Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Our Experience at HIT Telecom

We attended last week the HIT Telecom event in Barcelona.
Firstly, we could not win the Mobile Innovation Award to the most innovative consumer application or service, we congratulate the winner, Multiplied Media :-).
We will keep trying with our other platforms in next Innovation Awards calls :-).
The HIT was a very interesting event and it is one of the key actions of Barcelona Council to become "the place" chosen for start-up's to be created or established in Europe when oversees companies initiate their expansion. This area is the @22 (the innovation district), we think it is a great idea and probably they will succeed becoming a reference in Europe where many cities wants to "own" the european Sillicon Valley.
As GSMA Mobile Innovation Finalist we are awarded with 1 year of space at @22, we hope we can fund the company to have presence there also soon.
Regarding the HIT Telecom, we pitched, watched the other finalist pitches, and the interesing pannels, with leaders of the industry and succesful entrepreneurship stories as spinvox.

If you are interested in the summaries of innovators pitches you can read about them here

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Voice 2.0 matters!

The Voice is the quickest way of interaction, last years the "multimedia revolution" and internet moved the focus away from voice, but now the current scenario favouring the convergence and mash-up concepts are coming back to take again the voice and take the most of it.
Voice 2.0 are not related only with transport method and signalling (VoIP/SIP) but also the use and the combination with different solutions. You can find interesting definition here.
Voice can take profit from the "building blocks" trend, in order to build up very complex and powerful solutions. Till now...

a) Voice could be carried using legacy PSTN, VoIP, IP streaming, and 2 way Push To Talk (also IP)
b) Voice could be recognized (ASR), voice can be generated from text (TTS) and voice can be transcripted to text
c) Voice could be used for interaction (IVR) and this interaction can be designed easily using VXML & CCXML protocols.

From now on VOICE can be used as additional input/ouput source/destination in ubiquous /convergent solutions, voice mash-ups can be created to merge voice, mobility, web 2.0 creating powerful sinergies. Media task reporting, social media new concepts, personals assistant solutions, emergencies and law enforcement fields will be benefited.

Currently there are companies offering "building blocks" to be combined and interoperated with 3rd party applications easily: SpinVox (voice to text matching), Voxeo (cloud IVR), IfbyPhone, etc).
Solaiemes wants to offer new enablers to use voice combined with Web and Mobililty. Using our VoxServe and LiveServe platforms combined we can create a web based push to talk client to interact with mobiles, working as a dispatcher and also as media repository without installing external apps at pc or mobile. Watch our alfa demo.



Monday, June 1, 2009

How can IMS help launching new services?

During past IMS 2.0 World Forum, panelists pointed about IMS deployment being slower than anticipated. When convergence is a main goal, but on the other hand internet communication services are becoming more and more popular, the Telco role is being questioned mainly from internet related representatives.
In our opinion, even considering the fact that a lot of convergent communication services can be offered directly only needing connectivity from the telcos, this approach has 2 weaknesses in order to boost "mass market" services:
a) Complexity, the mobile penetration index is higher than pc-based internet penetration, then a lot of mobile users with not internet and internet-based literacy will be out of mobile advanced services revolutions if the approach is the "internet applications" one.
b) Entry costs for users, the internet/internet applications based approach to enrich mobile solutions needs powerful smartphones, and has portability costs, and most of people don't want to install hundreds of apps.

In the past we can find examples of simple enablers being the base of very different services (SMS case). Simple and common enablers, included in all the device range are easy to be massively adopted. This is the main reason to forecast that proper combination of IMS with RCS (rich comunication suite) combined with a proper and "transparent" billing scheme could be a good alternative for carriers to keep heading the mobile revolution for the masses and this is compatible with other approaches.
Find our keynote about "what final user wants and how IMS could fit the bill" :-)