Almira Labs Wins Dialogic Innovator Award Contest

Dialogic (News - Alert) Corp. recently concluded its first-ever Innovator Award Contest, naming Almira Labs of Madrid, Spain, the grand prize winner for its two 3G-related video applications. Munich’s CreaLog (News - Alert) placed as the runner up, and Bay Talkitec, Calltech and EGTEK Co. Ltd. accepted honorable mentions.

Jim Machi, Dialogic’s senior vice president of marketing, says that over the years there’s been a lot of innovation in the industry, even back when VoIP first started. Dialogic wanted to highlight some of the recent innovations based on its platforms, so it created this contest, for which it received more than 30 submissions.

A panel of judges selected winners based on their innovations around either solving a particular problem or in terms of the application itself, says Machi. The judging panel included Machi; Rich Tehrani (News - Alert), CEO and group editor-in-chief at Technology Marketing Corp.; Doug Mohney, editor-in-chief of HDConnect; and Bertrand Gatellier, president of VMA/International Association for Enhanced Voice Services.

Almira Labs (News - Alert) came out on top, Machi says, because: “We felt that they created an innovative application that was very useful.”

The independent software vendor, which specializes in creating next-generation services for telecommunications networks, won the Innovator Award for two video applications – Video Notes and Community Video Cast – built using the Dialogic IP Media Server.

The grand prize consisted of a plaque, and $10,000 in Dialogic training and product discounts.

Video Notes allows individuals to store and retrieve videos on a service provider’s network via a 3G mobile phone or through a Web site. Community Video Cast enables 3G mobile phone users to send video messages to multiple recipients at once quickly and easily.

Almira Labs distributes its applications via both wireline and wireless service providers, including Vodafone (News - Alert) Spain, and sells them direct to corporations and small companies.

Javier Martin, CEO of Almira Labs, says Video Notes can be useful if, for example, a person is walking down the street and spots something of interest in a shop window or elsewhere and wants to record that item or event for their own memory or to share with family, friends or coworkers. While the capability to record, store and share multiple videos is available today in high-end mobile phones, he says, not everybody has such devices, so Video Notes makes that available to a broader group of the population.

Community Video Cast, meanwhile, allows users to predefine groups with which they want to communicate. That way they can send broadcast messages to invite others to a movie or other event, for example, Martin explains. He adds that while this is a video offer, there’s also an audio broadcast option in the Almira Labs suite of applications. This application also is well-suited for the hearing impaired community, as it allows them to communicate via sign language through short video messages. It is also helpful in countries in which patients live far from their doctors, as it enables patients to communicate their symptoms via video message, which can help doctors understand the urgency of their condition and decide if a hospital visit is necessary.

As for the runner up, Dialogic’s Machi explains that CreaLog was singled out for its Cabfish iPhone (News - Alert) application, which allows mobile users to easily find a nearby taxi station.

CreaLog is a major European provider of voice portal, unified messaging and CTI (News - Alert) solutions for telecom and enterprise customers. It developed Cabfish using Dialogic Host Media Processing Software and Dialogic CG Series Media Boards. The location-based taxi ordering application, which is available in more than 40 languages, allows a customer to order a taxi by simply pressing a button on his or her mobile phone. The GPS position of the mobile phone is sent to a server, which converts the position into a postal address. Then, the voice portal calls a local taxi station – in the local language – and the ordering result is displayed on the customer’s mobile phone.

Honorable mention winner Bay Talkitec, of Chennai, India, was noted for its Mobile Video Yellow Pages application. Calltech, of Bogota, Columbia, was honored for its “Click to Call” Facebook (News - Alert) application.

And EGTEK Co. Ltd. of Seoul, Korea received accolades for its voice analyzing “Love Meter” application, which as Dialogic’s Machi explains, analyzes the voice of the person with whom the user is speaking and if it detects stress the user gets an MMS message indicating “your love meter is love” and suggests the user send the other person (perhaps his girlfriend) flowers.

“We are very pleased by the number of innovative applications submitted by both our partners and new developers throughout the course of this contest,” says Machi. “We believe ‘video is the new voice’ – that is, Dialogic’s vision is that all voice and text applications will eventually migrate to adding video capabilities, and that there will be video-only applications entering the mobile arena. It’s great to see that developers around the world are using Dialogic products to create some of these cutting-edge video applications for mobile phones.” IT

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