Last week, I already stressed the necessity of convergence in my article on convenience.

On the one hand, users still have to use alternative applications on their cellphone for individual functions (aside from telephony and SMS), i. e. one client for IM, one for e-mail or the WAP page of a micro-blogging service. On the other hand, most services offer reasonable integration of the mobile and web interfaces only sporadically. A positive example is GMail who have developed both a mobile and a web solution focusing on the respective interface and providing the user with real added value. In terms of an addressbook 2.0, what we need, however, is the highest possible integration of both levels, so that as many applications as possible are aggregated in a system and are available from WEB and WAP or the Mobile Client. Only by taking this step, the user may enter the third level of integration: the integration of the contact details. The advantage of this for every user is evident. Only one service has to be used
- for using all the communication functions,
- for saving contact details and
- for using contact details.

Such a solution would allow me to forward an interesting status update to any Social Network or an IM message as an e-mail or a SMS to any contact from my addressbook. Only if this is the case, the user will use the features more frequently and therefore communicates more. If the users, in a next step, exchange contact details, this would mean that the evolution to addressbook 2.0 has been implemented using this “activation”.

O2, for instance, also has provided its users with a Communication Center, hereby connecting the interfaces web and mobile as well as telephony, SMS and, in its basics, e-mail. If, however, my regular SMS quota is not credited there and if I miss other functions, this integration attempt is considered as not implemented with insufficient decisiveness. This month, I will present and compare some approaches which have developed an approach similar to addressbook 2.0.

Best regards

Joerg Land

Product - cellity AG

A few days ago we were able to launch the great news that our award-winning software has by now been downloaded more than 5 million times. At the same time we have first announced in public the launch of our completely revised cellity Communicator for the end of October. The decisive advantage for the user is the introduction of the address book 2.0. It enables the user for the first time to centrally synchronize contacts from the mobile phone book, from Outlook and from the Social Networks, and to communicate therefrom via freely selected channels.

This announcement has found major approval in the media.

- PRO 7

- Forbes

- newsmax media business and relations

- Interest! ALERT

- TeleComPaper

- redtram

- PR-USA

Last week, I was dealing at this point with the aspect of communication with respect to addressbook 2.0. Doing so, it has been stressed that the prime benefit from centralizing and interconnecting communication and contacts is convenience. However, why comfort is that important and unfortunately, has often been neglected so far, is supposed to be referred to in this article.
Convenience is everything that makes for an easier life and as Wikipedia states: a facility is comfortable due to its possibilities and its equipment with objects if its reduces men’s work and can offer coziness (WIKIPEDIA n.d.).
Unfortunately, in the status quo of contact administration and communication, comfort frequently cannot be found to the actually possible extent. The following points are supposed to clarify this statement.

1. Separating the communication channels
By separating the different communication channels, the user still has to change the applications for different forms of communication and he cannot use the data system wide. To give an example, please let me mention a complete e-mail client with web synchronization. To do so, I have to open a new application on the cell phone and unfortunately,  I also cannot use it with my phonebook. With the utmost probability, many users, however, will not perceive this as being convenient. Next week, I am going to dwell on the convergence topic at this point.

2. Not using information available
Up to now, the information available unfortunately is used rather rarely, partly due to lacking integration in order to improve the user experience. To give an example, please let me mention a telephone call and an e-mail to write. Why is the user not suggested the recipients who have top priority for him and not just an address book starting at A. like in Anderson and ending with Z. like in Zaza? The same is true for conversations, as the user should also be interested in obtaining relevant information about his dialog partner. Last week, I gave the example that the profile or the e-mails last sent or received are being displayed to me during a conversation matching the corresponding contact.

3. Data security
Any cell phone user should be able to understand the fear to lose all his contact details. But why are most synchronization solutions  applications with one single purpose: the user has to initiate synchronization himself instead of having it work automatically in the background. In addition, synchronization only makes sense if all  contact details are administered in one place so that not only contact fragments are saved. And if these are saved right away, saving the communication history (e.g of an e-mail) itself would be interesting, too.

4. Usability
By addressing the above-mentioned problems, there is the danger of preparing an application fraught with features. However, comfort is only generated by reducing the features truly relevant to added value, so that the complexity of technology does not constrain its use. The main task should be to design a lean application clearly geared to the users, also taking into account the user’s individual particularities.

When designing the cellity Communicator, we have addressed these issues to provide the user with a higher degree of comfort. cellity users will be able to use all of their contacts and all of their communication anywhere. Doing so, they can rely on data security and experience high comfort when using this tool. We are currently investigating in an acceptance and usability study, to what extent we do hit the targets we have set for ourselves and what details may need reworking to be able to offer the promised user experience at launching.

