Friday, February 29, 2008
Artilium’s Simon Wood discusses the company’s ground-breaking presence solutions by podcast
PODCAST: Is Mobile & Location The Dream Team? Or Are We Forgetting The Pivotal Role Of Presence?
Author: Peggy Anne Salz
In-Brief: Knowing the exact - or even the approximate - location of a person is just half of the battle when it comes to delivering appropriate content on the fly. Simon Wood, VP Program Management at Artilium, a provider of enhanced mobile communications solutions based around unified communications, walks us through importance of presence and his path-breaking ideas around a “semantic priority” to determine our presence and preference in real-time. Think mobile Web meets Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web.
Location-based services are soooo yesterday. Now the race is on to provide a complete suite of applications built on the convergence of services as varied as location-based services, social networking, mobile search, and web 3.0 technologies. Put simply, the end-game is about offering connected multimedia experiences including information, entertainment, social networks, and navigation. [Nokia “gets” this. In fact, during a recent mobile search conference organized by Visiongain, Jussi-Pekka Partanen, Nokia’s head of mobile search, stressed the importance of location capabilities (such as GPS) described precisely how location will unite the physical, virtual and social worlds we live in. ]
But location is just part of the equation. Presence, and the systems that will manage it, will be core to location-based services and sit at the center of how we will experience and organize our lives across platforms and devices. More importantly, it will form the foundation for effective mobile advertising and services delivery.
This is the view (or rather, the vision) of Simon Wood, VP Program Management at Artilium, a provider of enhanced mobile communications solutions based around unified communications. I caught up with Simon to discuss context-aware services, personalization, presence and Artilium’s recent acquisition.
Presence and service scenarios: Forget the desktop definition. Presence in mobile is about more than status; it’s about customized connectivity and a bridge to more holistic and personalized mobility services. “By having a richer view of the user’s current environment, current circumstances and current state of presence, you can [deliver] personalization dynamically [and] in an intelligent way.” The slew of “Find me Follow Me” services on the market today already combine the concepts of time-based presence and location.
But they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Services could be delivered differently depending on context and the company a user keeps. “At certain times of the day, I might want certain calls from certain groups of people to be handled in one way, and another time of day in a different way.” Mobile advertising, for example, wouldn’t just need to fit with the user’s location; it would have to be delivered in an intelligent manner than matches the user’s status, mode and personal requirements for message delivery.
The Semantic (mobile) Web: Simon is developing a systematic and automatic approach to presence that can “decide” which expressions of presence are more relevant than others. In many ways, it is similar to the work in progress on the semantic Web. “You have a way of describing what information is being presented, so you can automatically work out how relevant that information is and I think it’s exactly the same concept applied to enhanced mobile presence. [In mobile] we’re getting a wider set of information, a wider variety of feeds, and much richer environment. You need to be able to manage that richness, that extra level of information and from there, be able to pull out really what’s important and being able to do that automatically so that you’re not relying on human intervention to change the delivery of those services. It has to be automatic and it has to be convenient for the subscriber.”
Open Web: Mobile operators are well equipped to deliver location-based and presence-aware services. But they’re not the only ones. “We’re moving into a new open world [and] we’re seeing more operators trying to get out of their walled gardens. As they [operators] become more open, the opportunities widen to deliver services across a larger, more connected subscriber base….In terms of delivering those services, I still think the operators have a very strong play in those areas but there’s also growing benefits for having that service wider than just tied to a network operator.
News: At MWC, Artilium snapped up Trisent Communications, a company specialized in LBS technology that enables mobile network operators to deliver services to subscribing customers based on the geographic location of their mobile phone. In a nutshell, the acquisition will complement Artilium’s ARTA Service Delivery Platform to allow operators to rate, charge and deliver services combining location, presence, commerce and social networks. (Background: Trisent’s technology, the Tri-Cell Intelligent Location System, enables real-time tracking service like GPS (Global Positioning System), but does not use satellites or require equipment to be installed on the network. The technology works by using standard phone handsets.)
As Robert Marcus, CEO of Artilium, said in a press statement: “By combining location with presence and status, consumers can see the availability of the people they want to reach, mobile network operators can provide contextually aware services, and brands can better personalize mobile experiences.”