carriers to evaluate CAPEX/OPEX investment defining the needs and best options for core and services infrastructure adquisition.
Solaiemes Project :-)
Opportunities exist now to use identity management as a tool to personalise communication services. By personalisation I mean any of this:
Several years talking about IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) as converged core, the way to interconect mobile and fixed worlds all carriers with trials, the technology ready, but.... there are not being launched commercial solutions.
Always we are facing the same circle.....no commercial service available because of no perceived demand, and not perceived demand because no commercial service available and real added value services showcases.
In exemple, the "video sharing" feature (also labelled as "see what i see / rich voice call), voice over circuit switch + video over packet switch (data), only one way, the needed one. This feature has some advantadges comparing with 3G videocall:
- videocall uses 64 kbps to be merge signalling, voice, and video and videosharing use a different channel for voice, more bandwidth then for video, higher quality.
- using data bearer for video, whatever improvement in uplink rates allows to transmit video with more quality, with future HSUPA, broadcast quality.
- using data bearer we could share video from mobile and internet worlds without costly infrastructure as Videogateways are.
(now it seems TMN in Portugal and TIM in Italy launched this service...but and the other european carriers?)
Currently a lot of amazing solutions based on mobile video in the uplink, as mobile journalism, blogging, law reinforcement are "on hold" until mobile carriers will decide to push forward IMS services....please...do that, we need that soon :-)
(in spanish)
Años hablando del IMS, el core convergente, la red perfecta donde no importe el acceso, la conexión del mundo fijo con el móvil, la tecnología ya madura, pero....todavía no se lanzan servicios comerciales por parte de los operadores.
Siempre nos topamos con la misma pescadilla que se muerde la cola o si debe ser antes el huevo o la gallina. No hay servicios comerciales sobre IMS porque no hay demanda, pero no hay demanda porque no hay servicio comercial de IMS y casos de uso con valor añadido debidamente demostrados.
Por ejemplo, el videosharing (también llamada "mira lo que veo"), sobre una llamada de voz convencional en un momento dado se envía video en tiempo real por paquetes (como conexión de datos), al ir por caminos distintos, todo el ancho de banda de datos es para el video redundando en una mejor calidad. Aparte tiene más ventajas sobre la videollamada 3G:
-al usar el video una portadora de datos, la mejora del ancho de banda ascendente as 128 kbps, a medio plazo a 384 kbps o incluso en el futuro con el HSUPA permitirá mandar video con calidad broadcast. (algo que los operadores podrán rentabilizar compitiendo en mercados hasta ahora de radioenlaces fijos de banda ancha).
- al usar el video directamente una conexión de datos...es directamente accesible al mundo fijo/internet, no así la videollamada, que requiere una infrastructura costosa, el videogateway que pasa de conmutación de circuitos a paquetes el video.
(ahora parece que TMN - Portugal) y TIM -Italia lanzaron el servicio de IMS videosharing, para cuándo el resto de operadores europeos ??? )
Ahora mismo un buen número de casos de uso interesantes y de alto valor añadido (periodismo, seguridad, blogging, reporte visual de tareas) están "en la nevera" a la espera de que los operadores se decidan a lanzar estos servicios...por favor, que sea pronto, ...los necesitamos :-)
We find everyday how the direct "way to do" translations from pc browser to mobile browser is becoming unsuccesful, the mobile "sites" are not easy to use, users left, carriers complain about how difficult to balance voice and data revenues, and while complaining they are not seeing this could be fixed soon. ("If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars" by R. Tagore).
The first key is rethinking from scratch the concept of mobile content, with small screens, limited keypad and no mouse, how to provide the info should be conceived for mobile, forget about pc-based web content adaptation.
From the web-core infrastructure, it is highly predictable what the user to see when is accessing to an online media, their bank m-CRM, the mobile portal of his carrier to check the bill, etc... why not offering the information with proper reading times, in slides with the best representation format supported by the mobile device (wml, html, XHTML, SVG) ??? The same for mobile marketing, we do not need to browse the catalogues, the catalogues should be personalized as continuous animation.
Solaiemes is working on that, demonstrating this is possible with a common platform for whatever kind of mobile CRMs and content, who want to be the first trying this new mobile-content easy to use ? :-)
(Spanish) Constatamos cada día el fracaso de la navegación web en el móvil, los usarios se quejan de que es incómoda, las operadoras de lo díficil que resulta balancear los ingresos de voz y datos, pero mientras se producen las quejas no se entra a resolver la cuestión, lo cual a día de hoy es resoluble. ("si lloras porque se oculta el sol las lágrimas no te dejarán ver las estrellas", R. Tagore).
Lo primero es asumir que el modelo de contenido móvil hay que rehacerlo desde cero, con pantallas pequeñas, teclado limitado y sin ratón hemos de olvidar la tentación de adaptar los contenidos de internet-pc al móvil. Hemos de concebir otra forma de "entregar" contenido apta para el móvil.
El "corazón" de los sistemas de internet, ya permite almacenar e identificar los hábitos del usuario que conduzcan a una predicibilidad alta de lo que quiere hacer cuando accede a su banca online, a periódicos online, o cualquier crm, así como qué es lo que ojea de un catálogo. ¿Por qué no presentarle lo que quiere como una sucesión de diapositivas con tiempos adecuados de lectura, como una animación?
Solaiemes trabaja en esto, demostrando que una plataforma única es posible adaptarse a muchos tipos de contenido, ¿quién quiere ser el primero "movilizando" de verdad sus canales para usuarios?
Months ago, we decided to leave our jobs and become entrepreneurs, not easy decission to take, but everybody learns being at 2 sides of the table, provider and customers, employee and founder. What we do? What is our idea? Our idea is promote mobility with more use cases squeezing the amazing capabilities of new radio (3G & Wimax) and core capabilities as IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and use the enhanced mobile device capabilities as multimedia resources or SVG technologies to make truly useful the mobile CRMs (mBanking, mInformation, etc) and mobile marketing. We do consultancy but our focus is the technology development. Our platforms are highly customizable. More info at our website www.solaiemes.com or the videoexamples below the posts.
Hace unos meses decidimos dejar nuestros trabajo y convertirnos en emprendedores, decisión nada trivial pero pensamos que todo el mundo aprende estando en los 2 lados de cada situación, cliente y proveedor, empleado y empresario, etc. Cuál es nuestra idea? Básicamente promover nuevos casos de uso productivo de la movilidad, aprovechando al máximo las nuevas tecnologías de acceso con mayor ancho de banda (3G y Wimax) y core de red (IMS) así como las prestaciones multimedia y de representación que se van incorporando en los terminales móviles, como los formatos SVG de animación embebibles en el navegador del terminal, y que permiten crear canales CRM (banca, ticketing, información) realmente usables así como marketing móvil efectivo y de fácil acceso. Más información en nuestra web www.solaiemes.com o los videoejemplos al final de esta página.
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