UNI versus propietary interfaces for communication services platforms

User-to-network interface or UNI is just a fancy term for naming the procedures and protocols that communication tools in the user hands (phones, mobiles, soft-phones, IM clients …) use to do their work and establish communicate with the network.
In the pre-Internet circuit based communication world, user devices were very simple, as simple and dumb as possible. Intelligence was supposed to be in the network. UNI capabilities were very limited, as corresponds to a very stable and limited service offer.
Internet turned upside down that approach: the “End to end principle” (https://www1.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1958.txt) translates roughly into “dumb network – smart endpoints”. It is assumed in the Internet that intelligence in the endpoints, and not in the network, that has a very important, but limited role: moving packets as efficiently as possible. Services are deployed in the endpoints, without relying on specific network behaviour. The UNI actually defines the services.
Telco core design (and a good chunk of the business) is based on the “smart network” view. The advent of IP based services thus supposed a revolution, and IMS was designed to mix both approaches: access and core assume the role of the “dumb network” efficiently moving IP packets, whereas the smart endpoints are the IMS, the application servers and the user mobile.
As in the Internet, in IMS the UNI comprises and defines the services. There is little difference between the UNI (client-IMS) and the ICS (app. Server-IMS) interfaces. One example is RCS: a rich, complete UNI that allows to perform all sort of service invocations and combine them with quite a lot of freedom.
Landing from these disquisitions to earthly matters: given that the UNI comprises the services, it is complete, stable, tested …. Wouldn’t make sense to extend the ideas explained above and use it also for communicating with the external, non-RCS world? We propose to use the RCS UNI to communicate web services, enterprise systems, and social networks with RCS.

Obviously the carrier is keeping a role, it's providing a valuable common enabler with its core, and assuring interoperability with other carriers & service roaming, security, and at the same time making easy for the ecosystem create mass market possible adoption for their solutions. WIN-WIN.
Why reinvent the wheel? Why spend money and time on designing new services interfaces when the UNI is there and contains the full service capabilities? Surely it is the better starting point.

Jose Recio

Key for success of RCS.

After "evangelizing" posts about RCS technology, own product portfolio explanation and demos, and finally, last week reflections on MWC RCS Seminar, we would like to add our view about key factors to make RCS a huge success and a new way of conceive mobility & unified communications.
The key advantadge of RCS is a type of "SMS enabler", only 1 experience to be learnt, very different use cases to be available using the service, all carriers, all devices compatible. This is the right way to address to the masses, not only geeks of smartphone owners.
On the other hand, unfortunately we are at the beginning of "all carriers, all devices, lots of services using RCS as door". Carriers start trialing RCS, and luckily with a good approach, including interoperability as part of trials (the 3 top carriers in France and Telefonica and Orange in Spain).

But...to run faster...there are a key few points:

a) Affordable core for small carriers, MVNO's and even servive providers trying to offer RCS using agnostic data connectivity. The good new here comes from Acme Packet, launching their new product Net-Net SIP Multimedia-Xpress

b) All devices. The good news come from Genaker with their J2ME RCS Client to enable the boost of RCS service usage before native clients arrive. (It won the RCS Innovation devChallenge).

c) Lots of services on top. The good news here come from us !!! The Solaiemes RCS Solution Gateway, is designed to create services on top of RCS being "content buddies" with no telco experience, the idea is merge internet & telco space, and our platform enablers the service creation based on APIs, being fully interoperated with telco IMS core to create fully compliant content buddies.

Then, even smaller innovative MVNOs looking to differentiate with compelling services, carriers looking for affordable service testing can save time to validate the service, and give a chance to the ecosystem to think about solutions, as it happened with SMS in the past...
And finally, let us remember how we finish our latest post, because it is the key to understand the battler, apps vs services...Devices apps could be the Ferraris, but the real success is the Ford-T, providing a nice experience everybody can afford in terms of cost & usability.

