As JAJAH CTO I get to see quite a few technologies in our space, most I suspect will not make a major impact and will end us as a nice feature at most. However, there are few technologies that reach a point where technology maturity meet with emerging customer needs. I’ll try to survey few of those in this post. I’d be glad to hear your opinion.

VIDEO CALLS

Video messaging is not new, in fact Video conferencing has been around for more than a decade and quite a few companies provide different levels of Video support as part of their offerings – but until recently it didn’t really reach wide spread as IM for example. I think it’s about to change as more and more companies will be adding video capabilities to their clients. We too at JAJAH spent quite some time ensuring our Data Platform (currently servicing Yahoo, eHarmony, eMobile and others) may pass along video. As more and more IM clients are to introduce Video capabilities the main questions are still what is the added value of Video in a discussion, and how to make money from it – yet I’m confident that in 2009 more and more main stream companies will be pushing this method of communication to the masses. It will most probably go beyond PC-to-PC communication and we’ll be seeing video calls gradually entering the mobile market later 2009. Mobile providers with growing data bandwidths and narrowing business will push this strongly and will convince us it’s the holy grail of communications – in few years from now we’ll probably not understand how we could live without it.

ULTRA LIGTH MOBILE PCs (UMPCs)

In CES ‘08 I’ve seen in Intel’s booth several bulky devices under the tag UMPCs or MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) – none of that was really consumer ready – but you could have seen the birth of a new space of devices, a space I think will be fast growing in 2009 and effect both consumer electronics and software companies. We consume a lot of information today off the web, and the ratio of information gathering vs. information creation is continually growing – in other words – most people consume data services, but few generate information. Take a look at SHARP D4 currently sold by Willcom in Japan – it’s a really cool device if you’re a knowledge worker who needs fast Internet connection, get quite a few emails a day, need to carry around electronic documents, run presentations, get information off the web and make cheap international calls while traveling.

Take a look.

I also really like Fujitsu new Netbooks line – like  http://mobilitysite.com/2008/08/fujitsu-netbook-gets-official/ – though I’ve seen it in much cooler colors.

WAKE ON EVENT

Short disclaimer here – I was heavily involved in the Wake-On-VOIP project we’ve done with Intel’s Corwin Springs chipset (I might write a separate blog on how to that topic). JAJAH provided the back-end support and the client side wrappers to Intel SIP based Wake-On-VOIP chipset, while MailVision integrated with our client side allowing a softphone to be in a standby mode, receive an incoming call, wake up in less than 5 seconds and divert the call to the softphone. There was quite some press (for example http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2328083,00.asp) around this project. This is actually the second time Intel is trying to introduce remote wake technologies – however -  last time their Wake-On-Lan was a total disaster. Putting JAJAH hat off for a while, there’s a broader view to wake on event technologies, allowing PCs to be in a stand-by mode yet be awaken remotely by incoming data such as emails, virus updates, OS updates, TV shows and more. As energy preservation is key these days, the ability to bring out a device out of standby mode using an external event is a key feature in many applications – specially for Mobile VoIP applications.

VOICE RECOGNITION

This will probably go beyond 2009 – but demand for high quality voice recognition is ever growing, there’s a wide range of new services just waiting for the right engine to emerge. If you know of one – drop me a note

Amichay