Solaiemes

Explaining RCS, will RCS become the killer enabler?

2009-11-03T17:12:00.003+01:00

We just made a presentation using the minimalist Lawrence Lessig style. It's about the need of simplifying communication tools for mobile and unified communication and at the same time provide rich experience and the possibility of interaction with everybody and "everything" as your social media profiles and your providers customer care.
For us RCS, Rich Communication Suite is "THE ENABLER", we are working to enrich their potential use cases and want to help to RCS to be understood, adopted by carriers and have the people accepting and using as a "natural" rich communication method in the next future.

eComm Highlights (part II)

2009-10-30T17:02:00.003+01:00

Keeping up with the previous two days a fantastic day at eComm at Amsterdam, ideas pouring, challenging audience. Politically incorrect but valid things said on stage, you will never hear that in other events. A bunch of quick notes summarizing the first and last days:

Martin Geddes, BT: "goodbye minutes, welcome moments"
Current voicemail (automatic messages left by IVRs, etc.) ineffective: relies on customer acting, doing + poor user experience + inefficient + unsecure (how to re-authenticate customer call back? how do I know message is from tax agency and not from a fraudster?)
What can be done to e.g. enhance voicemail:
1. use better existing channels (e.g. phweet)
2. insert/update/delete APIs (chargable events) + high definition audio + personalise interactions + smarter containers for messages + add multimodal channels

Sample revenue opportunities for new-think voicemail:
• connect: message informing or asking to contact.
• interact: avoid CRM call by using smart containers (e.g. data in the message avoids the call).
• transact: collect payment on behalf of the enterprise.

James Enck mCapital:
Future is not going to be a repeat of the past. World is not going to be the same.
So ... what do we have to say about all this? Are we a serious industry allocating capital to Kindle, iPhones, etc.?
Greatest value will be found in solving real problems (some of which we haven't found yet): Awareness + engagement + investment + reorientation.

J. Salanave, IDAE: Telecom in 2015: death or bazaar
Future scenario for telcos? Model possible outcomes as a 2x2 matrix:
• Telecom market expanding vs declining-stagnant
• Competition integration model: concentrated-vertical vs fragmented-horizontal
4 possible outocomes
• Silent death: surviving of the fattest, perhaps bailouts from governments and becoming utilities
• Market shakeout: service providers entities mixing device partnerships, spectrum, brands. Probably forced by investors.
• Clash of giants: vertical integration + optimized content + RCS + succeeds.
• Generative bazaar: open model prevails.
Bazaar means do-it-yourself connectivity? No, some entity will be needed to provide interconnection (key aspect) and other services.

Rudolf van der Berg, Logica: "almost everything in telco services is wrong"
Telcos not satisfied being an utility, they see no value being vodafone, they invest in being apple/google/etc.
All telcos offer the same, stuck in a standard value proposition. Telcos fail at innovation.
But ... other approaches are possible and successful in the real marketplace: Free.fr: everything for 30€. How? Keep back-office simple; finances and business cases are simple and transparent, not faked; offer the best product; deny competitors competition on price or capacity. 1000 total staff, 850 staff in call centres.
How to copy free.fr? Accept you work for a telco. Think cool things. Simply billing with single contract + top ups.

G. Leonhard MediaFuturist.com :
Media future: Must transition from ego-system to ecosystem, and, by the way, driven by capitalism, not by goodwill or philanthropy. Price moving from expensive to cheaper (but not cheap enough) to flat rates and bundles. Pricing logic will flip: lower prices, ubiquitous access.
But content pricing and licensing can’t be solved without engaging ISP, advertising, right holders, social networks (recommendations, trend setting). Spotify solved it, paying 0,1 cents per song, but it might become a time bomb if there are no upper caps.