If you consider this post interesting to be shared, remember you can tweet this post using the button in the upper-left button :-)

Reflections on the RCS seminar in MWC 2010

GSMA organized again a very interesting seminar on RCS as part of the Mobile World Congress GSMA activities. Almost 4 hours packed with experience from trials and vendors and operators heavyweights. It is difficult to say that there is no commitment after listening to the attendants.

I will summarize the most important points on our view, just a schematic, not the full session proceedings.

Telefónica: Stressed the dynamic nature of the future enhanced phonebook, one of the RCS strong points. Advantages of RCS services vs over-the-top: Native and embedded client + Universality + Telco service model.

Japan operators: Very intesting explanation of the timeline. PoC + Presence + IM launched in 2008, limited success due to poor interoperability. Step back and work on agreement under standard organisation umbrella. Now launching IMS based services and integrated with RCS group.

Trial operators: Ongoing and well.

AT&T: Sharing very interesting lessons learnt from SMS slow start and MMS blazing success in the US market: Interoperability between operators is key, it was lacking initially with SMS (and harmed it a lot), carefully worked for MMS (contributed to quick and massive success). GRX is not good enough, RCS interconnectivity should be IPX.

Very important insight from an Asia operator: when RCS service was launched, it didn't canibalize SMS traffic, on the contrary, SMS actually increased !!!. RCS stimulates communication, any kind of communication.

Reportedly, some nostrils perceived the uncertain aroma of doubt in the last part of the seminar, I think it is just another take in the continuous game between vendors (we won't ship until operators commit) and operators (we can't commit unless more units and models are available). Hopefully with RCS a common interest will leave behind this conundrum, as old as the mobile industry (remember the "God send mobiles" joke?).

And finally we want to remark that Solaiemes point of view remains intact. High tier devices apps could be the Ferraris, but the real success is the Ford-T, providing a nice experience everybody can afford in terms of cost & usability. Steve Jobs could be a nice "ferrari" type innovator, but the huge mass market impact should come from carriers (the communication Henry Ford's) if they do not throw the towel :-)

If you consider this post interesting to be shared, remember you can tweet this post using the button in the upper-left button :-)

Wow, included as vendor in a GSMA flyer to promote RCS !!!

We were really amazed as appearing listed in a flyer to promote Rich Communication Suite technology with 6 vendors listed as "please ensure the visit to the following...".
We are appearing with other fantastic start-up's, even some of then were start-up's decades ago :-)
Just kidding :-)
Now, seriously, we are glad to see that our product gets some attention, and is complementary to the core IMS and device/desktop client suppliers offering.

Mobile Banking using RCS, finally a common way to deliver mobile CRM

When we explained our RCS Solution GW we said it was conceived to create social media interfaces, CRM mobile channels, not intrussive advertisement, and other solutions as TV remote clients. Well, we showcase in this demo how RCS can help banks to deliver a very intuitive easy to use self-service for mobility. (It also applies to other types of companies needing to provide their customers a mobile access).



The clear adavantadge of this approach is that using a near coming "universal service" as RCS people will learn once this kind of interaction (as in the past most of mobile users learnt SMS) and will become the most natural way for mobile data services, compatible with all device tiers.

feedback welcomed
solaiemes RCS team

Meet us at Mobile World Congress 2010!

This is our 3rd year exhibiting at Mobile Innovation Zone of the MWC (stand Hall 7-IZ12, download floorplan). Since we were a new born start-up till today we grew our portfolio, have some references but still needing funding, partners and potential customers to boost. MWC for us is "the event".
We are particulary motivated this year, as it seems carriers are finally decided (or at least, it seems so) to compete in new services under common user experience using Rich Communication Suite, and we are developing a platform to allow 3rd parties to create services on top of RCS.
We are also showcasing our mobile video framework to mash-up live mobile video from mobile to web application (enterprise and social media).

Eager to know about you !!!

