Tuesday, June 1, 2010 — 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT
LIVE TODAY – Sign Up Below!

The proliferation of smartphones, e-commerce Web sites and social networks has cultivated a new generation of highly connected “anywhere customers” who are taking command of “how, when and why” they are interacting with their selected vendors and service providers.

In this webcast, Dan Miller with Opus Research and Zor Gorelov, CEO with SpeechCycle, will showcase:

• Changing patterns in self-service and assisted service as customers take command
• Strategies for customer care architectures that leverage internal resources and provide consistently good experiences
• Best practices for enriching the customer experience across multiple media and modalities
• New forms of customer dialogs that blend automated speech, visual components, live agents and text as appropriate.

Attendees of the webcast will receive a free white paper (“Reaching the Anywhere Customer”) published by Opus Research detailing the new roles for contact centers in customer interactions.

At Opus Research’s Voice Biometrics Conference 2010, Brent Williams, CTO of multifactor authentication specialist Anakam, observed that voice biometrics solutions providers had, perhaps, done themselves a disservice by concentrating so heavily on financial services. When the worldwide financial chill hit all banks, voice-based authentication projects were the unintentional victims.

By contrast, Williams noted, his company remains very bullish on the potential for voice authentication to play an important role in supporting multifactor authentication requirements for truly large scale deployments, where people have to have great confidence in remote authentication. Anakam has several opportunities in mind in areas where his company has had success: authenticating “extremely large scale user-bases for consumer, patient, and citizen-facing applications in e-health, e-government, e-banking, and e-commerce.”

Connecting the Dots
For core technology providers, success is predicated on working with partners in risk-based authentication, like Anakam (which offers a complete solution of its own), as well as vertical specialists in areas like credit reporting, like Experian, TransUnion, Equifax or Acxiom. This means that success for the technology will depend largely on how well voice biometric specialists can work with, interface to and internetwork across multiple service providers.

For each of them, Voice Biometrics has the potential to be a tremendous differentiator. As noted earlier in this paper, it can serve as the “something you are,” but it can also provide the sort of “liveness testing” that is becoming tremendously important in both fraud prevention and promotion of ecommerce. The failure of solutions providers to reach high visibility and critical mass is largely a problem of marketing, not technology. To its credit, the core biometric engines and application logic is on a par with alternative techniques for keeping imposters at bay and, as we frequently point out, voice biometrics is largely superior of authenticating users (as opposed to their devices) and detecting real-time speaker changes.

“Strong authentication” will be required to give the general public the confidence to carry out everyday activities online or over their wireless devices in a way that protects their privacy and prevents identity theft. In a mobile setting (as well as instances that can be supported by “out-of-band” or outbound, phone-based authentication) voice-based verification should be positioned as the only way that a person (or enterprise) can be assured that the person on the other side of a transaction is alive, well and, indeed, the person he or she claims to be.

Finally, while it may appear counter-intuitive, voice biometrics — which we have argued to be the “most personal of authentication technologies” — will find its greatest value as a supporter of “anonymous authentication.” In well-designed implementations, voiceprints are not associated directly with personal information of any sort. They are merely part of a mechanism that provides confidence that callers or customers are, indeed, who they claim to be. As the follies of Facebook and other social networks raise attention about privacy protection in cyberspace, the availability of this highly portable and personal, yet anonymous, authentication technique will rise in importance.

Featured Research Reports are available to registered users only.

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

Click Here to View the Report Summary

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 — 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT
Sign Up Below!

The proliferation of smartphones, e-commerce Web sites and social networks has cultivated a new generation of highly connected “anywhere customers” who are taking command of “how, when and why” they are interacting with their selected vendors and service providers.

In this webcast, Dan Miller with Opus Research and Zor Gorelov, CEO with SpeechCycle, will showcase:

• Changing patterns in self-service and assisted service as customers take command
• Strategies for customer care architectures that leverage internal resources and provide consistently good experiences
• Best practices for enriching the customer experience across multiple media and modalities
• New forms of customer dialogs that blend automated speech, visual components, live agents and text as appropriate.

Attendees of the webcast will receive a free white paper (“Reaching the Anywhere Customer”) published by Opus Research detailing the new roles for contact centers in customer interactions.

At the time, Cisco noted that versions of the client would be out “soon” for both the Blackberry and for the Nokia E-Series handsets. The corporate call for a Blackberry-based solution is obvious. MVS 5 provides IT departments with the mechanism to manage calling plans, security settings and PBX-like features to their Blackberry-toting employees. That can lead to toll savings and greater confidence in the security and privacy over wireless links. Cisco has also been adding a number of bells-and-whistles to its fixed-to-mobile offering, most notably a protocol for “call preservation” which assures that users can quickly restore a call should it be interrupted by lost connectivity or a move from a mobile phone to a fixed-line or extension.