After these 2 last post, we will prepare for coming week a post explaining the view of Solaiemes about the Telecom trends, and the possible scenarios of next decade telco/communication industry, stay tunned, and remember, the debate is open

Jose Recio

eComm Highlights (part I)

2009-10-29T19:25:00.006+01:00

I am attending the eComm Europe event in Amsterdam, just amazed by the level of the speakers and the quality and rythm of the 15 minutes keynotes schedule.
Just writting this post (and additional one after the event with final thoughts) just to share some headlines and sentences to think about :-)

VoiceSage:
There are white spaces in the enterprises: communication-enabled services may help to surface them and optimize/monetize/ save costs. An edge perspective allows to surface this data. Simple example: allowing customers to confirm just a bit earlier may have big impacts in resources.

Nauiokas Park:
There is nothing wrong with being a dump pipe, capital structures will adapt to be cash flow driven.
Platform and APIs basically selling trust, technical capabilities are a must, but not enough.
Everything as a Service is coming (including banking). Future platforms blending identity + trust + messaging may allow that.

Mangrove:
Major disruptive driver in the last years: Telecom operators displaced to their rightful place in the eco-system: providers of the tubes. Capital models will have to change to adapt to that situation.

VURB:
Peering-up is the best way to cope with climate change, peak oil, financial crisis, ...

RJ Auburn - Voxeo:
To innovators: Get passionate or get out.
Voice is coming out, text is in. Kids and next generation don’t talk on the phone unless they have to, TXT is second nature to them. Communication pace is faster than voice now, customers want instantaneous answers, not wasting time waiting for IVR answers. No money in voice, cost saving in text (permits multitasking, voice not).
Building person to person communication based on bots and mash-ups. What happens with the existing phone applications?: look at IMified. Just use text instead of bots.

Jay Phillips - Voxeo:
If open source is communism … where is the proletarian?
Voice is not the application; it’s the spice to make the soup taste better.
Innovators to build lots of little voice experimental apps to find the right soup.
Voxeo open sourcing SIPMethod !!!

Jan Linden - Global IP Solutions:
H264 SVC codec for the Internet era.

Dean Bubbley - Disruptive Analysis: “LTE hostage of voice?”
IMS is the dead parrot in the Monthy Python sketch. Dead but nailed to the perch of LTE.
Is industry using LTE as the lever to persuade operators to deploy IMS? CS fallback: 2-3 seconds longer setup times (sometimes 8-10 seg, and double that for LTE-LTE calls). Drops data connection !!!. Extra capex in network.
And SMS on LTE? SMS was completely forgotten in LTE until it was too late. Fact is: You need SMS for backoffice operations (configuration, activations, passwords, prepaid top up, etc.) even if you use LTE only for data.

Sten Tamkivi - Skype: “peace, love and pstn”.
Skype processes 100 billion calls a year. Their view is that they are not taking revenue from telecoms, most of Skype minutes would never happen without Skype. 33% Skype calls include video.
Skype is for the people I actually want to talk to (average skype contact list is a single figure number). Somebody told Skype founders it would never happen because people don't have headsets, but people invested in headset to talk with their valued contacts.

To cover global needs, you need something relevant to developed (“peace and love” way of thinking, good voice quality, video, etc.) and emerging (PSTN, bad voice quality doesn’t matter so much, no video needed). Things like a MVNO focused on price and regular quality (long call setup, not very good audio, etc.) can’t be global (may succeed in emerging, but would be niche in
developed).

Voxygen:
Good user experience: calling a service number and directly listening what you wanted (e.g. ticket status, appointment confirmation), with no delay, no input of account, etc.
How much money wasted by couriers checking parcel delivery times, etc.?
Unlock that value !!!

