News & Events > Feature Article

HP, SUN MAKE CONTENT MOVES AT WORLDWIDE GSM GATHERING
 

by Dan O'Shea

8 March 2004

Announcements from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard at last week's 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, showed that content aggregation and service delivery innovation is in tune with 3G network capabilities likely to be available from an increasing number of carriers this year.

While AT&T Wireless is expected to launch four WCDMA markets in the U.S. this year, Thierry Breton, chairman of U.K.-based Orange and CEO of parent company France Telecom, announced at the 3GSM event that Orange is launching technology trials in France in preparation for a commercial rollout. His animated press conference at the show set the stage for the vendors' announcements.

H-P unveiled enhancements to its mSDP mobile service delivery platform, including the integration of mSDP with the vendor's OpenCall service controller and the addition of digital rights management and device management capabilities.

The company also introduced its CMC 1.0 content mediation and billing software to address the emergence of mobile content services and the fact that carriers are using a variety of strategies to work with content providers. Carriers also are experimenting with several different methods of billing users for content access.

“Success isn't just a question of technology,” said Joy King, vice president of the network and service provider unit at H-P. “A big carrier understanding audience segmentation and serving all niches is most likely to succeed.”

H-P has witnessed carriers working with content aggregators, but also with individual content companies to support their new services, King said. “Content rating and mediation is very difficult, and we see a lot of them unsure about how they want to bill for content,” she added.

While prepaid billing for content has become the model in some international markets, U.S. carriers are only beginning to experiment with it, King said. It's also important for carriers to have a set of business structures in place that make it easier for content partners to work with them.

Sun Microsystems likely would agree with that sentiment. Responding to what it said were requests from both carriers and content providers to help them sort through the business structure, the company announced at 3GSM that it is expanding the role of the Java.com Web site to support content aggregation.

Sun is providing back-office and payment mechanisms through the site, as well as Java applications, ringtones, screen savers and wallpapers for a wide range of mobile Java devices, said Craig Miller, group marketing manager for Sun's carrier solutions group.

“We don't develop the content, but we facilitate the relationships between carrier and content provider,” he said, acknowledging that many carriers also are likely to manage relationships with some providers on their own.

However, if they don't want the hassle of searching for and negotiating with every little developer that has a hot application, Miller said Java.com can save them money and time, while providing assurances that they are getting access to Java-certified applications.

Sun also announced a service delivery enhancement at 3GSM: the release of version 4.0 of its content delivery server, which now supports customer management features such as the segmentation of customer bases that H-P's King said was so important.

“The ideal is to attain customer segmentation down to the individual, being able to know preferences and supply recommendations,” Sun's Miller said. “It's like bringing the Amazon model to mobile content.”

Version 4.0 also supports multi-content vending for different classes of subscribers and more support for active content marketing.

In other 3GSM news, Atrua Technologies announced a haptic (or science of touch) processing-based solution that improves navigation of Web services and games on mobile devices with the addition of a touch-sensitive strip above the keypad that reads fingerprints, finger pressure and movements. The Atrua Wings navigation bar, which requires users to register their fingerprints, will ease the usage of these services while making the devices more secure, the company said.