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Mobile & Wireless
CTIA Wireless 2008: NewStep gets social
Service convergence vendor adds Facebook application to platform
by Jim Barthold
NewStep Networks is adding a personalized communications
framework layer tailored to users’ on-net personas to its
Converged Services Node (CSN). As part of the addition, which
is being unveiled at CTIA Wireless 2008, NewStep has
developed a Facebook application that enables converged
click-to-call and gives the user control over identity, social
network and communications channels.
It is also adding convergence widgets for Yahoo!oneConnect and iGoogle so
users can leverage presence, location and behavior
characteristics with their Web or mobile portals.
In every instance, the NewStep CSN makes it all worthwhile,
said Shannon Bell, NewStep’s marketing vice president.
“A click-to-call icon or application on Facebook in and of itself
isn’t that compelling. Where you get into the value is that the
application, when someone launches a call, is really launching
a call to me as a person that has multiple different devices,
multiple different personas, different locations, different
access mechanisms to address my service,” she said. “It
knows how to find me and the preferred way to find me.”
NewStep builds the application to interoperate with its server
but the app itself is provided by the service provider who
would “host the call control server which we provide and then
provide the application out to their user community and you
could provide it in a standard way,” she said. “Facebook has
mechanisms for distribution of applications and then it would
connect back into their network or, if it’s the mobile user, they
can send it via the mobile network over the application to
download."
While the application is simple to download, “it needs to be
distributed either by the service provider that’s hosting the
service for their users or by the enterprise.”
Somewhat surprisingly, NewStep believes that enterprises will
not block their mobile users from social networking and may
even encourage its use.
“A couple of our customers that we work with are playing with
this functionality because they, as an enterprise, have a large
group on Facebook,” she said. “They may be an anomaly …
(so) the real focus of this announcement was to the consumer
market.”
That consumer market will also be able to enable a
convergence widget for click-to-call experiences using Yahoo!
oneConnect and iGoogle, she said. Unlike with Facebook,
which is for social networking, these instances are “more
about having user control over your contact list and being
able to apply those same convergence intelligent routing
types of capabilities into how you contact people through
those interfaces.”
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