WebRTC-Telco Monetization Webinar slides and poll analysis.

Thanks to all the attendants to our webinar about WebRTC-Telco Monetization and the feedback provided with the initial polls and a short final survey. You all can access to the slides here:



Also, we would like to share the initial poll results. Some key points:

• Most of the attendants consider that WebRTC is a technology that telcos may use.


• Almost half of responses consider "internal politics" the cause of telcos not using WebRTC.


• The telco applications of WebRTC are broad and not a clear preference about the focus.


• The poll suggests the convenience of starting to use WebRTC by Telcos asap, and in case of waiting for "something", the most relevant issue to be solved is the lack of WebRTC support in mobile/tablet platform, not Internet Explorer. It seems that the lack of support of WebRTC by IE is not a concern.

Feel free to contact us or provide additional feedback, by email, linkedin or just visiting our booth at #MWC14.

Solaiemes to exhibit at MWC 2014.

As previous years Solaiemes is  exhibiting at the Mobile World Congress 2014. Our stand will be located in the Spanish Pavilion in the Congress Square in the corridor communication the Halls 4 & 5. In the Pavilion our Stand is the number 14.

Solaiemes is presenting its new products with the focus on helping telcos to monetize new enablers as RCS (Rich Communication Services) and tools as WebRTC.
Solaiemes has the right portfolio at the proper time to market but needs strong commercial partnerships (you know, in this telco world size matters) and/or get additional funding for the growth stage. We are interested in meeting:

- Telcos: mobile, fixed, triple play or even OTTs eager to integrate RCS/joyn in their offerings with monetizaton platforms and also interested in WebRTC to generate telco revenues.
- Investors: yes, we are looking for some fuel to accelerate our growth. Yes, we know that Spain is no a sexy country for VC's and telco technology is not the preferred area for investors, but we keep trying :(
- Partners: complementary technology providers or integrators wanting to pioneer RCS and WebRTC in their countries integrating our solutions.
- M&A guys from companies interested in expanding portfolio through selected acquisitions.

If you want to schedule a meeting contact us at: mwc (at) solaiemes (dot) com
See you there !!

New Webinar: WebRTC Telco Monetization. WebRTC as Telco opportunity. Tuesday, Feb, 11th.

After the experience of our first webinar about RCS monetization and the positive feedback received we were encouraged to repeat :-)

Several RCS Monetization attendants confirmed that they changed their mind regarding RCS business opportunity or the how the deployment strategy shoud be prepared.

We think it is a good idea to prepare a new one covering the monetization strategy of WebRTC by telcos.

Our aim is to dismantle "mantras" regarding WebRTC as it is only a challenger technology for telcos and not a technology that telcos can use to enhance its communication services portfolio.

YES! WebRTC offers telcos a lot of potential and we want to explain how WebRTC will benefit telcos and how new telco services WebRTC based could get Monetized.

Please, join the WebRTC Telco Monetization. WebRTC as Telco opportunity on Tuesday 11th, February. 

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1446721263229590018
  

RCS Monetization Webinar, the slides.

We started yesterday a series of Webinars with a RCS Monetization one. Thanks to all the attendand online and offline to the seminar for their time and providing feedback with previous questions and a short final survey. We decided to make public the slides as we are pioneering this area, we know some competitors will be copying our pitch soon. It would not be the first time but copying slides is easy, make it happen is more difficult :-)


If you want to make it happen and think RCS can be a monetizable service from the beginning, visit as at Mobile World Congress!

Solaiemes Webinar. RCS Monetization & API blue ocean. Tuesday Jan, 21st.

Solaiemes pioneered the vision of RCS as a Platform to make feasible for telcos to evolve from SMS but keeping the B2C/A2P capabilities of monetization and customer engagement.

Now, Solaiemes, 1st available RCS network API (UNI, plug&play on top of whatever RCS core solution, IMS and not-IMS based) is expanding the VAS layer with additional platforms to speed-up RCS adoption by marketers and also increase the possibilities of engagement of customers.

In the past months we have been presenting VAS platforms using RCS API to create new revenue streams, now we want to explain in a Webinar our vision and compare with what OTTs are doing, and define an strategy to make the telco IP messaging a strong player & how to do it. Join our Seminar.

Solaiemes RCS API supporting WebSockets. Why it matters.

We are receiving as of lately many questions about WebSockets and Telco APIs.

Solaiemes started implementing WebSockets interfaces accross all our infrastructure in 2013, with working prototypes available since the summer. We are sharing now that experience to help the operators looking at this topic. Most likely WebSocket support will be included in the RCS OMA API spec soon and Solaiemes wants, among other API flavours, offer the standardized for the customers requiring it.

In our experience, WebSockets is first and foremost useful for Telco API developers as an additional notification channel. Existing notifications can be reused without any change, because WebSockets provide a native framing mechanism and it is agnostic about the format. Existing notification processing code can be reused.

This approach makes even more sense as in many cases WebSockets won't be available (for example, behind some corporate firewalls), so it is advisable to keep existing channels (native messaging, long polling, etc.).