Interviewed at Techistan

It is nice to find people with entrepreneur spirit trying to find out what is happening at other side of the ocean :-), I was interviewed for a 5 minutes podcast by Suzanne Bowen (her twitter) and it was transcripted and podcasted the audio at Techistan.com.
Glad to see how people is interested in what is being cooked to improve communications, no matter where and who is doing that.
Thx Suzanne

Unveiling our RCS Solution Gateway, merging telco and web services

Being small start-up it is always difficult to decide which level of product roadmap disclosure is the optimal one, if you do not share your vision and some level of execution you are never paid attention from customers and potential investors, if you disclose too much, powerful companies can dedicate their "army of coders" to create alternatives.
Well, in the pdf/ppt below we explain our goal to easily create services on top of RCS.

We look for a win-win-win scenario:

- subscribers getting very different services (CRM, social media connectors, smart advertisement) with a only one client (RCS) being also a personal communicator
- telcos enabling a lot of services very easy to adopt to their subscribers, and compatible with all device tiers, and without the need of interoperating telco infrastructure with 3rd parties services.
- 3rd parties service providers & developers, able to reach critical mass of mobile users with a single client being "evangelized" by carriers.

previous posts include videos of use cases implemented for demo: rcs-tv , rcs-twitter

Whatever feedback, more than welcome,
solaiemes team

If you like the video (only in that case) remember you can tweet this post using the button in the upper-left button :-)

Unified Communications? and the TV? RCS to provide seamless communication

Hi,
Just releasing a new demo of use case of our RCS Solutions Gateway. In this case the platform instances "cloud" RCS clients to mirrored with IM/file sharing apps at TV side (with TV Widgets) or at STB/deco side (using MHP and other frameworks).
In this demo you can see how mobile and TV subscriber can initiate a instant messaging session, and even the mobile can share a pic to be displayed in the TV by the receiver. Soon live video from mobile will be added.
Using Rich Communication Suite (with a live IMS core) carriers offering triple play can also offer communication capabilities to the "TV" in a very simple way.



No need to modify the RCS client at mobile, or the IMS/RCS core to deploy this use case.

If you like the video (only in that case) remember you can tweet this post using the button in the upper-left button :-)

solaiemes team

For those who do not believe that "telcos" & internet can walk together...RCS

Hi,
We are glad to post new demos and unveil a new product, with RCS Solutions Gateway, 3rd parties will have the capability to create mobile channels using a common carrier or service provider feature, RCS. In this demos we use our platform and our own first version of droid client to show how a Social Media connector is possible to reach mobile customers with RCS, both are working under a live IMS/RCS Core. The idea was demonstrating that internet space and carrier space can co-exist and help each other.




If you like the video (only in that case) remember you can tweet this post using the button in the upper-left button :-)

soon more demos

Help us to create a shared Q&A (Faq list) about Solaiemes

We try to interact with customers, potential customers, partners, analysts, media, and people eager to know more about us.
We found specially useful Twitter, as a way to make quick questions publicly or privately using DM's. Recently I knew about Formspring.com and created our profile there, it is a fantastic method to create a Q&A list that remains public, it allows anonymous questions and also people disclosing their identities in a form of just using Facebook connect.
We invite you to help us to create an interesting question list, we will try to answer accurately this "user generated interview". You can use English and/or Spanish to type your questions.
Perhaps some questions could be impossible to answer due to NDA's with other companies or internal information not able to be disclosed, but we like tranparency and will do our best to answer all your questions. You can post your questions here :-)

2009 vs 2010, what we did and what we want to do.

