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Nowadays, infocommunications (telecommunications and information technology) have become so widespread that they are having significant influence on our lifestyle. By now, it is impossible to imagine everyday life of modern people without such things as mobile phones, e-mail and the Web. While an intensive development of telecommunication systems is continuing it is mostly determined by the development of transport networks towards increase of throughput, reliability, availability and other factors. Surely, these factors are very important, but they do not directly determine how much valuable these systems will be for human. We believe that in the next coming period an improvement of user value and usability at the service level will became the prevailing trend of an infocommunications development.
We, at the Magcomline Company, see our mission in building human-oriented infocommunications, in which recent achievements of telecommunication and information technology found their implementation in the manner that brings maximum value to the end consumer. To do so, we are developing technologies, solutions and software that allow infocommunication systems to harmonize with a lifestyle, match to psychology and needs of human.
One of the important telecommunication aspects, especially from the user’s point of view, is the addressing. Really, it is impossible to make a phone call, send an e-mail or visit a web site if you do not have necessary phone number or address. Of course, you can use a contact list, a phonebook, a directory-inquiry service or a web search engine but their usage consumes much time while not always lead to expected results.
Addressing systems of various modern telecommunication services significantly differ from each other because they were designed at different time on various technological bases. However, all of them are intended rather for ease of automatic address processing than for ease of address remembering. Thus, we need to store and remember a great number of various addresses such as phone numbers, e-mail, web and internet communicator addresses, etc. This made us thinking about following questions:
• Could one choose own address on his or her own being not limited by strict addressing rules of particular telecommunication system?
• Could this address be the same for various telecommunication networks he or she uses?
• Could one be available at multiple alternative addresses simultaneously while using single terminal and user account?
Definitely no. Infocommunication systems those are widespread today are not capable of providing such abilities.
Our flagship technology of Seamless Infocommunications (SI) is the unique complex of telecommunication and information technologies and solutions, which for the first time allow positive answering to those questions. The purpose of the SI technology is a creation of unified user service space, independent from addressing and technical specificities of transport networks. Its main advantage is the introduction of the natural addressing system that is most close to usual ways people identify themselves, each other and surrounding objects.
Let us examine in detail what is the natural addressing and what abilities it gives to the user. If we trace the development of addressing from phone numbers to Internet domain names and recent innovations then the development line becomes clear. This evolution provides the user with more and more freedom of choosing meaningful and memorable addresses while gradually removes technical restrictions to address formats. It is evident, that such evolution will result in the addressing system that is completely independent from transport network specificities and addressing of its technological elements. The natural addressing is just such a system that meets these requirements.
Well, the natural (free) addressing is the way of telecommunication customer addressing that allows any user, service or information provider to define own public addresses on his or her own without restrictions to a number of addresses defined and their content.
Usually, the SI address (natural address) is a textual string that is not constrained by strong technical restrictions in terms of string length, allowed characters, language, etc. This allows customers to express their individuality, business activity, services provided and so on in a form of most appropriate, well memorable addresses. A name of a person, his or her job position or an organization can be such an address. The SI address can also be any unique piece of digital information including those resulting from digital import, like multimedia objects or biometrical parameters.
Like postal addresses and Internet domain names, full SI address can consist of multiple segments. In this case, the second and following segments specify the context (customer group), to which the address belongs. This context can indicate a customer location, organization, interest or activity type, etc. These additional segments help to ensure uniqueness of full address while the first segment may be unique only within the context. At the same time, users operating in the same address context may omit additional segments entering called addresses, similarly to making local phone calls that do not require dialing of country and city codes.
For better understanding of the natural addressing, let us examine its basic elements with their differences from legacy counterparts.
By public address we will mean any address suitable for publishing as contact data of the customer. For example, a phone number is a public address while names in a phonebook of a mobile phone are not public addresses because one cannot indicate them as contact data. They are profile addresses. Similarly, for internet communicators a Skype login and an ICQ number are public addresses while arbitrary nicknames and other profile data items entered by the user are not usable as a public address.