Next week, I am going to write on the subject of convergence already addressed above.

Joerg Land

Prodcut - cellity AG

Last week in this space we reported on ‘connect’ and the rationale behind further development of the cellity Communicator. In the post we emphasized that contacts and their related information is the origin of all communication, or “messaging” as I called it last week. Today the spotlight is on ‘communicate’ and I will show why the cellity Communicator offers new possibilities in this area.

You may be asking yourself what kind of transformation cellity can bring about in how we communicate because people communicate over the Web or on their cellphone without any trouble. But, if you look more closely, the connection between contacts and communication is only there in part.

Most users will often only save relevant contact data within the communication tool they are using (e.g. a person’s email address at hotmail.com), but not include the remaining information about their contact. The reasons for this may be very different, however the user is the most likely to be wondering why he or she should enter a phone number if the number can’t be used in the application. Once again, this is the problem touched on last week of fragmented contact data spread across several applications.

Mobile communication is also characterized by the same problem, because here talking on your cellphone or sending short messages is the main thing you do. There is no full email client, Twitter or IM app on the cell (probably because carriers don’t want to sacrifice their text-messaging cash cow). Alternative applications such as emoze, cellity tweeter or ebuddy are helpful for this. However, users only being able to use one application makes things difficult, severely limiting usability and a having a neat interface.

This problem stands perfectly mirrors the poor interconnection of various communication channels. If I download an email from, for example, Sarik Weber to the mobile WAP page of my email provider, then I am only able to respond to his message using this platform. If I want to respond using a different channel, then the only option I have is to switch applications and to select Sarik’s entry again so that I can send him a text or twitter message or simply give him a call (if it is urgent). At the same time, the details provided are insufficient in these cases because pertinent information is useful when communicating.

I’ll illustrate this point with another example: while talking we should each have the corresponding profile, current status, the most recently sent or receive emails and appropriate tweet or other transferred data visible at the same time. This means contextual information is being shown to me which is truly relevant to me as a user. Visualization of this kind is definitely hard to achieve on a cellphone while talking to someone, but here too I can imagine linking information by clicking on a user to pull up emails, recent tweets, etc.

I say that cellphone users should be able to expect all electronic communication channels to be connected!

But what does all this have to do with cellity and the new cellity Communicator?

cellity has now had its applications downloaded five million times worldwide and is a specialized mobile communication provider which as an early adopter has been combining communication channels within the cellity Communicator. The Communicator already bundles telephony, fee-based and free text messaging, (freeSMS), emails and twitter. At the present stage of development, the cellity Communicator will continue to be developed to solve all the problems sketched out above by uniting all the communication channels within a single application. This means all your contacts’ details and related communication features will be available for the Web and mobile/handheld terminal devices.

The following example helps bring out what benefits are possible:

cellity user Clark K. uses cellity Communicator and this is the application where he receives GMail and Hotmail emails (only for his hobbies), status notifications such as twitter postings, messages from other cellity users (freeSMS), as well as messages intended for him from various social networks. Clark therefore has everything available at a glance, is up to speed on what’s happening and doesn’t have to put up with switching between applications all the time.

Thanks to the integration of contact data possible with the cellity Communicator, Clark is able to

1. Reach contacts directly using all the communication channels available
2. Respond to a message using a different “reverse” channel
3. Bundle all messages within one application so that
4. Later on he can easily search through all the messages without
5. Being dependent on a locally installed program while at the same time
6. Having all data available on the Web and on any mobile device.

The cellity Communicator thus makes it possible to interconnect and centralize communication in a single application. The core benefit can be summed up as the topic you can read about in our blog slated for next week—convenience!

Hope you will stop by to read more then.

Joerg Land

Product - cellity AG

Every Wednesday on this blog, I report on cellity project work so that those of you reading this can get an early preview of what the latest version of cellity Communicator will be like and gain some behind-the-scenes insight on its development. This week I’m writing about: connect

During the design planning phase for this project, we worked on key enhancements for the cellity Communicator. We wanted to take a decisive step forward with what is available, based on communication features already being used successfully. We felt that this next step could only go in the direction of contacts. All communication is based on the contact’s underlying data and this information is usually stored with other address book or phone book entries.

And that is exactly where the problem starts. Simply improving the phonebook wasn’t enough for us, because the phonebook’s fixed structure would remain unchanged. Another dilemma we were confronted with was this: if users didn’t keep their contact data updated themselves, it was only a matter of time before entries would become outdated. On top of that, most contacts were created with only one application in mind (see the ‘convergence’ post I will publish here on October 2). This problem gets even worse due to the contact volatility of a typical user. The following chart demonstrates this clearly:

On the Y axis we can see the number of new contacts per year, with their age shown along the X axis. People gain many new contact after they complete school, whether during their practical on-the-job training, starting studies at the university, studying/staying overseas or when moving to a new city, doing a traineeship or when moving to a new job. I don’t want to make a judgment here about these new contacts, however it is important to all users to securely and systematically save their contacts to an address book.