Cisco and RIM have been offering similar features to corporate customers in Europe for about a year and many of the features represent a new packaging of capabilites that RIM brought in-house with the purchase of Ascendent Systems in 2006. MVS 5 will be formally available “later this year.” As noted in our February post, clients for Android and even Windows Phone are not far behind.

Sharp Electronics manufactures the two phones. Both conform to the “slider” style (meaning that a full QWERTY keyboard slides out from under the touchscreen to support messaging and info entry). Both have cameras that, in the words of Microsoft product manager Derek Snyder, are designed to provide high-quality images from “dimly lit clubs”. The salient difference is that the Kin 1 is much smaller than the Kin 2.

What’s striking is the level of effort Microsoft has put into integrating its operating system software and cloud-based assets into supporting the objectives of social networkers. Like Motorola’s Motoblur, the challenge was to aggregate information and images from multiple social feeds. In this case, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system is much less fuzzy than Motoblur because it provides for an endless “loop” which can be scrolled through ad infinitum.

A single green “Kin Spot” persistently appears at the bottom of the screen. users can drag images, calendar items and the like into the spot for the purpose of sharing with others. An integration of Bing Maps with a cloud-based photo-sharing site called Kin Studio. Snyder shared a “Fun Fact” that Microsoft discovered: Only about a third of mobile phone owners have figured out how to extract photos from their devices. Not only does Kin Studio make it easy, the Kin automatically geotags and dates each photo so that it can be displayed on Bing Maps for later remembering and reminiscing.

Microsoft has worked closely with Verizon Wireless during design and testing of the Kin and related services. A Spokesperson for VZW said that the phones will be available for sale “in May” and that his company has the exclusive rights to sell the Kin. Outside the U.S. Vodafone has exclusive rights.

The media management and distribution assets associated with the Zune player are also integrated into Kin and the Kin infrastructure. Snyder demonstrated how the device supports search, discovery, sampling, display and purchase of music and video entertainment through a Zune app on the device. Thus, for the targeted market of socially active networkers, Kin is a formidable competitor to iPhones, Android-based devices and other general purpose smartphones.

Pictures and links to videos and the like can be seen here, on Microsoft’s Image Gallery.

When Palm introduced WebOS, there was grounds to be excited, as I noted here. However, many of the design concepts (of easy, browser-based access and navigation to anything on the Web) have been incorporated into Android, not to mention Microsoft Phone. All three make mobile phone users largely indifferent to whether they are invoking an application that is resident on the device or a Web service that is essentially rendered or executed on the device.

But if you’re an application or service developer, it’s an entirely different story. So-called “platform fragmentation” is the bane of the app developing public. Just about every day, we’re asked to handicap or rank “which mobile OS (or OSes) are gonna provide a large enough group of paying users?” The iPhone is a given for many. Not so much for its overall potential, but for the near term visibility, clear path to market (whether you like Apple’s T’s & C’s or not) and revenue generating capability. Android is next, just based on hope and Google’s gravitas. Then there’s anything that can be rendered in Java inside a HTML-conforming environment (fostered by the promise of resources like Appcelerator, which help developers write the code once and have it rendered on many platforms.

Next comes a range of tier three options. Business-oriented app developers have their sights set on BlackBerry. Those with global aspirations put Nokia and Symbian on their roadmap. But it’s hard to imagine how Samsung’s recently introduced mobile OS, Bada, is a good idea at this point.

Further fragmentation of the Apps – and device – market occurs at the retail level. Palm (and the WebOS-based devices) fell victim to insufficient support at the retail level. Its CEO believes that it may be corrected by more and better sales training, but that’s not likely to solve the dual problems of mobile buyer confusion and indifference. Let’s face it, the pro’s and con’s of mobile operating systems are “Inside Baseball” chatter for gadget geeks. There’s no “I want my MTV!” like fervor to be built around Windows Phone or WebOS. Then there’s the issue of loyalty which, in the case of mobile phones or devices, is more like a fashion show economy.

In his article, Colin Gibbs laid out long odds for the likes of Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft and Cisco to purchase Palm or its assets. He admits that it’s a partial list and that others our bound to emerge, especially as the stock price approaches target $0, at which point I would wonder why a tech-savvy turnaround specialist, like Silverlake or its partner TPG, which bought Avaya might not take a look. In the meantime, Palm-loyalists should start looking into how their favorite applications and services can be rendered in other HTML-based environments.