Last december we posted about our goals and just checking the accomplisments we are partially happy. We survived a very tough year, with dramatically reduced innovation budgets in telcos and big companies. The common feeling was "wait and see", both, for big companies needing technology and new services to launch and also for VC.
About ou goal of being funded from international VC, we were contacted by several VC's and also we contacted a few ones and we learnt "for A rounds, VC's invest only where they have office", then, we focused in our portfolio, trying to increase references and revenue and will come back to them again :-)
Other important goal, partnerships with big telco suppliers, we explore it, it seems our product fits someone else, and in the very next future we could offer together new mobility and UC use cases. About other listed 2009 goals, public references for our LiveServe video solutions will be disclosed Q1-2010, and we were mentioned in analyst reports from 2 important firms.
We finally become a Red Herring Top 100 Global last January.
We could not grow the staff but we managed to increase the revenue while saving costs, and increase brand awareness combining few events and the use of social media.
We invest in our new product, RCS Solution Gateway, to approach coming telco opportunity to the world of the web for CRM, Social Media and advertisment.
It was a difficult decision, as with limited resources, the RCS platform development delayed the global cloud/saas offering of our previous platforms, but, for sure, we are not forgetting our vision about communication solutions as a service and our RCS platform is including this vision (API's) from the beginning.

We are participating in the RCSdevChallenge next January, and unveiling our RCS portfolio coming Mobile World Congress. Stay tunned, also unveiling RCS client, no mobile, no desktop :-)
2009 was a hard year, and survived, and 2010 looks better, as the pic tries to describe, now we see the goal bigger, more space to score: our portfolio getting awareness and with sinergies with other suppliers, VC's needing to invest againg the new funds raised, M&A activity last months shows the big players are moving to strengthen their portfolios and most important, carriers needing to offer compelling service to compete with internet style service providers.

We strongly believe 2010 will be a very important year for Solaiemes, the long telco developement/sales cycle was completed in our first products and is being monetized, and for new "challenge/venture", the RCS, we are arriving just in time, no too soon, no too late.
Yes, we know some people think 2010 will be similar of worse than 2010, but it is better to focus in working everyday to exceed expectations during 2010, isn't it?
Let us dream !!!

Start-up's marketing, Twitter helps !

I suppose it would be very nice to have full pockets to have resources for marketing and brand awareness, but being a technology "bootstrapping" start-up, resources are very limited :-)
We have to decide each brand/marketing action valuable to spend our restricted marketing budget, and our own time.
We learnt about social networks by doing, and started with Twitter shyly and being a bit skeptical, but now, our first tweet was written 18 months ago.
Today, we read in a Nurun (a global presence marketing & communication company) report (report available in spanish) that Solaiemes is the 4th spanish most "conversational" brand in Twitter. Of course we are not leading by number of followers (about 300, more or less as following but not symetrica at all) or number of tweets, mere activity, we are happy because we are well positioned just where we need, conversation.
We used Twitter to announce products, our blog posts, our slideshare keynotes, and try to generate debates. We could create conversation with analysts, other start-up's, potential partners and costumers, communication managers of very nice companies able to provide feedback, where we suppose cold door email will never work, it seems tweeter is not a cold door if used properly, with non invasive style.
Of course we are aware that we should keep posting, creating presentations to share producs ot views, shooting video-demos of our portfolio, being at Facebook & Linkedin and of course, we need to update the website (be patient), but...Twitter becomes the circle around the communication strategy, and we recommend start-up's to use it, learning slowly but avoiding the risk of being considered spammer, or just 1 way emitter and use it to announce new info available in the other social or corporate communications channels.

Thanks Twitter for your help and thanks Nurun to just seeing us in the middle of so many brands using Twitter.

What about including Push to Talk in RCS ?

When talking about RCS (Rich Communication Suite) current features are Presence, Instant Messaging, VideoShare (enriched call) and file sharing...With all of them, using a "common use" a lot of applications and services could be offered on top, and Solaiemes is also working in a platform to make really easy for 3rd parties reach their customers using RCS.
But....we still miss the Push To Talk there.
Half duplex VoIP could be a great enabler for user generated content (UGC) to social media, voice alerts, and voice updates from social media and CRM universes.
Being triggered from the enhanced phonebook, Push To Talk is the missing feature to ensure the RCS success and complete the types of media directly reaching the web world from mobiles. PTT deserves a second chance to show its potential, more focused to subscriber <-> solution use cases system rather than subscriber <-> subscriber use case.

Come on !!! GSMA people...for mobility's sake, let's include PTT in the RCS specs !!!