Greg again.

Here's the last article about the issues that Glynx is trying to address and our approach to the solutions. This part discusses the issues surrounding social communications. You can also read part 1 and part 2 of this story.

Social communications - the growing functionality gap

Have you ever called a mobile when an appropriate landline would have been available - but you didn't know? Or not realised that you both had compatible free PC-based VoIP services when you placed a call? And how about telephone-tag - do you remember when the telco wouldn't let you know before the call whether the other person was on the phone before you called them?

Social communications subscribers today are failing to reap the benefits that technology can offer- due to the constraints of outdated network-centric communications service delivery.

We are inundated with communications options, and yet service providers and consumers are locked within a paradigm of distinct in-network service provision and edge-device consumption of services under network control. This architecture prevents subscribers getting what they want.

Subscribers' devices today have the bandwidth and capacity to address these sorts of problems, but, despite accelerating advances in personal computing, telecommunications, service providers would have us believe we are still need the same architecture back when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, with 'dumb' devices being serviced by centralised servers.

Consider a simple example from the telecommunications world. Why isn't an 'answering machine' standard functionality on a mobile phone? It is not a problem of circuit miniaturisation or of a phone's ability to handle audio stream reception or recording. It's that service providers only allow and promote phone features that stimulate revenue such as cameras, music players and radios (where the sending of MMS generates data traffic and possibly revenues) - rather than features such as answering machine that could enhance the customer experience. And such voicemail as there is is mediated through a set of centralised services - resulting in a service costs to the subscriber.

Most telling though, as the marginal cost of carriage drops, and the barriers to churn are removed, service providers, looking to wring value from their directory assets, do not willingly share information about their subscribers with others. This is because, a PSTN, mobile, or conventional VoIP carrier directory has no direct interest in informing a caller that the B-Party is available (or busy…) on a free VoIP service as well as their own network. The ENUM project, designed to address these concerns from a carrier perspective, has been underway for ten or so years, but telcos have been so concerned about cannibalisation that this initiative has not moved much beyond an engineering curiosity. And, more recently, Social Networks are still discussing how to deal with the "Open Social" initiative.

The reality is that the marginal cost of managing complexity is declining rapidly - both in terms of the cost of bandwidth and that of computing power itself. A major potential of technological change is to unleash possibilities for a paradigm shift in the delivery of online services from the network to the device itself.

The internet generation is more aware than ever before of the possibilities that technology can bring. Service subscribers expect 'cool' solutions to their social communication needs and are perplexed when technology itself becomes part of the problem. They are 'savvy' consumers and become irate when service providers ignore requests for new services or improvements to existing ones. They are able to quickly change providers if a clear differentiator emerges.

The launch of the iPhone, the announcement of Google's Android platform, and Nokia's divestiture of their in-network equipment business in favor of an exclusive focus on handsets are all indicators of a major shift of power from service providers to device manufacturers and consumers. The only thing missing is a platform which allows true control of subscribers' communication from edge devices. Until now.

Our approach to call control

As meaningful integration of service directories is unlikely occur organically from within the centralised directory paradigm, aggregation of communications identities and associated information must occur at the subscriber and device(s) level. Only a subscriber's device(s) have full access to communications options and state at any point in time - no centralised directory can provide as complete a picture of this information. Successful exploitation of this information requires several characteristics.

• Control of communications (e.g. call set-up, channel etc. negotiation) must take place device-to-device and not via in-service switching.
• Communications must be able to handle non-predictable calling situations - i.e. in real time at the time of call set-up, not as a result of some pre-defined calling sequence.
• Control of communication must satisfy both the calling party and called party preferences - irrespective of the business preferences of the carriage providers.
• Communications must be optimised on an end-to-end basis - not just at the calling party end (c.f. a BluePhone device which chooses between Cell and VoIP carriage depending on the proximity of the calling device to services - irrespective of the capabilities or status of the called party).
• Where possible, deliberate interference by carriage providers should be avoided - for example, the practice of carriage providers to terminate an un-answered call at an in-network voice-mail service without caller consent.
• Call control should be easily integrated into other aspects of social communication - such as public/private directory services.

We have prototypes of mobile phone and PC-based applications that enable full user communications control based on the discovery and management services inherent in the Glynx Blackpages directory . Context sensitive personas are updated in real-time and the phone software uses these to optimise communications. Users call the person, not one of a series of numbers or 'handles', and Glynx takes care of the rest (are they on/off hook, is Skype/Yahoo/MSN/PSTN/etc mutually available, are they available on the home or business number, are they in a meeting/working/etc, do they want to be called or emailed, etc.).

We'd like to think this is the beginning of the end of telephone tag and more.