At Saint-Emillion with my colleagues Lam Nguyen (who teaches classic SS7 at ENST) and Alex Vorbau who comes from Web service design at HP Labs. I attended the ICIN conference on intelligence in networks. As some of the best Bordeaux wines, it now an 18-years celebration of “classic telecoms”. But 2007 was an innovation challenge as the congress mixed experience coming from IN glory days with revolutionary Web 2.0 mash-ups. It was quite nice to see the old guard moves on and actually contributes ideas to combine the best of both worlds. And with such optimism, we obviously celebrated the French gastronomy, tasting a mix of old grand-crus and new wines.
Key points
- Web architectures as Google are even more scalable than IMS
- Web services can be interfaced with telecom networks and IMS
- Client software is essential in all cases : Java JSR 281 is one approach
- HP Conversa is a simple example of Web 2.0 to communication services, we presented more IMS oriented demos (instant group communications) so did several other presenters.
There is a broker in the Net ... its name is Google
Roberto Minerva, roberto.minerva@tilab.com from Telecom Italia Lab kicked off with his views on Google vs. IMS architectures “comparing apples and oranges”. He did a good job to impress us with the technology and scare us with the business models. In a summary Google is
an algorithm + a distributed systemGoogle algorithms to calculate the value of a page were originally described in “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
PageRank(pi) = ((1-q)/N + q ∑ PageRank(pj)/L(pj)) / pj €M(pi)
(PageRank of page n is the sum of PageRank of pages pointing to it , divided by L(n) the total number of out coming links from page n. q is the probability that the users will leaves the page without clicking any of these links )
Google monetizes page ranks with brokerage to advertisers (Ad sense is illustrated here) . But the clear direction is to move to detailed subscriber profile management to increase ARPU using information from :
- Registration to services (Gmail),
- Personalization of services (MysearchHistory, Page creator),
- On-line searches on PC, (Maps, Froogle, …)
- Applications (Gmail, Gtalk,..)
Google distributed system have pushed the limits of parallelism :
- Distributed computational model with Sawzall programming language
- Replication. fault tolerant version of the Linux Red Hat
- Up to 100,000 servers with 2 GB RAM >80 GB disk
A quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO : “we're much further along in the build out of data centers. We have the cheapest and most scalable architecture. Running large Internet scale businesses is very, very difficult."
Google disruption can be summarized as follows :
- Google Video (+ YouTube) = Impact on Media Companies
- Google Base, Froogle, Checkout = Impact on eBay, Craig list, …
- GTalk (IM + VoIP) + WiFi = Impact on telecom service providers
- Desktop Applications (Writely) = Impact on Microsoft, Apple, …
- Google Library, … = Impact on book publishers
- Spectrum acquisition in 700 MHz access = impact on Mobile network operators
Web 2.0 in an IMS Environment
Thomas Magedanz and Niklas Blum from Fraunhofer FOKUS ran a tutorial and several presentations on a cooperative research portfolio they characterize as “play ground” .
The Open IMS playground aims at creating enablers to IMS, legacy and internet network. HP OpenCall unit has provided MRF, HSS, XDMS component in this multi-vendor testbed. Orchestration of the service components can be done with : SIP application servers, IMS SCIM using S-CSCF service filter , SIP Proxies.
Listen to Thomas Magdeganz's advertising presentation of the SOA and IMS playgrounds on a classic Jazz backgrounds.
Niklas Blum presented a prototyping fixed mobile environment, with a focus on the network address book shared by multiple devices:
- IMS clients (Synchronisation via XCAP)
- legacy clients (Synchronisation via SyncML)
- Email clients (Synchronisation via SyncML)
Mobile video in a community-based Web service
My colleagues April Slayden Mitchell, Mitchell Trott from HP Labs were presenting Conversa, a social utility enabling video conversations. Our HP OpenCall team contributed a mobile video interface to this service. Alex Vorbau gave a very good example of HP research combining web enablers and telecommunication features. In addition, Conversa addresses social and usability aspects of multimedia services.
Alex Vorbau presentation at ICIN 2007
E-commerce transaction validation
I presented a discussion paper on payment transactions with telecom enablers co-authored with my colleagues Dominique Sandraz , Paul Serra and Antoni Drudis. This is work in-progress but the original objective was to investigate possible use cases were voice authentication and activation could assist e-payment. We felt this could be relevant in countries with low literacy and PC penetration. For example mobile money transfers are popular in Zambia and Bangladesh where Paypal could’nt be an option. Here is our work-in-progress ideas :
