Future of Ringtones….????

Its time for a new concept called Alert tones. Several wireless operators are expected to introduce musical “alert tones” — a snippet of a song lasting between two and five seconds, that users can assign to play when they receive incoming text messages and voice mail, similar to a ringtone.

Endtone seeks to replace the beeping that occurs when a call has been dropped, concluded or otherwise disconnected with a musical alert.

PhoneBites, has a service called Razz that enables phone users to insert audio clips into active conversations, outgoing messages and voice mail. Well, is there a limit to personalization?

Want To Show Who Is Calling?

What if people could see who you are talking to, or at least get an idea? Would you love to wear your heart on your sleeve? Well, here comes the answer! DotDotDot is a wearable display that connects to your mobile phone and is triggered by your communication. Dotdotdot connects to your phone over bluetooth. designing animations requires a java application. Once you’ve saved the animations to your friends numbers, then all you have to do is call.

Skype Over Mobile!

SoonR Talk empowers you to make Skype calls all over the world from your mobile phone. The User is no longer tied to thePC. Its a great application which conferences you and your buddy using Skype and requires the SoonR client on the desktop and a data plan on the mobile. International calling is never this economical!

Also check SoonR Desktop, which enables a user to remotely access his desktop through his mobile. What more, it works even when your PC is off! Interesting application, isn’t it?

Interactive Advertising!

DAEM Interactive is a software company based in Barcelona which develops “augmented reality” technologies for camera-phones which include an image recognition platform focused on mobile marketing and advertisement campaigns. Their technology identifies advertisements photographed by users and sends back related multimedia contents.

Brands and advertising agencies get to boost their marketing campaigns and promotions without having to make special developments or changes, maximizing their budget. And for users, it’s as easy as taking a picture. Users can interact with brands in a non intrusive way, where and when they want to, by simply pointing their camera phones at an ad (magazine or billboard) and clicking. Then, they can MMS the content to the DAEM server and DAEM software enables them to interact directly with the information and access the contents they are looking for.

Well, the service is based on an interesting concept, yet it needs to mature in the offering. Can this offering be enhanced to offer details just by pointing the mobile over the Ad? Can it host interactive polling, commenting and messaging? Looks like its a long way to go!

Integration of Telecom and Textile via Bluetooth

Mobeeline is an emotional mobile service based on wearable technology. The basic focus of this service lies in stimulating people’s emotions with an interaction between mobile and wearable technology, and to develop a social network service between friends.

The main goal is to create a wearable Bluetooth accessory that can receive data from a mobile phone. For example, let us assume that there are two mobile phone users. One user can send operative directions to the other’s clothes as the user wants. Without the two users having to meet, they can share their feelings and emotions by sending signals to each other’s clothes. Using our service, they will be changed the colors of each others garments, certain patterns or they can send emoticons to LEDs on the garment.

Check out Mobeeline for further details!

Well, the question still remains, do I want to wear my heart (rather my friend’s feelings) on the sleeve?

A Small Patting!

“Telecom as a Horizontal”, a whitepaper I have written is finally hosted on the TCS Website. It is accessible at

http://www.tcs.com/NAndI/default1.aspx?Cat_Id=220&DocType=324&docid=493

Here is the abstract of the Whitepaper:

Telecom is no longer a vertical market with a one-pony show called voice services. As we move into the Internet-everywhere age, we are moving onto mobile applications that reach into Enterprise private networks and extract data, applications and services from these networks. As Telecom offers the basic communication backbone, integrating next generation Telecom offerings within other domains in order to enable a converged world by creating New Revenue Channels and Cross Selling Models becomes the order of the day. Going forth, industries such as Retail, Financial Services and Insurance will utilize the services of the telecom market for communication as their core strategy to connect with their customers, thus ushering in the era of Telecom as a Horizontal.

To sum up the experience of writing a whitepaper, it was quite a work and rework with innumerable reviews until it took this shape. Thanks a ton for the different teams in TCS for putting this together. Special mention goes to my boss, without whom this whitepaper couldn’t have taken this shape. Well, it was quite fun!!