From the developer point of view, it is just needed to plug (or activate) javascript plugins that automatically manage the transport used (long polling, web sockets, etc.), such as Atmosphere, Socket.io, etc.

On the infrastructure side, a new notification transport is added, but existing APIs can be kept, as REST or whatever format, because there is no need to move the whole API package to WebSockets.

Solaiemes has also API invocation over WebSockets implemented. It is very easy to transform an HTTP-based invocation model (REST or pseudo-REST) to WebSockets, but in our experience the benefits are not so evident, specially as WebSockets are not as ubiquitous as other HTTP mechanisms and scalability solutions do not play well with WebSockets in some scenarios.

WebSockets may be used where its use has a positive impact but not in the cases that its applicability is a mere "reinventing the wheel" without no straightforward advantage.

New minisites explaining our RCS API + VAS Platforms & WebRTC portfolios.

We created a couple of months ago a "back to school" style mini-site to explain the concept of RCS as a Platfom and detail our products related.

Past 2 weeks we created 2 additional mini-sites with "boards" to explain additional pieces of our portfolio.

To explain the WebRTC for Telcos approach the new minisite explains our WebRTC portfolio showing the webphones and RCS web clients and also the SDK to create easily services, all of them based in our WebRTC-Telco Gateway product.

Also we included the powerful concept of the "WebRTC Telcos Services portal with a demo of portal with innovative services.

And finally, a third minisite explains our vision of "chats in your apps / in-chat services". How group chat becomes thanks to the RCS API in something cooler and more useful.

We envision the group chat as something dynamic, where "chat based bots" can be included temporarily to provide fun (chat based games) or productivity (recorder, translator, group access to a travel agent, etc).
You can see the web "Apps in your Chats"

We are working to also refurbish our corporate site www.solaiemes.com :-) Hope to be on time for the coming Mobile World Congress, we need to make clear what we have to help telcos to keep a relevant role.

2013 recap and...Happy New Year 2014!

We want to wish all of you but specially to our customers, partners, followers, fans and prospects :-) a happy new year.



2013 Recap:
2013 was a challenging year for us. Finally the carriers are taking seriously that they need a messaging alternative, that SMS is great but right now, a multimedia messaging using all the possibilities of the smartphone devices and the speed of 3G and 4G networks are needed.

Also, the new messaging market with free/very cheap alternatives forces service providers to think about how to monetize, and they are realizing that the potential is in the VAS, using the API. We were pioneers in this vision and were awarded by the GSMA 2 years ago, now we see our competitors repeating our pitch.

We can say we have API GW being trialed succesfully in 4 tier-1 telcos and expect some of them going to commercial models. While competitors are trying to replicate our vision we are thinking in the next layer of value, specific servers for messaging monetization as RCS Store, RCS Developer Portal and RCS Ad Server to introduce first time the contextual advertising using the chat as media.
Also we are reinventing the group chat with the "apps in your chats" concept. Telcos are in the crossroad between becoming pipe or instead to become "real service providers" offering new services that could add revenue, our goal is to help them to stay relevant and keep a role in future communications.

Also this year 2013 was the year of WebRTC and we started to create our own technology, initially to complete the RCS API GW and put voice and RCS videoshare on the internet browser without plugings but finally we extended to a full WebRTC-Telco GW with an SDK enabling the development of innovative new Telco and Telco bridging OTT services. We can say we are already competing in tier-1 telcos RFQs with this product too.

But 2013 is coming to and end and we have some goals we could not match. We were unable to raise a growth VC round (1.2-2 M€) we need to move the company to the next stage by attending and converting many of the presales opportunities we are finding. In spite of the change of mind of some telcos, now keen on working with small companies, to compete in others with need some muscle. Being a tech company based in Spain is not easy at all and sometimes even playing at home is complicated :-(

Solaiemes took off but this coming 2014 we expect to get onboard a new investor that could add the fuel needed to reach the cruising height or a strong tech company with complementary portfolio as partner for go to market.

In the short-term we expect all of you visiting our booth at Mobile World Congress 2014.

Happy New Year 2014
the Solaiemes team

Multiparty RCS Translator. More on "apps in your chats"

Have a look to another demo of the concept "apps in your chats".
Have a look how easy could be have a chat when all the participants have not a common language, they add the translation services as a member of the chat, and get instant translation of each message.

Telcos may realize that messaging is not trying to replicate each OTT messaging new feature but exploring new blue oceans in the use of messaging.



Credits: Solaiemes RCS network API Gateway, Google Translate API, Newpace RCS core and Silta RCS Android Client

WebRTC is the new telcos gold. See how!

We have been following the debate WebRTC vs Telco and our position is that WebRTC is a very useful tool for telcos. WebRTC makes easy to expose their communication assets reaching the internet browsers as endpoints and also with the proper SDK as a key instrument to innovate creating new services that could be monetized.

