| My mental picture of Silicon Valley has always
been one of a booming high-tech industry, millions of the worlds smartest
people bustling about, creating immense traffic jams, occupying vast swaths
of office space, and driving the cost of housing through the roof. Having
just returned back from my second trip to the San Jose area in about six
months, I can tell you that my mental image has changed. On the first of
these recent trips, I noticed an absolute lack of traffic. I could make it
to appointments on time and even had time for meals in-between. The most
recent trip a few weeks back I noticed that about every third
building was entirely for lease. It was not uncommon to see signs trying to
fill 1,000,000 vacant square feet at a time! Surprisingly, traffic has begun
to increase. While not nearly as heavy as it was a few years back, perhaps
we can view this as a good sign?
Amid the empty space I did find many companies worth writing about: Some
with new products, some with success stories, and some with grand visions
worth sharing in these pages. One of the most interesting visits was to
Net6, a company that makes a Mobility Engine or a network-based application
gateway. In case you are wondering what an application gateway is (I was),
it is also called a content transformation engine by Cisco who resells
Net6s Mobility Engine as the CTE 1400. Think of this device as a rack
mountable appliance, dynamically transforming Web-based content on a per
device basis, allowing for a consistent user experience. While this solution
has a variety of uses in the PDA and mobile phone spaces, it turns out that
one of the areas that this solution can have a great impact is enabling IP
telephony phones to become infinitely more useful. More on this later.
Using a program called the Design Studio a user can graphically design
how a Web page will be displayed on various devices. A user (who by the way
does not need to be a programmer) can select graphics from a page, clip the
page, ignore parts of it and select other parts, and even rearrange the
content to display on a variety of devices. Device definition files can be
created for various devices telling the application how many colors to send,
bandwidth limitations, and screen size. The Net6 solution takes care of
transformation and optimization (very useful for slow connections) without
the need to install any software on the client.
One demo I saw on a PDA displayed a Web page as a small graphic followed
by a paragraph of text. I then saw the same page on an IP phone. This demo
flashed the same graphic for one second and then displayed the text. By
flashing the graphic, the phone user doesnt need to scroll down on the
page and subsequently has a better experience reading text on a less than
ideal sized screen.
The Net6 gateway can be anywhere in the network so naturally a service
provider can host this solution as can the enterprise itself. There is a
dizzying assortment of applications for this technology and if you are
interested in seeing some for yourself, I invite you to check out
go.net6.com on various devices.
Whither IP Services?
We talk about services in the pages of this magazine all the time, and
yet, they arent being rolled out as fast as anyone would like. Until
recently, service providers were the primary companies responsible for
providing these services. Net6 gateways can be installed in service provider
networks and provided as a service but Net6 sees a real opportunity in the
corporate market and so do I. That is why they are working on an IP
telephony-based package that is priced lower than their current products
that have all the IP bells and whistles. So the question remains, what
services can IP phones now take advantage of? Ive assembled a few here
for you to peruse.
The education market where recent school tragedies have created an
atmosphere where teachers need to keep in touch with other classes and
school management at all times, is a place where always on
communication is a must. Providing classrooms with an IP phone allows
teachers to easily keep in touch. Another potential use is to send e-mail
from the phone to the parents, for example, to inform them of their
childs absence from a class. This can be done through Net6s Mobile
E-mail Module.
Other applications include the streaming of music through the second
channel of an IP phone allowing the user to use the phone as a radio that
shuts off automatically when the receiver is lifted. This application can be
extended to a hotel, which could allow users to be woken up with the
streaming radio station of their choice. Hotels could allow their guests to
program their own wake up calls on the phone as well. For those of you that
travel, you know that the people with the worst language skills imaginable
are handpicked to answer room service telephone calls. Not sure why that is
but I would enjoy an application that allows me to order my egg-whites and
oatmeal without the anxiety I usually feel that the room service worker
taking my order hasnt a clue about what I am saying. Hotels can also work
out deals with the local pizza place for one touch ordering and take a cut
on every order or just charge a time based fee. The opportunities are
certainly intriguing.
Another important application is streaming of presentations from the CEO
or training information or even daily morale boosting messages to the staff.
How about emergency broadcast; allowing a whole building or campus to be
contacted simultaneously through a voice broadcast. The phone is a much more
urgent communications mechanism than a PC. An emergency message can be
broadcast following a piercing tone, similar to the emergency broadcasting
system tests we have all come to know and love.
IP phones are obviously more powerful than any phones we have seen before
because they are Internet appliances and to date there has been no concerted
effort to allow the entire army of these devices in the workplace to do more
than they currently do. Weve seen phone specific applications but never
anything this broad reaching. The simplest application of corporate
directory browsing is perfectly suited to IP phones and usually already
exists on an intranet. Technology such as that provided by Net6 is a perfect
way to allow all IP phones and devices within an organization (or beyond) to
have access to this repository. The best part of all of this is that there
is no hard coding needed to make this happen.
We have certainly seen our ups and downs in the technology space these
past few years and that hasnt changed in twenty years. It is exciting to
see innovation still taking place. History has shown that times like these
are when the tech leaders of tomorrow are born. Lets just hope there is
someone inventing a solution that will minimize the traffic jams in Northern
California when the technology market starts to flourish again.
[ Return
To The September 2002 Table Of Contents ]
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