Fresh off the press .....

The App planet is a new comer to MWC 2010 but became the buzz of the show, highlighting the new focus on software and applications that we have been discussing in our previous posts from MWC 2010.

It brought a refreshing change to the “image” of mobile technology, which for several years now has been about communication networks and multimedia technology. App Planet brings in new creativity and the core idea of connecting people. In the App planet, “John”-s mobile device is much more than a phone!

John begins his day by jogging in the park, his mobile device helps him collect data regarding, mileage, route, and duration. His friends and he talked about his route a few days ago. Now he is chatting from his phone with his runner community. John's health consultant also gives him advice based on the data sent out from his mobile device.  Few hours later, John runs little bit late for his breakfast meeting, he decides to join it and shares the slides from his mobile device before getting to the office. As long as he is connected, the scheduled meeting notice rings his phone requesting him to join the conference. All he needs to do is answer the phone while driving. At lunch time, John wants to try the new sandwich place, recommended by his friends via Face Book. John clicks on the location-based social media service which indicates the place on the map, shows the reviews, and the exact shop info. Now he knows how to get there and what to order. After lunch, John is more than happy to give feedback to his friends. He goes on Face Book and writes down the messages to recommend the place and uploads some photos -- all from his mobile device. Now the photos are shown on the location-based social media service and also linked to other media outlets and quickly fans out to John’s friends and contacts. Before John gets back to work in the afternoon, he never forgets to get a cup of latte from the coffee machine. Of course, it is charged through the eATM from his mobile phone.

This is John's life on App Planet. It is cool, isn't it?

This is the year for the Apps to bloom and we will taste the fruits in the coming future. Health management, CRM, location-based services, and e-money are the major topics in App Planet. They are bringing the concept of mobile technology into people's daily life. From business perspective, the range of the ideas covers content providers, service providers, infrastructure providers and device manufacturers. They all point to the basic concept of communications infrastructure, via which people want to stay connected all the time, but what is most important is the way mobile technology is ready to touch each and every aspect of our lives via innovative and practical applications!

Posted by EK at 05:59 AM | Permalink

It is common industry knowledge by now that smart phones are typically causing an order of magnitude more data traffic on cellular networks, thus straining network capacity and the quality of user experience (QoE).

SNRLabs' focus on QoE based connectivity and mobility in multi-radio devices has this additional advantage from the point of view of operators, which is, "smartly" moving traffic from cellular to WiFi (or femto cells). At MWC 2010, it was interesting to see the same problem addressed via infrastructure based and operators driven solution by technology power house Qualcomm and FMC experts Kineto Wireless.

Kineto's solution requires the installation of the Kineto Multi-Service Access Gateway (MSAG) in the network side while the Qualcomm technology demo mentioned an addition to the core network. Both of course also require client side software on the device. Both technologies talk about service/flow based offload of data traffic from 3G to WiFi e.g. best-effort traffic like browsing data goes thru WiFi whereas QoS sensitive traffic goes via 3G.

SNRLabs’ device based convergence management products complements the above solutions by letting the device drive or co-operate with the network regarding best radio choices based on quality of user experience.

More importantly, in the absence of the infrastructure additions required by both solutions above, SNRLabs technology still provides a device driven offload of certain classes of 3G data traffic, thus giving operators the benefit of 3G/WiFi offload even if they choose not to make any changes to their infrastructure. SNRLabs’ Mobility Manager (part of CMS) uses algorithms for seamless mobility decisions that have been proven to maximize the use of WiFi whenever WiFi exists and meets the user’s QoE needs, as compared to the more typical RSSI-comparison based mobility decisions.

References:

3G/Wi-Fi Seamless Offload: A live demonstration of seamless offloading of operator-defined data services from 3G to Wi-Fi.

Kineto Smart Wi-Fi Offload Solution Addresses Network Challenges Created by Smartphones.

Posted by CS at 02:28 AM | Permalink

Posted by SSG at 06:07 AM | Permalink

“Convergence of mobile world and internet finally happening” is an interesting perspective that CS talks about. The last time I remember a similar buzz was 1996, as the internet was gaining ground. “The network is the computer” slogan saw the rise of SUN and the same year Oracle introduced the concept of the Network computer - a “under $500 computer” that end users could eventually use for communication, entertainment and surf the web. The question was “what is the killer App” for the internet. Fourteen years later the “Network computers” of today are the Mobile internet devices - from Apple’s iPhone, iPad to everybody and his dog’s Android device. Mobile devices are ready to get, and are getting ‘embedded’.

As this is my first MWC, I expected to see everything Mobile. However software applications shadow the event. From Blackberry to Samsung, the third party application pods are interesting .. Yahoo being showcased at Blackberry! Is this an internet applications show or mobile world?

I guess the answer is “all of the above”. Convergence ensures that we cannot partition technology anymore. Silicon vendors, Platform designers, Operating system providers, Device manufacturers, and application developers are all Mobile. And if they aren’t .. they are missing the bus. And as Oracle and IBM showcase their wireless billing and customer management systems, along side SUN and IBM servers, we can safely rephrase and say “ The mobile internet is the computer “.

