At Dreamforce Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff led off the conference by introducing the “Social Enterprise,” and associating that term with “mobile, social and open.” The big factors in supporting the initiative in the cloud is encapsulated in the mantra, “Easy, Open, Everyone” which, in turn, is dependent on “Logic and data portability,” “no hardware or software,” and “pay as you go.” But for a firm that touts “no hardware or software,” the demos had a decided preference for Apple iPads as the hardware platform and widgets running within HTML5 as the preferred software at the presentation layer.

Salesforce.com has retooled its core product so that it will render consistently on both iPads and Android-based tablets. Called by its URL, “touch.salesforce.com,” it will be generally available in the first quarter of 2012.

I brought up Nuance FlexT9 in the lead paragraph because I was recently briefed on a new instantiation of the text-input application, shipped pre-loaded on the latest version of Lenovo’s ThinkPad Tablet. As a result, people who purchase the devices can go to “Settings” and choose to make FlexT9 the default means to input text. This, in turn, will enable them to “tap, trace, or write” as they prefer.

Refinements in the user interface at both the application and device level are key to both convenience and increased productivity. The product managers at Nuance, Lenovo and Salesforce.com recognize the trend to tablets and we expect to see more retooling of their offerings to accommodate the relatively bigger screen.

This simple tactic seems almost self-evident as people discover how to use mobile apps or Web sites to get information from airlines, insurance companies, hotel chains, retailers and others. Indeed, there is not a business of any size that has not started to pursue a “mobile strategy” or at least put out their first app for the iPhone.

But the product planners at Genesys have observed that most mobile efforts are only beginning to incorporate all the knowledge and resources baked into the company’s customer service and contact center fabric. What’s more, only a handful have made it easier for customers to use their smartphones to “escalate” their issues by initiating or transferring their conversation to the right resource (be it an IVR, Web site or customer service agent) without leaving their app or having to re-establish their identity and the general purpose of context of the call.

From a functional point of view, Genesys wants corporate customers and developers to recognize three sets of best practices. The first on the list is “Contact Me” addresses the way that phone calls can be integrated in a smartphone app, including call initiation (click-to-call), that uses the smartphone app’s intelligence to deliver the context of the call or, if it makes more sense, detect the availability of an agent and schedule a callback.

Second set of best practices, “Connect Me,” address is the result of the integration of smartphone-based processing to leverage Genesys IWD (intelligent Workload Distribution) and Conversation Manager. Its purpose is to put mobile customers in touch with the right resource over their choice of communications modes: voice, text or Chat.

Genesys’ third set of best practices surround “Know Me.” This is where Genesys will help its customers take advantage of the smartphone’s ability to authenticate its owner and create the sort of trusted communications link required to deliver highly personalized customer service. Under the “Integrated Mobile Customer Care Apps” umbrella expect to see deep integration of Genesys 8 (the company’s core call routing and customer interaction manager), IWD, Conversation Manager and UC Connect.

Given the level of interest and preliminary effort that Opus Research is observing as companies build their “mobile strategies,” adoption of the Genesys approach could be quite fast. We’ve already seen precursor products at Groupama, the French insurance company. Leading firms in banking, travel, insurance and telecommunications will not be far behind as they move past their first mobile apps to this, more integrated, more empowering approach.

Google, under the guidance of Mike Cohen, is going to make sure that speech recognition is one of the input options for every activity through an Android-based device or any device running a Chrome-based browser. As reported in Google’s Chrome blog, the beta version of Chrome 11 takes advantage of the W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium’s) “Speech Input API” in order to support speech-to-text transcription which, in turn, allows for spoken navigation, dictation and command entry.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, the technology works “okay.” It is not 100% accurate and, like all speech recognition resources, it can appear to discriminate against women and individuals whose voices are in registers that correspond to a small sample of collected utterances. But speech-to-text transcription is the gateway technology into a slew of speech-enabled, mobile activities and we expect it to be ubiquitous and its use to grow geometrically as new devices, applications and use cases abound.

During Day One, Lee laid the foundation by announcing four finalists for the contest, including a mobile service from Hold Free Systems, Logica and BludPlanetApps. BioProximity is an app that runs on a range of platforms including Android. The HELEX application, called BioProximity, runs on Android-based phones and provided a method for providing strong authentication of people logging into a location-aware, mobile collaboration platform. It was chosen because, it is an application that judges believe incorporates voice biometrics as a critical component to user authentication in a way that immediate commercial potential while, at the same time, lays the foundation for broader applications and deployment scenarios in the future.

Both Opus Research and VoiceVault see this sort of challenge as a highly visible means to promote awareness of voice biometrics among mobile application developers. We anticipate holding similar promotions in the future.

Several languages and dialects are supported, as are frameworks and software to support mobile, multi-modal interactions. You can keep up to date by referring to this descriptive page on the Nuance Web site.

It is becoming increasingly evident that we are well into an era that takes us “Beyond the SDK” in the mobile world. While this offering does not fall into the category of a speech API, it does overlap with many of the initiatives that mobile API providers have launched to fire up the creative juices of the app developer community. As the makers of “tools,” “reusable code,” and “development environments well know, developers gravitate toward the well-understood, well-documented and familiar. Spoken input and output from mobile navigation devices and apps conform to those three criteria.

