The high profile advertising campaign for the SYNC is having its effect. For the first time in 12 months, Ford’s unit sales had a modest increase. More importantly, SYNC demonstrates that multivendor solutions (meaning Microsoft and Nuance) are more than viable in the automotive vertical.
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Verizon Wireless Opens Up to Larger Possibilities
Mobile America will be subject to a “Coke-versus-Pepsi†like battle pitting a newly “open†Verizon Wireless against the locked-down AT&T Mobility/iPhone combo. Last week, Verizon Wireless reversed its hard-line stance against “open access†to its network. Creating terms for certifying third-party applications, devices and software amounts to a radical change in its business model. Or does it?
Securing the Future of Voice Biometrics
With more than 150 people in attendance at Voice Biometrics Conference London, Nov. 28-29, top vendors and implementers of voice biometric-based authentication and identification solutions defined future products, services and positioning. Recent security breaches militate toward broader deployment of voice biometrics, as does the growth of mobile commerce. Thus, the dialogue will continue between buyers, prospects and solutions providers.
Nortel’s Multivendor Survival Strategy: Courting Both IBM and Microsoft
Unified communications calls for traditional routing technology providers to integrate with the top providers of collaboration and Web-services middleware. Thus it is of necessity that Nortel (and its peers) continue to interoperate with both Microsoft and IBM, the leading purveyors of middleware and collaboration software.
Mobile Advertising Revenue Forecast: North America and Western Europe, 2007-2012
Mobile phones are poised to serve as a new, geo-targeted, highly social media that provide their owners with a means to find out the people, places and products of interest locally. In this document, Local Mobile Search provides planning assumptions to support business development and product definitions that are in line with reasonable revenue expectations.
Google’s Open Handset Alliance: Promoting Mobile Application Development
In a potentially industry-changing move, Google has announced an open-source mobile platform and an alliance of mobile industry heavyweights, including carriers and OEMs, that contributed to and are embracing the platform. The intention is to push cost, fragmentation and complexity out of developing for the mobile Internet and help create dramatically improved user experiences to drive mobile Internet adoption.
Conversations from Nuance Conversations
With its acquisition of Viecore and the joint offering with Nexidia, Nuance gave the 1,000 attendees to Conversations 2007 plenty of grist for conversations in the corridors of the Boca Raton Resort and Club. Both developments have strategic implications for users, partners and competitors. It was the coming out party for a “new†Nuance with a chance to redefine the market for speech-enabled solutions.
WellPoint Simplifies Opening New Accounts with Voice Signature
WellPoint’s use of a voice-biometric based e-signature to issue new policies portends future deployments that balance convenience, security and cost in the healthcare vertical. The largest health benefits company in the U.S. perceives voice biometrics as a source of competitive advantage. It has used the system to enroll over 140,000 new policyholders.
Nuance and Nexidia Speed Speech Analytics
A beefed-up set of service offerings for the enterprise market reflects Nuance’s efforts to capitalize on the shift in enterprise spending. In partnering with Nexidia, Nuance will lower the time it takes to detect and remediate problems in automated speech callflows as new modalities (read “mobilityâ€) and contexts (or “social networksâ€) take hold.
Microsoft’s Two Launches: UC and Live Search
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, October 16th, Microsoft’s speech technologies played in both ends of a doubleheader. Outlook Voice Access was showcased to attendees of the Unified Communications Launch event in San Francisco. Meanwhile, speech-enabled search figured prominently in newly rolled out phone-based services: 1-800-CALL 411 (based on the recent acquisition of Tellme) and Live Search for Mobile.