With legacy addressing systems, a public address is usually a technological address determined by means of a telecommunication network. It is hard to remember and has no meaning to the user. This forces the user to create profile addresses, keep own phonebooks and contact lists. With the natural addressing, the user may even do not know technological addresses of his or her terminals because other users need only single SI address to access the user. Thanks to this fact, in many cases, there is no need in keeping profile addresses, own phonebooks and contact lists at all.
Personal ID: an identifier, for example, a number or a character sequence, assigned to the user on a registration to access infocommunication services and used for authorization and billing purposes. Unlike many legacy technologies, the SI technology does not treat a personal code as a public address and the user may keep it in secret. This provides an additional protection level against unauthorized access to the user’s account.
The important advantage of the SI technology is the support for multiple own addresses per customer. For each address, it provides an independent ability to control a presence status.
One may consider the natural addressing as just advanced and more convenient replacement to plenty of legacy addressing systems. However, you will really wonder at how implementation of the natural addressing in modern infocommunications significantly changes their usage manner while opens new abilities of a comfortable access to communication services and information resources. It solves plenty of problems the user faces daily while opens new development perspectives for infocommunication and related businesses. Let us examine few examples of accomplishing daily user tasks with legacy infocommunications versus their solutions with the SI technology.
Suppose you have found some web site of a company, shop or organization you want to contact directly. To do so you need to open contacts page and record a phone number or copy an e-mail address specified. Now imagine, how it will be comfortable, if just opened a site with a browser you can instantly connect with a corresponding contact person just by clicking a button of necessary communication type (Fig. 1). At the same time, before starting communication, you can see which communication services are available to the customer, does contact person ready to receive a call now or it currently answers another call, etc. The achieved usability level results from a normal implementation of the natural addressing features and does not require the web site to support any special features. There is no need for the site owner to publish any contact data at all, because with the natural addressing the name of the company or organization is suitable as its web address as well as a public address for phone communication, e-mailing and other services.
Fig. 1. Instant jump from web site browsing to direct communication.
From the previous example, you may understand that there will be only single address you need to publishing as your own contact data. This address simultaneously plays roles of a phone number, e-mail address, internet communicator account, etc. (Fig. 2). Moreover, this address may be a usual name of the user or organization, so you can easily remember such addresses because there is no need to keep any additional numbers or addresses in memory except a name of a contact person or an organization. This also makes advertising significantly more effective because there is no need to specify hard-to-remember numbers and addresses in promotion materials. A potential customer needs only to know the trademark or the label of advertised company for a communication.
Fig. 2. Own names and organization labels are only contact data that SI technology users need to publish.
Do not forget the fact that every user utilizes telecommunications for intercourse related to various aspects of his or her activity, various parts of life and thus to various contact groups: co-workers, business partners, relatives, friends, neighbors, partners in a hobby or sport, etc. Many of us use two or more phones, e-mail boxes, internet communicator accounts just to divide business and general communication, for example. However, how much more comfortable it would be to keep using the same terminal and the same user account, being represented to various contact groups with various addresses (full name, job position, nickname, alias and so on) providing them with necessary parts of profile data and separately controlling indication of own presence for various addresses (Fig. 3). It becomes reality with an implementation of the SI technology based on multi-address approach to a customer identification and complete support for a presence capability. By managing indication of your presence (readiness to receive a call) at various own addresses you may, for example, suspend all incoming calls from users not related to your job except your family members when you have came to work. Alternatively, while on leave you may disable your public addresses for communication about work staying available for all other contacts.
Fig. 3. Usage of multiple own addresses to separate contact groups related to various activity types.
This is just few examples of how seamless infocommunications allow users to accomplish their daily tasks more effectively. For complete list of SI technology advantages do not hesitate to read the charter “Why Seamless Infocommunications?”. Other charters contain detail descriptions of various SI technology aspects:
♦ the natural addressing system, the SI technology is based on;
♦ SI technology software components and their operational prototypes;
♦ building unified service space on the foundation of the SI technology;
♦ and advanced technologies solving vital problems of infocommunications. |