We created a demo of WebRTC Telco Service portal, allowing telcos to sell not only voice minutes for outgoing calls but also creating a new business model. A possible new revenue could come from selling incoming minutes while allowing people to call you browser using alphanumeric codes or just being authorized using Facebook Connect. This is a way to protect the privacy of your phone number while allowing others to call you. YES, it means telcos taking advantage from internet companies stuff as well.



Our WebRTC-Telco GW product has now an SDK allowing to develope telco-WebRTC services easily. We have designed 3 services and create a Service Portal that telcos can deploy today as are UNI and can be connected to whatever IMS or VoIP server.

To create a funny and customizable user interface based on widgets we used Gridster.js  a framework from Ducksboard.

RCS "in-chat apps". Multiplayer chat based game demo.

Most of messaging apps are only taking care of person to person messaging only, Solaiemes thinks this is not a "finish-line" but a "start-line".
We created a demo using our RCS API Gateway, the pioneer RCS API in the market to create a multiplayer chat based "trivial-like" game. It is added to a group chat and allows you to start playing with your friends, and after finishing it disconnects from the group. Easy to play with.



It has been created using GSMA joyn innovation accelerator API environment, nothing else.

Which messaging app could be more open today to 3rd party innovation?

Our advice on RCS: telcos, launch soon, launch cloud, launch with API to allow developers to flood of content the RCS platform :-)

Credits: Solaiemes RCS network API Gateway, Newpace RCS core and Silta RCS Android Client

RCS Service Store, how chat can become alternative to apps.

Just to complete the series of RCS as a Platform vision we just uploaded the final demo explaining the concept for RCS Service Store. Our RCS API GW (RCS Solution Gateway) includes the management database to create "the store" of the rich chat based cases created with the API.

The "Store" has an API to get integrated with RCS clients or create Store-Apps independent from clients. Easily, the users may search for RCS services (banks, customer care, chat based games, learning tools, info services) and add them as a contacts. From the "app-store" to the "service-store". It would mean a new concept of app, not consuming memory, no needing updated in the mobile side, just a contact in the phonebook.

Greatest things are the simple ones. See how it works watching this video.



As usual, any feedback more than welcomed

RCS as a Platform. Concept, deploying API easily and Monetization case. New Solaiemes site to explain the how to.

Solaiemes has published a minisite "RCS as a platform by Solaiemes" to make easier to understand the potential of instant messaging as a la platform, how to deploy in days the network API and offer it to the developers and how to monetize "RCS" using as context for advertisement third party cases created with the API.

Yes, RCS has a business case, and can be the initial point for telcos take a slice of the cake of contextual advertising business.

Telcos, it'stime to get down to work and we can help :-)

Rich Communication 2013 event. Our view.

We attended the Rich Communication conference in Berlin last week. Juan, our co-founder participated in the WebRTC workshop chaired by Alan Quayle, you can find the slides here. We participated in 2 pannels discussing how RCS deployments were going and the potential of the API to go beyong the person to person messaging case.

Regarding the WebRTC vs RCS, it was explained how WebRTC is a technology that broadens the telco communication reach for services as voice and RCS media (videoshare and IP Videocall). We made live demos involving WebRTC to provide media in RCS clients, also to create Webphones.

During the 2 days of conference along the many keynotes and panels it was clear that RCS is happening, in different ways but happening. The industry is just intruducing the A/B testing for RCS, some telcos are testing with "joyn" common brand and others are introducing RCS as natural evolution of SMS/MMS. RCS UI is combining RCS chat/file transfer and using SMS/MMS when the other party is not RCS enabled. It was the case of the service explained by Vodafone & Wit.

Also, it is interesting to see potential dual deployments on-net + OTT RCS to try to expand the RCS user base until latecomers will be launching. It was the case of Sprint in the US.

Another of the hot topics discussed was the IMS vs non-IMS deployments. As Brent from Newpace said during his presentations, the last editions of the events the presence of the big NEVs trying to sell the "big IMS concept" was overwhelming and this year the RCS hosted solution vendors took charge of the show.

API, API, API....network API...YES! Not only us but several vendors and telcos emphasized the role of the API and the need to open RCS communication to B2C and other person to "something" experiences. Deutsche Telekom & Orange talked about the Paris to Berling hackaton.
The winner in Berlin was Yeppt and we all saw the video of how a web based service can use joyn to add additional channel for their users to interact with their service.

Other speakers as Naren from DT stated the important role of RCS API with examples of human-service instant messaging interaction.

Some telcos with not yet deployed RCS talk about their plans, how they are issuing RFQs, how they plan to use RCS not only as messaging tool but replacing/improving the A2P business they made along the years with the SMS. We see that our vision is shared with telcos (and we fear that now also with competitors).

In our opinion this was the best edition of the event. There was not taboo to talk openly about OTT competitiors as Whatsapp and analyze the opportunities as B2C comms that Whatsapp is not promoting yet. This a very good opportunity for telcos to take the lead there.

Finally, we are starting a newsletter, please join our mailing list here

UPDATE: find a full review of the event by Alan Quayle here .