Posted by BGS at 05:21 AM | Permalink

Posted by SSG at 11:21 PM | Permalink

Today, I attended a panel discussion organized by FierceWireless that invited top telecom industry executives to discuss the latest developments in the embedded wireless ecosystem. In spite of the pre-defined topic on embedded wireless, the discussion and the follow-up Q&A of course veered in other directions regarding the challenges being faced today by service providers and the wireless industry at large. Which got me and our team here thinking – is this truly the beginning of a new era in wireless services deployment?

For one thing the number of connected devices is exploding – expected to be up to 50 billion by 2012 as heard in the panel discussion today. Now, these devices come in all forms ranging from the more familiar handheld devices to embedded wireless in automotive, mobile health applications, mobile commerce, and a variety of M2M connectivity-s. For service providers, dealing with these huge numbers of connected devices are creating signaling as well as capacity issues. So, service providers need to build new service delivery platforms, have new ways of monitoring the health of the network and loading, and start distinguishing between traffic from different device types.

For end users the issue is where does the quality guarantee and customer support come from? In, embedded wireless devices and m2m scenarios, the wireless carrier may not be directly visible to the end user. Conventional wisdom would suggest that such support be provided at the first level by whoever is providing the actual service or utility to the end user, leading to a chain of customer support requirements rather than one-stop support and clear accountability.

Finally, the success of smooth network operation and services delivery depend one way or the other on every player in the chain being “good citizens” of the network. Over the last 25 years, this has been guaranteed via standardization bodies and certifications, as well as the expertise and experience of a relatively small number of companies. Now, with embedded wireless, the number of companies building these connected devices are expanding and so are application developers for connected devices. It will be essential that guidelines are set on how applications are written and the network accessed by these devices and their applications, to prevent signaling issues as well as minimize unnecessary traffic overhead.

Posted by SSG at 10:56 PM | Permalink

Posted by SSG at 06:07 PM | Permalink

MWC has always been about the “traditional” wireless industry heavy weights – you saw them every where from the big posters in Barcelona airport to the bright pavilions of Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Ericsson, TI, Qualcomm (to name just a few) in Hall 8, to the event announcements and meeting room directions in the FIRA Palace hotel and Hotel Catalunya Plaza, and the banners seen from the Plaza Espanaya. But in 2010, it is the shadow of the two presences that are not so visually overt but nonetheless they are in every conversation and thought – Apple and Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a keynote speaker on Tuesday and Android devices announcements are everywhere at MWC 2010, though Apple of course is not a participant. Which made me (like many many other industry followers and experts) wonder – why? What is the secret? How did this phenomenon happen?

The answers are many – but the one that I find most interesting is that the much talked about convergence of the internet and mobile world has finally happened – and today it is all about software in its purest and most beautiful form, it is about the user and what the device can become for the user, and most importantly the developer community and what inspires and engages millions of people to spend their own time and resources to create for the device. Which is why it took two companies with a strong understanding of using technologies to engage the masses and to fire the imagination of millions, to finally change the game that has been played out over the years at MWC / 3GSM.

So, what are some of the key features of these two software platforms? Firstly, simplicity of use and development and a solid foundation of core features that just work – without having developers to spend time tinkering and optimizing and looking around for the best place to start. Secondly, well defined interfaces to underlying components ranging from the accelerometer to the radios and GPS. Again straight forward and simple functional interfaces that are easy to program with. Third and related to the second one, is the right level of abstraction. In the case of the iPhone software, Apple dictates what level of access within the device the programmer and user can have. Android, even though open source, is also very well thought out in terms of programming access. All these features allow developers to focus on their unique value-add towards a polished end product ready for millions to use, without having to deal with messy interfaces and drivers and either too much access or no access at all to the necessary hardware components.

The last interesting feature common to both is how voice capabilities have been dealt with – integrated but some how still separate. Both frameworks realized up front that voice is a necessity but data is the focus. So, things like the dialer and telephony has not been ignored and even though there may be better frameworks to deal with voice related features, iPhone and Android users and programmers have a good basis to work with.

Before signing off, here is a good summary of the landscape in smart phone software frameworks published yesterday, including all the major players in addition to Apple and Google – Symbian, Palm, RIM, and several Linux frameworks.

Posted by CS at 06:01 PM | Permalink

Posted by SSG at 01:47 PM | Permalink

Posted by SSG at 01:40 PM | Permalink

We will be in Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Feb 15-18th 2010. Please visit this Newsroom for a daily update and let us know if there are specific topics you want us to check out.

Posted by SSG at 01:21 PM | Permalink

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world’s largest consumer electronics tradeshow, held annually at Las Vegas, took place between January 7th and 10th, this year. We demonstrated our Advanced Connection Management Suite for Intel (ACMI) technology on an Intel MID device. ACMI allows for seamless data handover between 3G and WLAN resulting in uninterrupted YouTube viewing experience.

We saw our vision, regarding Quality of User Experience (QoE) driven multi-radio convergence, reconfirmed. SNRLabs set this vision forth when we were founded. At the time there were very few multi-radio devices and an even smaller number of people saw the need for these devices. However, now a majority of smartphones, netbooks, tablets and notebooks have multi-radios ranging from 3G, WLAN, WiMAX and very soon the upcoming LTE. Many of the visitors, who played with ACMI at CES, underscored the need for smart connectivity management in their mobile devices – a prime opportunity for SNRLabs technology!

Posted by SSG at 01:14 PM | Permalink