Hawaii is a set of enabling technologies bringing the prospects for speech recognition, optical character recognition or augmented reality into the mobile application mix. For those who have not seen Windows Phone 7, its mobile user interface starts with “Live Tiles.” Instead of static icons that invoke separate applications, Live Tiles illustrate dynamic data. The “messaging” app will show the number of “new” messages from the home page, of course, but the news app may show scrolling news, social networks can show status changes of friends and on and on. Thus dramatizing how mobile apps morph into hybrid apps that combine programs or applications on the device with both executables and data residing in the cloud.

The first apps for Hawaii, for instance, a “Relay Service” and a “Rendezvous Service” enable and leverage apps ability to communicate with one another to keep the information fresh and lively. These are attributes that mobile subscribers come to expect as the phone’s role as a highly personal tool for every day life becomes more prominent – given that the phones know where you are, where you’re supposed to be (given that it has calendar info), who you talk to (call records), who you may talk to (in a contact list) and is continuously updated and increasingly personal. Not all of this can (or should) reside on the Web.

The menu of network-based APIs support location-awareness, messaging and billing services. Future additions will include support for MMS, all designed to accelerate the time it takes for third-party application providers to introduce new “cloud based” services over Rogers’ wireless networks.

Opus Research will be issuing a report on the Telephony API in the coming month and one of the primary findings is that third-party application developers have a heirarchy of needs of Maslovian proportions (referring to Abraham Maslow’s “Heirarchy of Needs” depicted below:

Rogers Catalyst addresses what I would characterize as “comfort” needs by providing documentation, sample code and access to a community of other developers and support personnel. However, it will be hard for network operators to fulfill the “basic” needs of developers, which is to overcoming platform fragmentation and gain access to the largest possible audience or subscriber base for their services and also present them with a broad set of Web-based resources as the foundation for their mashups.

As they move up the pyramid, developers move toward psychological fulfillment by trying to reach the largest audience possible. That means they address iPhone, Android and a choice among Rim, Nokia (Symbian) or Windows Phone. A technology partner like Appcelerator enables developers to overcome platform fragmentation by enabling them to write their programs once and have them to run “natively” on multiple mobile and desktop platforms. Through links with PayPal, Appcelerator also makes it easier for developers to get paid for their efforts (which, for many, is first-order or “basic” need).

API aggregator/publishers have an important role to play in terms of providing developers with a rich set of raw material for their applications and services. Companies like Programmable Web or Apigee build resources for developers that enable them to build “mashups” of Web-based services and resources, like Google Maps, eBay auction information, Amazon’s check-out, etc. In this context, a network operators API would just be one of many.

The Rogers Catalyst program is on the right track when it simplifies developer access to APIs at that expose various components of their IT systems. However, as this post shows, these APIs tend to be a small part of an ever-growing set of services that today’s developers invoke in their mashups. The competition can be fierce. AT&T, for instance, has built innovation centers, sponsored contests and a variety of outreach programs in an effort to make its resources core to developer efforts. It is well-advised to focus some of its support efforts on making its APIs will understood to the aggregator/publishers of the world.

Here’s a brief video that illustrates what Apigee provides:

In brief, it supports developers’ efforts by making it easier to understand what an API is capable of supporting and then to develop and test applications or services that use that API. In addition to Twilio, Apigee has built consoles to for the APIs from a number of popular Web service providers, including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, PayPal, SimpleGeo and SoundCloud.

The companies that facilitate low-latency, highly-scalable access to popular Web services have a promising future. Because so much activity is initiated from mobile phones – both smartphones and browser-equipped feature phones – adding telephony functions is a natural. Successfully integrating telephony functions into popular mobile applications will rely on sharing reliable (and reusable) code, as well end-to-end testing of the finished products. Apigee’s efforts support both of those objectives and, according to TechCrunch’s CrunchBase, it has been rewarded with over $50 million in venture capital during its 6 year’s of existence.

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The company now provides free access to an API (application programming interface) that points to its hosted resource for voice-based authentication. Registered developers can join in discussions in a community forum designed to put them in touch with support personnel at VoiceVault or engage in discussions with other developers.

As constant companions of their owners, smartphones house all sorts of personal information, starting with contact lists and calendars but expanding to include repositories for records of location, messages, photos and input into social networks. What’s more, the phone itself is morphing into an electronic wallet, used to authorize and authenticate money transfers and purchases of goods and services. Given all the new roles for mobile phones, the need for stronger user authentication is glaring. The notion that all this information is protected by entering a four-digit “unlock” code is ludicrous.

Biometric and behavioral identifiers will provide the strongest form of user verification. Since these devices are – first-and-foremost – phones, the use of voice biometrics seems natural. Given that the latest phones also include cameras and resources that gauge location and gestures, it’s easy to see that “voice” the security community may want to mix and match voice, gesture, fingerprint or whatever factor it takes to deliver the level of confidence required to support user verification either transparently or explicitly.

There’s lots of work to be done to define and implement solutions that balance a good user experience with appropriate levels of security. We hope that VoiceVault’s Voice Biometric Smartphone Developer Program attracts participation from a broad spectrum of Web and mobile application developers whose collective creativity will define and re-define a dynamic set of multifactor mobile authentication solutions.