Multiple-Modality Disorder
Emerson says that some of the primary constraints Medio encountered when designing Get It Now were the restrictions around maintaining Verizon’s brand preferences. Pixels around selected boxes, for instance, had to be a certain size and not interfere with the company’s branding colors.
Because of Medio’s close working relationship with Verizon, Emerson was cautious when asked how his company and Novauris worked to create the best interface while still conforming to the carrier’s standards.
"Sometimes you don’t," he says. "I guess the answer is you take the constraints that you have and you do your best to work within them and create a product that would be the most useful. Then you go back to the carrier customer, show them reports, do [audio-visual] testing to show them alternatives that might work better."
Verizon has a reputation of being a robust, widespread, but closed network. "Verizon is one of the toughest right now," Phillips says. "It’s a great network, and we use Verizon all the time, but in terms of making downloadable clients on their mainstream handsets, they completely control that market."
Last November, the company announced that early this year it would "publish the technical standards the development community will need to design products to interface with the Verizon Wireless network." In March, Verizon clarified its stance at its developer-targeted Open Development Conference in New York, noting that it would essentially take a much more laissez faire attitude toward developers building devices and applications to run on Verizon’s network. Certification and approval by Verizon for an independently developed application can take up to eight weeks. Aside from that, the company claims, anything goes.
In April, Verizon paid $4.74 billion for a block of spectrum called C-block, which will be available after television broadcasters convert to digital in 2009. Because of preset conditions, the owner of that spectrum must abide by certain open-access requirements. According to embedded and open source analyst and consultant William Weinberg, Verizon’s move is consistent with its pledge to allow independent device manufacturers and application developers to access its network.
While this seems promising for the proliferation of multimodal phone applications, it’s unclear how open Verizon’s standards will be. Ultimately, if operators create a completely open infrastructure, they won’t be able to maintain or recover any investment in their networks.
"They have to have in their back pocket a business model moving forward to collect tolls along this new highway," Weinberg says. "In terms of network usage, one of the ways they can segregate use modes is through encryption." Additionally, even with an open network, devices themselves represent another chokepoint. The CDMA mobile standard used by Verizon, for instance, doesn’t have SIM cards. "You can’t just go out and buy a SIM card and walk onto the Verizon network," Weinberg adds. "You need it to be certified by the provider."
The big conflict here seems to be control of service providers and Web-based companies, with Internet-based companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! trying to get more freedom by providing content to consumers without trying to work through service providers.
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