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Schwartz says the idea started from the basic observation that, thanks to the cell
phone, people were reachable all the time no matter where or how occupied they
happened to be. This gave rise to a need for more flexible and sophisticated callmanagement
techniques than simply answering or not answering a call. Schwartz
saw an opportunity to change the rules and make it easier for people to “take the
call” even when unable to talk. “We see a fundamental shift in how people are reachable
and when they are available,” he says.
This is one of those head-slapper ideas that just seem obvious. He calls it “enhanced
reachability.”“There’s no way people can describe their life in advance,” he says, so the
next generation of communications tools will need to offer solutions that “capture
the situation you’re in, and the perceived situation of the person on the other end.”
But it will take time to get users onboard.“People don’t change as quickly as technology,”
he admits.
Nor do carriers adopt technology as quickly as it changes. SoloMio is not fully available
yet on any cellular system, save that of Telefonica in Spain. SoloMio services
have to be integrated into a carrier’s infrastructure, necessitating both a long sales
cycle and an intensive implementation period.
Still, Schwartz is pleased with the progress his company has been making. SoloMio
has services either rolling out or being trialed right now with 14 partners, including
(thank goodness!) some in the US – although he won’t say which. After four years of
hard work on the concept, it’s paying off. Now that he’s getting traction with the
mobile carriers, his next goal is to work on landline phone companies, VoIP carriers
and the “super-carriers” that control consumer landlines, enterprise phone systems
and mobile accounts.
PRESENTATION – Stanley Zdonik, StreamBase Systems:
Fast data in the enterprise
Stan Zdonik’s first encounter with databases came long ago, while he was working
for BBN in the early 70s. BBN is best-known for having built DARPAnet, precursor
to the Internet, for the US Defense Department. But Zdonik, who had just graduated
from MIT, was working on Prophet, a data management tool for pharmacologists.
“The basic idea was to automate the lab notebook and display data on one of those
beautiful [monochrome] Tektronix tubes of the day,” he recalls. “A lab notebook
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