Solaiemes, now, new Facebook Page

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

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!

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Solaiemes signs the Open Cloud Manifesto

Solaiemes joined the Open Cloud Manifesto initiative. The ultimate goal of the Manifesto is to make the cloud as open and valuable as possible. Solaiemes believes in the cloud not only for enterprise or personal computing areas but mobility cloud based solutions.
We are happy joining the list of supporters including huge companies as Cisco, Sun, AT&T, Telefonica, IBM and also amazing start-ups.
We are glad to see spanish start-up's very focused in exploring the possibilities in the cloud as SaaS areas as EyeOS, Abiquo, Litebi and others also joining.
We strongly believe in openess as global opportunity and consider a huge step in the right way to find huge companies also supporting standards and looking for an extended community including start-up's of the ecosystem of "the cloud" that is being placed as "early stage". We think this "spirit of collaboration" will be a key point to succed both, technology and ecosystem.

To download the full manifesto in pdf here.

First time at CTIA Wireless

Solaiemes exhibited first time at CTIA Wireless (Las Vegas, NV, US, 1-3 April). We had just arrived from this experience and our feeling is very positive. Our booth, located at the spanish pavilion was very nice and located in very crowded zone of floor map.
We received visitors as potential customers, partners, investors and also analysts and media.
Our neighbours, other mobility companies based in Spain were perfect colleagues during the exhibition, and we could share some time to exchanve views about entrepreneurship, mobility trends, how the economic downturn comes as an oppotunity etc. Some of them also posted about the event, i.e: Unkasoft.
We hope to repeat next year with more amazing demos and more time to schedule meetings, and generate "buzz" about our disruptive model of mobility.
We want to thank ICEX for the nice stand they prepared for us and how helpful was their staff there :-)
A short video:

Equality in Mobility User Experience, Is it a dream? No, it is a Right

Hi, 2 weeks ago we talk about a "mobile cloud" alternative to "mobile applications", today we want to show with a real demo how it is possible to provide very good user experience for mobile solutions in mid-tier devices, and it means to deliver "mobility value" for everybody. In this video we compare our network based solution with iPhone and a 3G device (not smartphone) and create for both the same multimodal experience based on browsing, voice call, Solaiemes AVISG usability platform and IVR/ASR/TTS SaaS capabilities from 3rd parties.



Obviously, smartphones have computing advantadges, larger display, touch, etc...but we must take in count that powerful 17" laptops are far away more capable than 9" netbooks and netbooks are beoming now (using browser as cloud based applications enabler) the perfect machine for most of use cases. This is the point we want to evangelize as new trend of mobility, common devices are enough for very rich experiences. Carriers, suppliers, content providers should work together to improve user experience for all mobile subscribers, Solaiemes in pushing for that :-)
feedback welcome