Tomorrow more :-)

Jose Recio, VP Alliances

AVISG Tecnology for Multimodal Interaction explained

2009-10-27T09:45:00.007+01:00

When demonstrating the AVISG tecnology for mobile multimodal web interaction (see videos here) customers tell us about how can it be possible, how to synchronize real time voice and mobile web if mobile browsers are not AJAX enabled. The others concern is about the possibility of reusing their IVR/ASR/TTS. Basically the answers are: YES, Solaiemes AVISG can synchronize real time voice and web content with only xhtml capable devices and AVISG can use whatever pre-existing IVR or using cloud IVR's. But in order to explain better our technology and advantadge we just prepared a ppt product sheet to help architects of partners and final customers understand how AVISG can be combined with their offers or cover their needs.

Solaiemes featured in the Moriana Group IMS & RCS Report 2009

2009-10-13T11:38:00.005+02:00

Solaiemes has been featured in the vendors appendix of the Moriana Group IMS & RCS Report 2009.
Our vendor profile is included with other 13 companies profiles. We are very happy to see our company profile together big industry players as Intel, Huawei , ZTE among others, and see other 2 companies based in Spain (Almira Labs and Genaker) also listed.
We understood how difficult is entrepreneuring in technology in Spain with limited funding and it could help to boost VC operations when investors realized the important matters are vision and execution rather than company location :-)
Solaiemes aims to contribute with its vision to improve the mobility, convergence and UC, and participated in the last edicion of IMS forum, and believe IMS & RCS could have a key role, you can find our keynote here.

The Moriana Group (from it own about) specializes in the telecom service layer and next generation networks. Our focus is on: Service Delivery Platforms, Next Generation OSS/BSS, Convergent Charging and Billing, IMS, FMC, VoIP, WiMAX, IPTV, Triple Play Mobile Commerce and Advertising and other key technologies and services. Their mission is to help network operators and service providers to transform their business models, service offerings and network infrastructure to create new revenue streams and to meet the challenges of the competitive Telecom market and the growing pressure from Internet and Web 2.0 players.

Latest Solaiemes Company Profile presentation.

2009-10-05T14:50:00.005+02:00

In this company executive summary presentation we explain: "the problem" we are trying to solve, our approach, what is different and is a real enhancement, our aimed business model, and our portfolio and real use cases applications.

If you are interested in see the demos visit http://www.youtube.com/solaiemes
Feedback, comments, suggestions, more than welcomed.

RCS DevChallenge...carriers aiming a new paradigm?

2009-09-30T16:17:00.008+02:00

The GSMA launched a new competition, the RCS DevChallenge trying to boost mobile and pc solutions based on RCS specifications.
Rich Communication Suite is perhaps the last chance of carriers to keep a key role (not exclusive) in the solutions based communication market and avoid to become finally a mere dumb pipe.
The idea is about combining a lot of experiences around the address book, allowing to combined voice call with additional media sharing possibilities (audio files, live videoshare, instant messaging, etc).
The powerful Presence feature (IETF, 3GPP and OMA specs) is enabling a lot of rich "use cases always on" not being intrusive. Then Social Media interaction, CRM info from your suppliers, user generated content and distribution can be "re-invented" using a common interface, the RCS client. A compatible multi-platform RCS client, backed from powerful data core and IMS, coming as a native feature even in low-mid tier handsets, with API's to create clients and extensions (as app or web based) for personal computers will make RCS as successful as SMS.
a) most of devices enabled
b) a common interface being used for a lot of different use cases (no laziness to learn how to use, little effort, lots of possibilities).
We hope carriers take RCS seriously and forget their traditional trial/deploying times and push the accelerator. Solutions based on particular apps, not always multi-platform are being launched everyday, app-stores being opened...are not the win-win-win scenario. If services are not compatible for all types of users making difficult to arrive to critical mass of users, and when most of users reject the idea of installing an application and learn it for each communication experience they want to try.

The paradigm of "only carrier owned" services was not successful, carriers can not think and flawless execute all the use cases.
The opposite paradigm based on mere dumb pipe carriers and a ecosystem of applications with no standards and compability (the current one) is not being successful, it is not including the most of users.
A new paradigm is needed. It will be relying on both approaches, openness and also standarized enablers being shared to develope use cases on the top.

