Presence: Mobile Killer App

Like a thousand years ago, we are still in search of The Holy Grail. Regardless of the industry sector, we keep on dreaming about the killer application that will make all the customers happy and all the suppliers rich. Of course in mobile communications sector everybody is doing the same, since the conception of the first mobile network. We are not talking here about client applications running on smartphones, focusing rather on the applications running on the network, available to all mobile subscribers, regardless of the type of the handset they use.

I think the first one has been the voice mail. Before mobile, we used to have answering machines at home. Especially in the US, everybody used to have one. But then you could not attach it to the mobile phone, so it had to be hosted on the network, and this way started to be available to all subscribes in form of a service (VAS or Value Added Service). Up to this day voice mail has been the most profitable VAS hosted by mobile operators. The second one has been SMS (Short Message Service). Initially not very popular in America, it is still hitting the new highs across Asia and especially Europe. While price per single SMS message keeps on dropping, SMS revenues are going up and up due to constant growth in volume (even US is waking up...). Then entertainment services emerged, placing personalized ringbacktones on the podium within the most profitable value added services.

So what is next? Are there any potential applications on the horizon to rival the voice mail? Or to displace SMSes or make personalized ringbacktones obsolete? Hah! This is a million dollar question and I think I may have an answer...

I wonder how many of you actually use traditional voicemail? How many voice messages a day do you retrieve from your mailbox? Do you have a personalized greeting? Or it is just there because you don't know how to turn the thing off...? My observation is people are giving up their voicemail accounts and turn to network notification services. For me it is far more convenient to get an SMS telling me somebody tried to reach me instead of my voicemail calling to tell me I have one message (that happens to be a hang-up tone most of the times). Or get an SMS telling me the person I tried to reach is now online and within the reach of the network.

And here is the hint. I call you. You have your phone turned off (for whatever reason). You turn it on and I get the SMS that you are back. So I can call you. Very nice service (BTW my company has implemented this recently in Poland). But isn't it a little "too automatic" (may be turning your phone on you does not exactly mean "call me now")? So here we come to the final: let users manage their presence status from their phones. Presence status you say? Yeah, we know that. Everybody uses an Internet communicator, be it Google Talk or Messenger or Skype... And presence management is the very basic feature on the Internet. Busy, at the meeting, away, available... we know all that. So my question here is why isn't it as "basic" on the mobile phone networks, as it is on the Internet? Do you know why? I do not... But I do know I would use a service like that. To be able to set a status with a simple press of a button on any phone. And have it announced automatically to anybody trying to reach me, when I cannot take a call (be it a meeting or vacation or out of the network coverage). And to be able to query statuses of my buddies - Internet style.

Presence management is extremely underutilized nowadays. And it is completely not converged. When I change my Google Talk status to busy, so should change my Skype and my mobile phone. It can be done. In fact we have already done that. BTW is this an opportunity for operators? You bet! Wouldn't you pay 50 cents a month to have your presence and availability synchronized across all the communications channels you use, mobile phone included? I would.

Comments

  1. AnonymousNov 8, 2006, 12:51:00 AM

    Have you seen Jaiku: http://jaiku.com/ ? It seems that they are very close to the solution...

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  2. HeadworxNov 8, 2006, 9:41:00 AM

    Yes and no. The jaiku solition is a client side solution. My idea (and the products we develop at Wind) is to make the telephone network aware of your presence status. This way many interesting scenarios can happen. For example when you are at your computer, you can have the incoming calls routed to your voip softphone (cheaper and better quality). And when you set a busy status in the Google Talk messenger, people calling your mobile will hear "Hi, this is Roger, I am busy at the moment and would prefer to talk to you later. But if your call is important please stay on the line." while your phone is ringing. And you have the freedom to accept or reject that call.

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  3. AnonymousNov 12, 2006, 11:31:00 PM

    The advantage of implementing presence service on the mobile side is that you can actually see the status of the people you want to call even before you press the green button. So if you see "I'm on vacation", "GMT -8", "On the boring meeting" statuses you know that it's pointless to call someone and you can save some precious time.
    I generally agree that the presence service is probably the mobile service of 2007, but I am not sure which implementation will be most successful.
    Cheers

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  4. HeadworxNov 13, 2006, 9:36:00 PM

    Yes, you are right. But as a matter of fact our system lets you do that. There is a special function you can query over USSD channel. So press a button and your phone displays all your buddies and their respective statuses. And there is an option to query individual people as well.
    We are thinking the other way around as well. You can set a special status like "call me" or "i feel lonely" or "i miss you" to attract callers. This is potentially big for the operators, as they get yet another application that drives traffic (they love it).

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  5. AnonymousNov 20, 2006, 12:47:00 AM

    Actually, the operator-side and the client-side solutions can coexist and complement one another. This way there can be a working presence system on low-end phones (through USSD codes) and sophisticated native application installed on the high-end devices. Such application can communicate with the operator through USSD codes (hard but doable on Symbian) and integrate presence status with the Contacts, Inbox, Log etc. Operators would love such solution even more, because it would work on all their devices and would probably boost sales of the more expensive ones. The important issue IMHO is to enable presence information to cross the operators boundaries. This can be done through some central presence server. What do you think?

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  6. HeadworxNov 26, 2006, 10:00:00 PM

    Surely the most important issue is to enable integration with 3rd party presence providers. I would love my Vodafone presence status to follow my Google Talk presence status (as long as I am looged into the Google service).

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