The example above shows how I archived the contacts I have created over the years. I have some contacts saved in my e-mail software, often this is only the person’s name and e-mail address, which as the years have passed I have kept there while on trips or because I was frustrated by Outlook. Several of my contacts are kept on my cellphone.

Some of these phone numbers are no longer up-to-date and there is the constant threat of misplacing or losing my cellphone looming over my head (four years ago I lost a silver Sony Ericsson T610 and all the contacts on it—last seen somewhere in downtown Hamburg. Any reported sightings are welcome).

And for two years now my social network contacts have been a part of my life. Though these details are up-to-date, they are only maintained by that contact directly. The problem then is if some of the data or a whole profile is removed, that cuts me off from the information. Put in only a few words: things are really chaotic. I certainly don’t need to mention that several contacts are scattered across several address archives with varying details, which doesn’t help matters either.

Given this situation, we came to the conclusion that address books and contacts need a completely new development approach. But what should this approach involve? We thought that if individual contacts were interconnected, this would bring an end to invalid or inaccurate contact data.

Our vision is for every user to keep his or her data up-to-date and make sure all of that person’s friends have these changes updated in their own address book. In addition, the new address book would have to throw down the stiff old convention of individual fields and be arranged in a new and more flexible manner and be made editable as users chose them to be, without disregarding patterns it was familiar with. This flexibility is also needed if users want to use just one address book and choose not to continue archiving their contacts in phonebooks, in Outlook, on social network platforms, in the address book of their e-mail providers, etc. In addition, we wanted to place a clear focus on data security and the user experience.

This solution can therefore be summarized and will become available in the cellity Communicator:

1. Keeping all data stored in one place.
2. Direct exchange of contact data so that changes to data can be automatically adopted by other users as well.
3. Secure data, meaning protection from the risk of losing data and data is kept secure from third-parties (see the ‘convenience’ post I will publish here on September 25).
4. Convenient and direct use of contacts and the communication this enables (see the ‘convenience’ post I will publish here on September 25).
5. Linking this data with a number of other potential applications, if users want to take advantage of these apps (this keeps the application manageable). (see the ‘communicate’ post I will publish here on September 18)

They key statements imply quite a number of further steps which we have developed in the cellity Communicator and which will be launched when the release goes live.

I will be interested to hear your responses and look forward to writing my next post on the topic of ‘communicate’ next week.

Best regards

Joerg Land

Product – cellity AG

We are happy to announce our new project we are working on these days and I am delighted to get the chance to write about it. As many of you probably have seen in the teaser movie we are expanding our current business to the next stage. In the beginning we had the vision to evolve our core product ‘cellity Communicator’. The logical extension of this couldn’t be anything else but the contacts - which are the origin of any communication. This can be reconstructed by anyone: Do you think at first about an SMS or email and then about whom to sent it to? No, first there is a person in my mind and then I choose how I want to get in contact with this person (OK, maybe when you forward one of those fun emails).

Based on these thoughts we designed the Communicator in a new way. A simple extension of the existing phonebook wasn’t enough – we wanted those contacts to be activated so the users are connected. There are some similar approaches, but none of them is combining being connected to other people and communicating with them like this. Furthermore this application won’t imprison the contact information on one user interface. cellity Communicator is a comprehensive way of communication. We will add value to any user interface by focusing on their core functions and the use of a single server structure.

Until the launch in October every week I am going to write here about our project, about the revolutionary features we will include into the Communicator and how this might change the way we use addressbooks and communicate.

Best regards

Joerg Land

Product – cellity AG

Australian and European users of Twitter can no longer receive text message updates on their mobile phones, in a temporary move designed to keep the start-up’s telecom bills down.

The company has managed to find text-message billing agreements in the US, Canada and India, the other three countries in which Twitter has enabled SMS updates, so those countries will not be affected by the change.Twitter recommends the use of the Twitter mobile site or a third-party client like cellity.

cellity AG is starting a partnership with QYPE GmbH. Visitors to the mobile Internet pages of both companies can easily access the offers of both the two partners. QYPE is Germany’s largest assessment portal for local offers.
QYPE Mobile can now be reached directly via the cellity WAP page on http://wap.cellity.com. Thanks to the reciprocative links on the WAP pages cellity fans can also easily and quickly access the mobile Internet page of cellity AG. On this page the innovative applications for mobile phones by cellity can be downloaded with only one click.