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Real-time delivered
By Christer Björk, CEO
Mikz is about seamless access to your personal data and media, anytime and anywhere, from any application on the web regardless of network. It’s about Internet-enabling your device.
The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was a great success for Conveneer. One person at VP level working for one of the top 5 OEMs told me that “Mikz is not really about a single application, it’s about Internet-enabling your device”. I think this is very true.
I was listening to Microsoft's presentation of MyPhone in Barcelona, being one of the latest contributions of new mobile services “in the cloud”. Services such as MyPhone typically build upon synchronizing and uploading information to the web. Lengthy sync process certainly has a role to play, but we cannot synchronize everything at all times.
The mobile device is today rapidly becoming a multi GB personal data storage and our personal media server. 16 GB flash memories today become 32 GB tomorrow. We all understand that information such as position data must be fresh and if we want to stream from our camera phones to friends live, it’s obvious that we have to be online.
The web offers today interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over an open web API such as Google Maps. What would happen if mobile phones and other computing devices become full-blown members of the web instead of being peripheral clients as today? What would happen if each device becomes a URL? This is what Mikz is all about.
Mikz enables your device to respond to HTTP, SIP and RTSP requests, supporting a consistent web API across many platforms, plus full support for caching, access control, security and Fast CGI for interfacing interactive applications. So what is Mikz then? Mikz is about comparing real-time access to content and resources in your device versus sync and upload solutions, or comparing an open web interface versus proprietary clients deployed for each application.
I have been asked about what services, benefits and kinds of experiences Mikz can provide to its customers, and let’s spend a few minutes on typical use cases. Instead of uploading all the 5 megapixel photos you take with your camera phone to a service on the web, you may want to upload thumbnails only and then be able to send a request to the phone and get one specific photo in full resolution. Such a service would typically subscribe on the thumbnails via an RSS feed and then use the HTTP GET request for a specific picture. By avoiding uploading when not needed, much bandwidth and battery power will be saved.
Other typical use cases:
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Google Latitude alike applications, i.e. instead of building a service on the web or involving third party service providers that requires prior arrangements, a Facebook application or mobile widgets can subscribe on friends' GPS positions via standard RSS feeds peer-to-peer;
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Other applications or mobile widgets exchanging data in any direction such as instant messaging, games, picture blogs, Facebook activities, presence information, VoIP, etc;
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Streaming live (tubing live) from your camera to your friends, e.g. viewed from a Facebook or YouTube application, or a mobile widget in another phone;
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Vista gadgets installed in the Windows sidebar on the desktop (or web applications such as iGoogle) that interact with your phone (or friends’ phones) offering PC suite alike applications, e.g. accessing phone books, calendar, note books, sending SMS/MMS from the PC, pictures galleries, backup and restore, etc;
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Media players that enable you to stream music and video from your phone over WiFi;
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Pushing mobile content, accessing user profile data such as metadata and listening statistics for contextual advertising and music recommendations;
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Drag-n-drop files between the phone and a PC using for instance Windows Explorer.
Mikz can also cut costs by enabling remote support such as online provisioning, diagnostics and upgrades, remote control and device management, or offer on-device portals with the ability to push new branded on-device experiences and applications.
By enabling your device to talk the full language of the Internet, OEMs, operators as well as the millions of web developers today can start developing applications that seamlessly interact with devices in real-time using web methodology. The only effort needed to interact with a device is to write a simple request such as HTTP GET or POST. Application developers no longer have to care about deploying and maintaining dedicated clients for various applications, operating systems and setting up connectivity solutions.
Mikz provides mobile connectivity the web way. This is what I believe the person at MWC meant with “Internet-enabling your device”. This is fixed-mobile convergence at its edge. This is Mikz.
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