Of course, Solaiemes backs RCS, we will participate in the contest, our vision from the beginning was about communication services, using standard features, considering IMS as a very good enablers and being our first product, LIVESERVE, using combination services (videoshare).

Carriers, we look forward your feedback and positive collaboration.

1 or 2 Cameras ? that's the question

2009-09-21T11:33:00.005+02:00

Everybody knows how one of the most promising features of 3G technology, the videocall was not successful. Carriers, with initial limited 3G capacity launched low profile the videocall, it was more related to say "we have videocall" rather than "videocall is powerful, use it". Initial prices were too high and the person to person videocall is not really "the killer application".
A lot of services can be deployed using Videocall, IVVR (video IVR), user generated content for enterprise use cases, online journalism, multimedia blogging, law enforcement use cases and also social media interaction. But the initial "not correct promotion" just discouraged solution developers from innovating based on mobile video. The point is that as videocall/videoShare was not being used, right now, in order to reduce the cost of the handsets, the 3G devices are missing the front camera, not only useful for videocall/IMS_videoshare features but also for well known applications being ported to mobile.
When mobile bandwidth & stability capacity is ok, and some carriers (as 3G in UK) are welcoming 3rd Party VoIP/ToIP communication applications as Skype, now it is time to reconsider that the front camera is really a need, not only to use properly videocall and IMS videoshare, but also be used in traditional full multimedia and UC conceived applications.
In our opinions it makes no sense to add megapixels to the main camera, (not usefull when the device has not the zooming and optics of a photo-camera device) and remove from the design the front camera.
Just a mere example, when using a mobile to live broadcast a breaking new, the online journalist will need to appear him/herself during moments, and later...be streaming what is happening.

Carriers can still monetize videocall/videoshare when using them for added value use cases and other front camera based apps can help to monetize boost data plans.

Hope carriers and device suppliers reconsider this...WE WANT BOTH CAMERAS !!!

Solaiemes, semi-finalist at Qprize Business Plan competition

2009-09-04T09:30:00.008+02:00

Solaiemes has been selected as semi-finalist in the Europe/Israel region of the the global Qualcomm Ventures competition Qprize.
The competition rules set only early stage technology companies (< 1 M u$ in VC investment) could compete with their business plan to try to win convertible notes. The competition itself is a great chance to get awareness, as being shorlisted regional semifinalist means that the investment arm of one of the more innovative global companies as Qualcomm screened your business plan and consider feasible the entrepreneurs ideas and the how to convert them into a profitable business. We will be pitching in the regional semi-final next week, september, the 10th in London. Find here the list of Europe/Israel selected companies for the semi-final:

Solaiemes exhibiting at SIMO Network event

2009-08-31T16:40:00.005+02:00

Solaiemes will have a booth during the coming edition of SIMO Network, next 22-24 September in Madrid (at IFEMA exhibition center).
This year SIMO event, with long tradition in Spanish IT market is re-invented, from a large exhibition for everybody, this year it is transformed as a smaller exhibition area, but with a parallel powerful programme of conferences and pannels, focused in professional attendants.
We thank the organization for the free of cost booth as a prize for becoming finalist in past edition of "Premio Vivero" last january.
We will be showcasing our progress in our portfolio and explaining the next step, "cloud-ifying / SaaS-ifying" our offer as we understand what the market is asking for. A good opportunity to meet with partner & customers (and potential new ones) and also investors.
Suggestions, meeting requests, questions, very welcomed.

Update: the PR associated
http://www.simonetwork.com/es/cargarAplicacionSalaPrensa.do?identificador=117

Our view about trending topic: Cloud/SaaS market opportunities & challenges.

2009-08-19T17:36:00.005+02:00

In these slides we analyze our view about how IT is being changed with the irruption of Cloud & SaaS technology trends and the opportunities and also challenges it will offer for all players.

Solaiemes adds X+V support to its AVISG product family.