On the side of sunlight and open-ness, the City and County of San Francisco leveraged the efforts of many other cities, developers and non-profit organization to publish an “open API” for its 311-based non-emergency services hotline. This is Recombinant Communications at its best. A well-understood access technology (the venerable three-digit short code) is being deployed to offer more public service-oriented applications and to offload traffic from the over-burdened 911 emergency line. It will emerge as a channel for better “eGovernment” in an era when budget cuts spell reduced staffing and long lines at public offices.

Meanwhile, market forces have convinced AT&T Mobility (a) that it needs to have at least one Android device on the shelves of its retail stores but (b) it regards Google as a competitor whose products can only be offered within designated territories. That’s why Yahoo!, not Google, is the default search engine on the Backflip and why it is technically impossible for subscribers for shop around and personalize their devices with applications of their choice.

AT&T’s customers are short-changed by this short-sighted policy. Today, such heresy against open-ness and Recombinant Communications is part of an inside game and goes largely unnoticed. But the battle for share and survival among “mobile platform providers” (referring to the mobile OS and application delivery environments, like iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows 7…) is heavily influenced by the policies and practices of mobile carriers. AT&T’s conditional support of Android is destined to be regarded as cynical, ineffective and, in the long-run, it is not sustainable.

AT&T Mobility is doing its part to cast a sharp light on the problem. It has launched a nationwide campaign of public service announcements desigend “to raise awareness about the risks of texting and driving and remind all wireless consumers, especially youth, that text messages can – and should – wait until after driving.” Advertising initiatives are largely ineffective, unless accompanied by some other form of restraint or constraint. A White Paper published by ZoomSafer notes that, at any moment in time, over 810,000 autos are being driven by people who are actively using their cellular phone. This is the sad case, in spite of the fact that texting while driving is banned in a total of 21 states or territories.

ZoomSafer is a solution provider that has developed and markets software that enables its users (both corporate and personal) to define and manage policies that govern the use of mobile devices or, as CEO and Founder Matt Howard put it, “promote safe and legal use of cell phones while driving.” The solution is comprised of three parts. A Web site enables users to identify the policies that they wish to enforce (for example, to prohibit reception or origination of text messages or phone calls when the device is moving faster than 10 mph). Client software on the handset detects speed and “enforces” the designated policies. Finally, and this is the “speechable moment” aspect of the solution, ZoomSafer and Irish voice application service provider Dial2Do offer a service called “Voice Mate”, provides single-button control of TTS-based reading of emails or texts as well as dictation of replies, email or texts.

At the the theme of AT&T’s national campaign is “No text is worth dying for,” and its tagline is ““Txtng & Drivng … It Can Wait.” The carrier also uses this Facebook page to encourage users to take the pledge not to text while driving.

I see ZoomSafer picking up where such pledges leave off. The company sees three distinct market segments: Teens (or rather their parents), “pro-sumers” (meaning mobile professionals) and corporations. For $2.99 each month, it gives subscribers the ability to define and enforce their own policies against distracted driving. The addition of Voice Mate brings the monthly rate to $5.99. In addition, $10 per handset per month is the charge for Corporate customers to manage, enforce and audit their policies.

“Policy Enforcement”, meaning keeping people true to their stated intentions, is the crux of ZoomSafer’s value proposition. The economic benefit arises from loss reduction, lawsuit avoidance and abidance to existing laws. However, for those to whom communications deferred is communications denied, the delivery of voice renderings of text and the spoken origination of email or texts will turn out to be a bargain at an incremental $3 per month. Combining speech-enabled services with broader service offerings is destined to be the norm.

For NTT docomo, OpenID solved a very specific problem. All of its wireless subscribers were automatically issued an “imodeID” which enabled them to gain access to the communications, entertainment and information services that docomo provides to its wireless subscribers. But i-mode only works on docomo’s wireless handsets, not desktop PCs. For authentication on fixed line devices, the company issued a separate “docomoID”. Use of OpenID, enables subscribers to sign on to multiple services across multiple devices.

The list of large network operators and service providers deploying a flavor of OpenID authentiction is impressive. It includes AOL, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, MySpace, Orange and PayPal, among others. The addition of NTT docomo introduces OpenID into a country where wireless commerce has been highly successful thanks, in a large part, to the simplicity of access and the availability of multiple services. Earlier this year, 22 companies including NTT docomo, KDDI, Sony and NEC formed an “ID Platform Federation Forum” to test different ways to simplify user access across multiple carriers and services “based largely on OpenID.” The formal launch of OpenID-based authentication by NTT docomo moves the technology beyond the experimental stage.