Tag Archives: world

If you are at MWC, stop by the ALU/Motive booth to see my products

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While I am not attending Mobile World Congress this year (2010), my products are! If you want to see what I’ve been working on for the last year or so, stop by the Alcatel-Lucent booth where you will see a number of presentations and demos on these new products:

…will highlight the use ALU technologies such as Mobile Device Management, which streamlines and guides consumers through the offer, purchase and activation cycle. It will also highlight how mobile network operators can use ALU technologies like Mobile Broadband ServiceView and the 9900 Wireless Network Guardian to both better inform their CSRs about the conditions facing the subscriber (reducing Average Handle Times, reducing cost and increasing customer satisfaction), and work to improve the performance of the application itself.

Motive logo

The products you will see include:

  • Mobile ServiceView, our advanced solution for call-centers that provides end-to-end visibility into the subscriber, the device, the network, and the (back-end) services/systems, as well as automated troubleshooting and remediation for mobile handsets and mobile broadband;
    • With intuitive help desk UI which quickly guides help desk through problem triage, diagnosis and resolution;
    • Auto-discovery of subscribers on the network and the paths their packets take through the network – down to the base-station level;
    • Determination of subscribers’ quality of experience (QoE) and the factors that affect that experience;
    • Integrates with the Wireless Network Guardian to bring network intelligence into the call-center;
  • Our next generation mobile device manager (MDM) that together with WDSGlobal have co-developed with automatic device detection, identification and configuration of any phone implementing OMA-CP/DM and wireline devices implementing TR-69;
  • Demonstrations on our smart-phone service activation and troubleshooting including self and assisted-service for Android, etc;
  • Our guided activation workflows that steps customers through complex, multi-step service activation tasks.

…and more such as our home and wirelene solutions.

So enjoy MWC and stop by the Alcatel-Lucent/Motive booth and check out my products, and let me know what you think…

ceo

Microsoft Joins the Physical World Connections and Interactions Space with Microsoft Tag

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Microsoft has joined the physical world connection/interactions space with its release of their High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB) called Microsoft Tag, a new 2D Barcode technology developed by Microsoft research that competes with QR Code, Datamatrix and other 2D barcode technologies.

Comparing Microsoft Tag to QR Code:

Microsoft Tag uses colors and triangles vs. black and white and squares, and it support Tags that contain URLs, Free Text, vCard, and Dialer type. A time-to-live or time-frame can be associated with it the tag, which is useful for marketing campaigns.

I’m a big fan of the new kinds of interactions that are possible via visual and radio tags; related to this see my presentations (SlideShare), and related pages on my blog: Physical Interactions and Touch/NFC.

The Microsoft Tag Video (YouTube):

Creating and Managing Tags

Microsoft tag is an end-to-end solution: the Tags, the software on the handset, and the software on the web that allows you to create and manage and print your own tags; see below.

Creating a Tag (Click to enlarge):

Managing Tags (Click to enlarge):

This is the Tag I created of type URL to my blog:

Downloading Microsoft Tag

You can download the Microsoft Tag reader client directly to your phone: Android and PalmOS (coming soon), BlackBerry, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, Sony Ericsson and other J2ME devices, by pointing your phone to gettag.mobi website.

Is there a need for a new Visual Tag?

Tags such as QR Codes are high capacity tags already:

(from Wikipedia)

  • Numeric only Max. 7,089 characters
  • Alphanumeric Max. 4,296 characters
  • Binary (8 bits) Max. 2,953 bytes
  • Kanji/Kana Max. 1,817 characters

But as @torgo Tweeted back:

“…But do we really need a new 2d barcode? What exactly is the problem with QR?”

And @adamcohenrose wrote:

“I thought QR codes had no licensing problems?”

I don’t buy “capacity” as the reason Microsoft introduced its own tag, but perhaps is because “they just can”, or maybe related to licensing; while QR Codes are considered open, QR Codes are patented, but the patent is not being enforced (at this moment). Another reason is that the color-based, triangle tags provide for better “fiducials”, allowing for faster alignment and scanning thus better experience; this I need to test to determine.

ceo