2009-08-06T11:51:00.007+02:00

X+V is a nice standard endorsed by the W3C initially developed by Opera and IBM some years ago to bring vocal functionality to web browsers. Among its nice features is to allow to embed
voice content (using VXML 2.0) on XHTML content. This allows to leverage current web applications architecture to bring also vocal and multimodal functionality to voice enabled web browsers.
The Solaiemes approach is to use the AVISG infrastructure to implement X+V using current web browsers that do not have any voice functionality and using current IVR systems. This allows bringing multimodal (web + vocal) interaction to users that just have a simple web browser and a vocal phone (POTS, mobile, SIP, VoIP, widgets enabling VoIP embeded in a webpage, etc). Then, we try to achieve the main objective of X+V standard, to leverage current web application architecture to provide both web and vocal content in a single document. This is done by means of AVISG that splits web content and pushes it to the simple web browser and vocal content and pushes it to the phone channel through a current IVR system.
This fresh approach to X+V greatly leverages current premise and cloud based IVR systems (or if you want it the other way around: leverages current self-customer care web systems) to provide multimodal interaction using simple clients already in place in most users PC Desktops, mobile phones, etc.

Soon, videos with use cases mobile and pc-browser using 3rd party cloud IVRs, stay tunned

by Saúl Labajo

Live mobile video to create Web apps using Cloud LSF. Video-tutorial.

2009-07-31T13:16:00.003+02:00

We are introducing with this videotutorial how easy is to create a customized (social or enterprise) solutions over a cloud shared platform based in LiveServe.
The video last 7 minutes and showcases the full proccess of adding a new user, creating the channel/app configuration: mobile numbers allowed to stream, channel design, channel layout and how to include external widgets or own web applications to fit properly the use case needed.
This approach very "platform" aims to get a base of developers/designers working on offer new features to their projects for their costumers in each field.

Hi carriers, do you want an innovative new "cash-cow" ?

2009-07-15T15:33:00.009+02:00

Yeapp !!! we believe a new cash-cow can help the telco industry to find new consistent revenue stream, take the most from past capex investment and "re-invent" carriers services not being pushed properly in the past, and what is more important, monetize the social media interaction, offering an easy way communicate dual way with web 2.0 concepts. Twitter is a clear example of how web 2.0 concepts need mobility for a proper "always on".
IP services are winning, carriers aim to offer standarized services rather than specific application to be portated from mobile platform to mobile platform....IMS and PTT Servers investments were done....USE THEM.

The fear of mobile 2 way radio (push to talk) cannibalizing voice and sms markets only applies when thinking in person-to-person use cases....but on the other hand why no using PTT for

- User generated content to the web (enterprise or social media) ?
- Quick interaction with IVR for customer care not needing permanent full-duplex connection ?
- Audio based non intrusive advertisment when combining PTT and presence ?
- New user alerts customized in lots of fields ?
- Receiving audio-read of your incoming emails ?
- Standarized audio-push from web to mobile and/or mobile to web?

Even owning high tier smartphones, people can not walk in the street, or travel permanently focused on what is happening on the display....Why not using from low to high tier devices PTT enabled to offer a wide range of amazing mobile use cases for your base of customers ???

Solaiemes platform VOXSERVE is designed to interoperate with whatever OMA PoC Server vendor to deliver a full range of mobile services.
We are eager to partners with Mobile Carriers, MVNO's and service providers feeling the need of keep a role enhancing Mobility, taking the most from past CAPEX investment and offering new capabilities to keep and improve customer loyalty.

