The killer app for mobility appears to be, well, mobility itself. Rather than, say, enabling a dishwasher that can ring your cell phone when it’s full, the trend toward so-called “blended services” is converging on the appeal of being able to take with you what you already know and love.
Blended services go beyond bundling to unite and manipulate applications and content from television, home or office PCs, video conferencing devices or any other source. For instance, an IMS-based end-user application from Alcatel-Lucent, “Multimedia Instant Conferencing,” blends IM, presence, application-sharing, and VoIP/video conferencing across mobile and wired networks, a boon for enterprise productivity. But it’s the wireless component — anywhere, anytime access to any of those services — that really gives it legs, so to speak.
Carl-Henric Svanberg, president and CEO at Ericsson, quantified the trend succinctly: "Broadband is opening up multimedia services, both fixed and wireless. ... The killer [mobile data] application is being able to access everything you have today in the fixed world, wherever you are."
That's the idea behind Nortel Networks' launch of new SIP and IMS-ready applications, designed for "the era of hyperconnectivity." The offerings include Web services, FMC and Web-portal customization applications which can integrate multiple networks — telco wireline, wireless or cable — to carry IP-based communications like e-mail, video and instant messaging to any device. Users can forget about which device is needed to access which network, because the service contains all the intelligence needed to make those decisions behind the scenes. And one application for business users will let carriers integrate their services directly onto a business's Web site, like presence, messaging and click-to-connect, for easier use.
In another recent development on the business side, Verizon Communications Inc. at NXTcomm took the wraps off three FMC offerings that are aimed at allowing people to take existing business processes and make them mobile. Wireless Office for SMBs is a hosted solution that extends four-digit dialing, call control functions and other PBX features to the handset. PBX Mobile Extension connects with an existing PBX system to provide a single phone number that rings simultaneously on a user's office, home and cell phone, consolidates voice mail from multiple devices and extends PBX functions. Mobile Conference Connection gives Blackberry and Windows Mobile users a mobile conferencing portal to initiate meetings, send e-mail invitations and add participants to conference calls. Users also can join audio calls by having a conference call bridge "dial out'' to contact them. All will be available later this year.
Of course, this access-it-anywhere trend also applies to residential services.
Service providers are embracing the concept with recent high-profile launches. AT&T Inc. CEO Randall Stephenson announced the AT&T Video Share service during the NXTcomm keynote address. The service allows users to show the people they’re speaking with what they see, enabled via a special mobile handset that hosts a SIP client. AT&T has billed Video Share as the first commercial IMS service in the United States, and the upshot of the launch is that it will soon be part of a blended service, a full three-screen strategy of fixed/mobile convergence. Toward the end of the year people will be able to stream to a PC and eventually to a television.
Speaking at NXTcomm, Ed Zander, president and CEO of Motorola Inc., said television and the handset will be the two most transformational devices going forward. "Television is where you get the content, and the mobile device is where you take it." To that end, Zander also announced that “follow-me TV" is in the works at Motorola, which will allow a person to port content around to multiple screens via a DVR-style interface. It will also enable video-sharing on the soon-to-come RAZR II. "As the networks ramp up to accommodate this, the best is yet to come," he said. "You will make the content work for you, instead of you working for the content."
Alcatel-Lucent Ltd. www.alcatel-lucent.com
AT&T Inc. www.att.com
Ericsson www.ericsson.com
IDC www.idc.com
Motorola Inc. www.motorola.com
Nortel Networks www.nortelnetworks.com
Tekelec www.tekelec.com
Verizon Communications Inc. www.verizon.com
