The Bloor Perspective: Controlling electronic messaging, mobile games downloads and SPSS

External email is becoming polluted with spam and viruses and an increasing number of organisations consider internal email to be a time waster. We need to consider all the options for electronic communication and make intelligent choices based on the context and content we wish to communicate.

Emails are often forwarded to spread or avoid responsibility. Emails are often hard to decipher, having headers that bear no relation to the content and with essential contextual information missing. If diaries are busy, email tennis can go on for days when more direct communication would solve the problem at once. In many organisations, people are driven by their inbox.

Email is only one tool. We can also use IM and SMS for short messages, telephone and voice mail when we are on the move and shared workspaces for complex and rich communications.

With all these options, we have to make smart choices. IM provides a spam-free real-time interaction with a select group of colleagues. Voicemail delivers a useful fallback solution when you can't get through by phone. When you absolutely have to contact someone and be assured of delivery then text messaging is most likely to get through. When you need to send a document, email attachments work best.

With the introduction of unified messaging services that combine these different messages, a shared workspace will be essential to track a dialogue conducted with different tools. A shared workspace can use presence technology to tell you when your co-workers are available for a phone call or an instant message.

If they share the workspace, you can communicate knowing they will understand the context of your message. When the communications are complex they are most efficient within a collaborative workspace where earlier conversations and the related information are all to hand. A workspace can hold a shared task list so that buck-passing is explicit and visible. Because a workspace creates a community, it is much easier to filter out messages from key team members from external email and spam.

The problems of email can be solved if we make more effective use of the wide range of electronic communication tools that are available. Email is often misused but that doesn't mean that we have to abandon all electronic communication and go back to Post-It notes.

*Playing games* The market for downloaded games has grown rapidly in recent years and a number of operators are already capitalising on the revenue to be made at the point of download. However this one-off revenue could quickly become overshadowed if game users make ongoing use of the network during gameplay. One way to accomplish this is with multi-player games. Thus far most multi-player mobile gaming has involved the use of a direct Bluetooth or infrared link for two or more players in the same location. The gameplay only generates revenue for the electrical companies used to recharge the phones and is no great money earner for the operator. What would help are games that make use of GPRS and 3G communication flow. Internet multi-player gaming (MUDs and MOOs) generate little revenue except by subscription controlled access. With the high popularity of handset games on mobile phones there is a significant opportunity for multi-player games communicating over the mobile networks. To deliver this profitably to the hard realities of multiple handset types across multiple networks is a complex issue, so three companies have come together to address the problem: elata, Synergenix and Terraplay Systems. The subscriber management and service delivery system is provided by elata senses, which manages delivery of downloadable components written in either J2ME or C. Synergenix provides the morphun gaming engine for the handset and the communications element comes from Swedish company Terraplay Systems.

Although gaming might not be regarded as a 'critical' service, communications breaks during gameplay would spoil the experience, so the Terraplay solution, MOVE, will handle up to 20,000 simultaneous gamers and copes with the network delays in GPRS networks. Of course this could be used for applications other than just games but with the strong interest in games on mobile devices, and an apparent widespread willingness to pay for mobile phone entertainment, multi-player gaming could be a revenue earner for operators. These three companies provide the server, client and communications elements of a multi-player gaming solution. They also seem to realise that these elements need to be brought together to simplify the integration tasks for operators but also to stimulate developer interest to create compelling games content. This is a good example of how several specialist skill areas converge to produce a complete mobile solution for the service delivery platform challenge. As a model for more 'serious' mobile data applications it has much merit. In the meantime, mobile multi-player gaming could start providing some serious fun for mobile operators.

*Next stage analysis* SPSS has announced Clementine version 8.0. As one might expect from a dominant product in a mature market, it does not include any radical departures from the previous offering. Nevertheless, it does have a number of interesting new features. In previous releases you had to extract the data in order to run the model itself. Now this can be run in the database, along with most other elements involved in the process, with the only exception being the application of any filters that may apply after the calculation of probabilities. Clementine 8.0 is only supporting regression and decision trees within the database, though it plans comparable facilities for neural networks and other algorithmic approaches in the future. This means that it accessible via SQL which, provides greater portability. In this context, it is worth noting that Clementine supports the PMML standard which provides model interchange between vendors. So you could use IBM's Intelligent Miner Scoring in conjunction with Clementine models, or you could use the PMML compliance to migrate from other vendor's environments. A second major focus in this release is on making data preparation simpler. This, according to SPSS' discussions with its user base, is its customer's number one priority. There are two major new features to support this, where the first is an extended data audit capability and the second is a new re-classification function. The new data auditing function is a graphical profiling tool that analyses and illustrates the data fields that you are interested in. By automating this process what Clementine is doing is removing the need for the analyst to do it himself. SPSS claims that this feature should lower the number of such steps by "several orders of magnitude". The re-classification function is designed to make it easy to combine data into more useful groupings for analysis purposes. For example, you might have data that is organised by country but which you want to analyse by continent. The new facility allows you to graphically define such mappings. Finally, the other major new feature in Clementine 8.0 is a new Cluster Viewer. This is designed to make it easier to visualise the relationships that exist within and between discovered clusters. Of course, we can't do it justice by simply describing it.

Bloor Research is a leading independent analyst organisation in Europe. You can find out more at www.bloor-research.com or by emailing mail@bloor-research.com.