Solaiemes is looking for Carriers offering Push To Talk service to partner a mobile Voice 2.0 revolution...contact us...win win and win your customers. Maybe Solaiemes become the farmer of your cash-cows :-)

Solaiemes, now, new Facebook Page

2009-07-06T22:59:00.002+02:00

Now, just trying to encourage to provide feedback and interactivity from customers, analysts, VC', supporters & fans, we just launch our Facebook page.
Social Media are becoming the key of communication with people, a 2 way channel when companies and people can talk about mutual needs and hoy to satisfy them, the place where companies learn about their customers, analysts and investors, and they can help companies to define the expected product/service portfolio, and improve processes.
Of course, we are going to keep active our site, this blog, and youtube , slideshare and twitter channels, and most probably Facebook page will be the melting pot to keep you fully updated and to collect your feedback.

Our Experience at HIT Telecom

2009-06-23T12:22:00.005+02:00

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

Voice 2.0 matters!

2009-06-02T12:12:00.004+02:00

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.

How can IMS help launching new services?

2009-06-01T16:06:00.003+02:00

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" :-)

Solaiemes Nominee at Global Mobile Awards EMEA tournament

2009-05-26T10:11:00.006+02:00

We are thrilled to announce that Solaiemes is a Nominee for the Mobile Innovation Grand Prix in the EMEA Tournament to be celebrated in Barcelona next 17-19 June during the HIT World Innovation event.
There are 10 nominees, 2 nominees in each category, we are competing in the Most Innovating Consumer Application or Service, the other nominee is Multiplied Media from Canada (a public listed company).

This is the first time we submitted to Mobile Innovation Awards with our usability platform AVISG that enable multimodal interaction based on common device features (combining voice call and browsing).

We are one of the smallest and youngest companies among the nominees and we look forward the event, pitch, networking opportunties becoming an opportunity to approach to VC and potential partners, to fuel our growth :-) and who knows, perhaps companies interested in our portfolio completing theirs.

In spite of evangeling a different approach to mobility to the current trend (based on high tier smartphones) we are happy that our "vision about next mobility trend" based on simpler devices and combining common features to build powerful and rich experience have been understood.

See you in Barcelona :-) next june

our official PR here

Solaiemes contribution to Open Source

2009-05-24T10:24:00.004+02:00

Our R&D department in its constant work of looking for better solutions than currently available have developed a new technology for improving performance when using GStreamer invocated from Java. Available solutions like gstreamer-java which are JNA based achieve the objective of allowing that communication but a very high cost in resources. When facing use cases with low communication needs it is useful, but when processing media, which requires a lot of communication, it becomes highly resource consuming.
Our new approach, JNI based, outperforms this solutions achieving in the best case a x100 performance increase. Not all are good news, Java abstractions are lost and is necessary to use pointers in Java like plain C. We consider it a cost effective trade-off.

This kind of innovation in technology is what makes Solaiemes products be so competitive in the market and proves that innovation pays off. We believe that releasing this software to the open software community will be beneficial for both parties, as we can cooperate to have a better solution and make it available to the world.

Find the code/additional info/forum here

Miguel A. Cabrera

Yahoo! Connected TV !!! Welcome

2009-05-08T21:13:00.006+02:00

The digital convergence is here, and come here to stay. Yahoo come back, and in our opinion with an interesting play. The Yahoo Connected TV seems a better way to integrate internet "on TV screen" than the approach of running a full browser. The TV Widgets seem "the more usable" way to make arrive interactivity and the web to the home TV's. Non-Geek people can find in this technology a low entry (complexity) barrier to finally BE DIGITAL. TV manufacturers as Samsung, Sony & LG started to integrate the platform and offer to the public, and giants of media and internet as CBS and eBay among others had developed their own widgets. Intel is also involved. Now, while in most European countries are discussing about how deploy "interactivity" with DTT, perhaps the Connected TV is the real fast track and what is more important, more open.
Solaiemes is focused in digital convergence, and we foresee interesting possibilities to make arrive communication solutions directly from communication devices to the "big screen" of non-geek people and also offer new complex and high added value combining multimedia communications between mobile and TV spaces.
Stay tunned, we will post further :-)

We submitted our entry :-) Mobile User Experince Awards

2009-05-05T18:18:00.004+02:00

We just submitted our entry to the MEX2009 (Mobile User Experience Awards Event).
In spite of most of entries are about mobile applications, our entry is about our AVISG platform, trying to improve usability from the network side, and make it compatible with as many devices as possible, not only for high-tier smartphone users. With AVISG whatever web/wap site become multimodal and could browsed using the voice.
You can rate our entry and comment. As usual, whatever feedback and suggestions more than welcomed.

