An eventful afternoon flitting between stands and meeting rooms at the sprawling Fira complex. After a short and sweet demo of Scalados wonderful image management software, we heard from Bridgewater Systems about its subscriber management solution, deployed in 97 networks worldwide, which gives operators visibility of their customers behaviour, enabling them to make informed decisions about product and service offerings.
The sort of insight Bridgewater provides is the sort of data, you might imagine, that would be of interest to companies engaging in mobile advertising, and Bridgewater confirmed that it is now starting to forge alliances with business intelligence and ad delivery companies,
Next up was On-device Portal (ODP) company SurfKitchen, which has upgraded its Operator Desktop solution with a Widget framework and an Idle Screen application. The new version goes by the name of Surfkit Phonetop. As SurfKitchen CTO Dave Evans explained it, the new version gives operators a lot more flexibility.
The structure of the platform is such that operators can offer their customers a choice of applications and let them choose which ones they want on the handset, says Evans.
According to Evans, the application would enable operators to offer disposable widgets, perhaps based around a TV programme, that would reside on the handset for a matter of weeks while the programme was running, and then disappear.
Evans says the company is seeing a huge amount of interest from operators looking for a point of difference in a market where everyone is selling Nokia phones. He expects to see the first deployments of Surfkit Phonetop around the middle of the year.
Next on out visit list was mobile advertising and search company Medio Systems. The company launched an ODP of its own with T-Mobile in the US last week. In the UK, it has put together an ad network called Media Mobile Now, comprising around 30 mobile publishers and says it is seeing a lot of interest from advertisers, serving around 50 million page impressions per month.
Head of Advertising Sales for EMEA, Ben Tatton-Brown, points out that the network is performance-based, with all ads sold on a CPC (cost per click) basis. According to Tatton-Brown, the average per click cost is around 18p, but rates for click-to-call responses can be a lot higher, with one debt management company recently paying 5 per call for a recent campaign. Medio has also struck a deal with SurfKitchen to integrate its search technology into SurfKitchens Surfkit Phonetop application.
Finally, to the Actimagine stand, where Senior Vice-President, Products and Solutions, Denis Pagnac, is getting very excited about the companys new web portal, set for launch in the Autumn.
The portal will enable consumers to manage their online content, such as movies, podcasts and live TV streams, and access this content seamlessly from the handset. The technology development is all done, says Pagnac, what Actimagine is doing now is securing the content in preparation for the Autumn launch. And thats just about that. Well have a round-up of the days major launch activity a little later today, and well be reporting live from the floor of the show again tomorrow.