NEW YORK-As wireless and wireline carriers and Internet content providers seek to drive revenues through value-added services, the concept of presence has taken on new importance.
Presence is shorthand for knowledge about subscribers, including their locations and the kind of communications devices they are using at the moment. Importantly, it also means control of switching.
Oz.com, a five-year-old company in which L.M. Ericsson owns a 19-percent stake, has geared its enterprise toward enabling the coupling of presence and value-added services.
Late this month, Oz.com plans to make generally available the next generation of its iPulse server, which is designed to manage presence, said Kjartan Emilsson, chief technical officer, based in Reykjavik, Iceland.
“Interestingly, when I talked about the notion of presence a year ago, no one had heard of it, but now we have carriers asking us about it,” he said.
Besides wireless and wireline telecommunications companies, Oz.com also sees Internet portals as potential customers.
“They come at it from a different perspective because they already have the customer base for their services, but they want to take this wireless,” Emilsson said.
Version 1.5 of iPulse adds a software development kit and a partner program to train third-party applications developers. It builds on version 1.0, introduced in February and now undergoing trials by 20 GSM carriers in Europe, Asia and North America, he said. The operators requested the SDK included in the updated version.
“The server resides in a carrier’s network and connects to switches, Voice over IP gateways, SMS (short message service) centers. The user information is maintained dynamically, but we put a shield around it so both operators and users can control access,” Emilsson said.
“Web clients, personal computers, wireless devices including pagers, all contribute to presence information. Operators don’t control all of these, but if they want the convergence story, they need to centralize this information.”
iPulse uses intelligent routing based on Session Initiation Protocol.
“This is not a telephony protocol but a glorified SS7 protocol that covers phone, data, online and has been endorsed by 3G standards bodies,” Emilsson said.
“So, for example, someone can send an SMS to a different device, and intelligent routing will deliver it to where the end user is.”
In the near term, Emilsson said he believes lifestyle enhancements will be the most important value-added services to the consumer market. The iPulse server would, for example, allow nonenhanced specialized mobile radio operators to offer conference calling and group messaging, he said. Games played by multiple participants on a mixture of fixed line and wireless devices also are possible.
“Mobile commerce will come later on, not only because of security issues but also because there is a large gap in consumer comfort with online purchases,” he said.
Oz.com, which also has offices in Stockholm, Sweden, and Burlington, Mass., was incorporated in California in 1995. Its initial work involved real-time communications among online user communities. In 1997, the
company shifted its focus to extending the idea of online communities to wireless and wireline phones, Emilsson said.
Ericsson took an equity stake in the company in 1998, and it serves as the sales channel for Oz.com products and services. For carriers that prefer an outsourced provision of iPulse, Oz.com offers mPresence. Sometimes, operators will opt for mPresence to try out iPulse first before they buy it outright, Emilsson said.
Oz.com began its research and development in a GSM environment, but it now is “looking at options in CDMA and some Japanese standards,” he said.
Ericsson, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc. are at work on a “location interoperability forum” designed to simplify the way this kind of information is retrieved and shared across radio-frequency technologies, he noted.
Oz.com also will work with several companies, including Ericsson, Lucent Technologies Inc. and Nortel Networks on a new presence management forum Emilsson expects to become active later this fall. Looking ahead to third-generation wireless, its purpose is to improve the links between core networks and value-added services.