Our first customer in the U.S.

2009-04-28T16:05:00.003+02:00

We are glad to unveil our first customer in USA, NoteVault. NoteVault is based in San Diego, California and could be considered the leader in voice-to-text mobile reporting solutions for the construction industry. NoteVault enables superintendents to quickly and easily report project activity from the field using nothing but their voice and their mobile phone and now they will add video for live reporting and assistance (using LiveServe).
NoteVault CEO, Peter Lasensky is a serial entreprenur with an impressive background in both, construction and communication technology. For us, this agreement is not only a commercial agreement, it proves that entrepreneurs can find synergies to deliver best in class use cases for their customers.

Oracle adquiring Sun, our opinion.

2009-04-20T15:25:00.005+02:00

Now, it is official, Oracle adquires Sun, amazing news. Both were innovating companies changing the world. The competition and the commodity HW becoming very powerful, Linux becoming highly reliable damaged the core business of Sun Microsystems but not its envision and innovative aim. From the start-up perspective, we hope JAVA and MySQL not being "frozen" or discontinued, as they are common plaforms for continous innovation :-)
Regarding the pure M&A perspective, we welcome the Oracle move. The Sun core business was progressively eroded and being the IBM-Sun merge difficult due to monopolistic control, Oracle had the chance to wait and try to adquire cheaper in a few months BUT TIME IS GOLD and they preferred to do now, congratulations. If both companies had a lot of sinergies, Oracle has a lot of cash for investment, if other players as Cisco are coming into new business (Unified Computing), then, no reason to wait.
We are sure about seeing more merges and adquisitions involving huge "flagship" companies along these economical downturn times. The lesson to be learnt by middle size companies, with positive cash, is about they have a huge ocean of opportunities, when VC funding becoming scarce, to expand their portfolio investing/merging/adquiring early stage technology or service companies. Perhaps if VC firms are being so shy for a while, time to M&A focused on SME to "upgrade" their role from supporting actor to the leading role.
Let us turn crisis into opportunity.

Solaiemes VP to speak at IMS 2.0 WorldForum

2009-04-18T00:10:00.005+02:00

Luis Valencia, our IMS Products VP is one of the selected speakers of the 6th IMS 2.0 WorldForum next 28-30th April in Barcelona.
Luis will be introducing the keynote "What does the End User Want and How Can IMS Fit the Bill?" and later participating in the pannel "Strategies to Addressing the End User’s Needs from IMS".
Solaiemes learnt from final potential and early adopters "communication solutions" users what they need from the current and future networks. Multimedia capabilities enable a lot of added value use cases, both enterprise/government and mass market fields, eager to be adopted. The lack of compatible services (too much focused the market on device applications, with no compatibility with different mobile OS) and the unknown cost of data traffic involved with the service were two big stones in the middle of the road.
Fortunately, now, RCS initiative and the each time more extended "flat rate and/or stepped semi-flat rates" billing data traffic will help to boost IMS and got their maximum potential.
Solaiemes is one of the companies believing in the future of IMS, developing Application Servers to provide "communication solutions", premise and mobile_cloud/hosted, making real use cases of VideoShare, PTT, Presence, VoIP and VideoIP in mobile / convergence spaces with particular focused on mobile/web2.0 interaction. We are pleased to share this important forum with speakers and delegates from hugest carriers as Telefonica, France Telecom, TeliaSonera, Telenor, KPN, telecom top suppliers as Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, and also succesful mobile start-up's colleagues.