Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

I just learned about Orative, a software firm that uses some of the key components of chat systems like AIM, within the corporate firewall and for verbal communications.

Basically, they have software (J2ME, Symbian, BREW) that runs on handsets that lets users access the entire corporate phone directory, indicate status (in a meeting, unavailable, and so forth), and request callbacks indicating subject and priority. It is therefore an application with a text messaging component, used to enhance voice communications. Of course there is a server component as s well. The idea is to prevent voicemail tag, reduce meeting interruptions, and so forth.

This is a terrific idea. It combines many of the benefits of email (asynchronous messaging), chat (presence + synchronous messaging), and voice communications. I imagine that for people who spend most of their time talking to others within the company, it's a wonderful solution.

The big problem, in my opinion, is that I can't use it. I'm talking about small businesses, who spend most of their communications time with people outside the company. In my case, clients and partner organizations couldn't be included. Within larger companies, anybody who interfaces with the outside world would not be able to use the software.

So here's my recommendation: A business networking site like LinkedIn should install the server component on their site. People paying a subscription fee to use the voice service can allow anybody in their immediate contact list to see presence information for others in the list. Note the major revenue opportunity for LinkedIn or whomever sets up the external affinity groups.

We'll need to alter the software a little bit as well, because users can now be involved in multiple networks: one corporate, and any number of affinity networks. This would be an excellent tool for those involved in any flavor of business development or partnership work.

This application (even without my recommended enhancement) is a wonderful example of an application that is starting to achieve some of the promise of mobile: It shares information with the device's phone book, adds an application running on the device with ongoing data connectivity, connects to a central server, is massively networked within a community, and also enhances voice communication. This promise of mobile is what I believe will make mobile the dominant application environment in the next 10 years, if we can just get some application providers to start making multi-context applications. Good job, Orative.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Business, Design, Mobile applications, Product Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.