Motorola Inc. said it created a new start-up services business to focus on developing and providing integrated communication and information services.
The Internet and Connectivity Services Division is part of the Internet and Networking Group, which is part of another new Motorola unit called the Communications Enterprise organization.
Motorola ICSD will address speech-enabled, Web-based content, in-vehicle and paging information services. Motorola said the services platform was created to simplify communications needs and to develop a new market.
The company said it expects the speech-enabled mobile services market to reach $3.4 billion by 2003. Its recent acquisition of Starfish Software Inc., which makes synchronization data technology, was influenced by this prediction, as was Motorola’s investment in Nuance Communications, which manufactures speech-recognition technology for transaction and network applications.
Maria Martinez, Motorola ICSD general manager and vice president, pointed to Motorola’s history of developing markets by championing new technologies. “We are now focusing on ways to simplify communications across multiple devices from any location through the introduction of new, network-based carrier-class services,” she said.
Citing a Gallup study found in a recent Fortune article, Motorola said the average executive receives around 30 e-mails, 22 voice messages, four pages and three express mailings a day. Motorola said all these communications require several devices and can make life more complicated, referring to a Yankelovich Partners Inc. finding that 23 percent of message users experience message overload.
ICSD was created to develop a platform to help manage these various messages that can be reached by a single point of access. Its first product, set to be tested later this year, is a speech-enabled service dubbed Myosphere, meaning “my world.”
Myosphere is a service bureau platform Motorola wants to sell to carriers, which then can sell it to customers. Motorola also will provide carriers with turnkey marketing, sales support, customer care, integrated billing and other back-office solutions.
The company said Myosphere will allow customers to manage wireless and wireline communications from a single point of access using natural voice commands. Users verbally can command Myosphere to make several calls, return pages and provide online information by calling into a toll-free number. For instance, a customer could call into the Myosphere service and request traffic information for a certain area.
Myosphere will not only bring customers their e-mail and telephone messages, but also can access custom Internet content such as news, weather, sports and traffic via voice commands.
In addition, Motorola said software developers will be able to create new applications to the platform. The company is talking with carriers to trial Myosphere.
Voice competition
Similar voice-user interface technology is used by Wildfire and General Magic Inc. for their respective offerings.
Wildfire’s Network Wildfire is a server carriers can buy and integrate into their network. Along with other functions, customers subscribing to Wildfire service can have a virtual assistant that answers calls for them and forwards them as told. Although several carriers have conducted trials of the server, none have yet made Network Wildfire commercially available to customers.
General Magic’s newly launched Portico service has many of the same virtual assistant functions but is a service bureau. It is sold directly to corporations and individual customers, who will pay for the right to access the Portico call center to get their e-mail messages and voice mail. Eventually, General Magic hopes carriers will buy access to the service bureau.
Motorola said it is positioning itself differently from these two offerings, calling Myosphere a mobile productivity space, not a virtual assistant, stressing its Internet-content abilities, turnkey support and third-party application-development options.
