Hewlett Packard in Mobile
I went to a Hewlett Packard Mobile Video Bloggers Dinner last Thursday evening. The other bloggers were Ewan MacLeod from smstextnews and Dean Bubley from Disruptive Wireless.
We were told how HP is already a major supplier to Network Operators - the exact facts and figures are on Ewan’s blog.
Jean-Marie Bulte, Solutions Architect for Opencall Media Solutions in France, demonstrated several services based on video calls. The idea is to make more of the video call functionality in 3G phones. The user makes a normal video call to use services. The user controls what happens via DTMF tones sent by pressing the phone keyboard. The ’screens’ that the user sees are actually video sent to the phone. We were shown the following services based on this idea…
-
Content Discovery. We were shown a demo where music fans make video calls to receive exclusive video and audio content, plus messages from artists.
-
User Generated Content. We were shown several examples. The first, a BBC Sport service, allows football fans to make video calls and record their comments about the latest football news. There was also a further example where users view remote Web Cam video on their phone. This concept can be adapted to viewing public Web Cams such as traffic monitoring.
Another example allowed captured video content to be sent to arbitrary places such as YouTube, Daily Motion or even an email address.
-
Video Conferencing. Cross network, SIP based video conferencing where you can have real-time multi-user (>2) conferences as well as record and play back video conversations.
I particularly liked the fact that all these services worked without downloading any applications and hence avoided the problems of the user (not) having and using an Internet APN. The services work on all 3G cameras. There’s also development flexibility of doing/changing things on the server rather than in an installed application.
On the negative side, the services were limited by the image resolution provided by video calling. Also, as options were displayed via video (e.g. Press 1 for xyz), as opposed to the native menu options, I suspect it’s possible for the more technically challenged users to become temporarily confused.
There were also some commercial challenges to be overcome that tend to be common to many mobile projects…
-
Supplying a product that relies on a service (video calling in this case) where the user usually doesn’t know the cost
-
Supplying a product that potentially has many (media, HP and operator in this case) partners i.e. The split revenue share may not be significant