NEW YORK-Volantis Systems Ltd., Guildford, England, has crossed the pond and established U.S. offices on both coasts to market its new Mariner software, which is designed to improve the speed, display and usability of data delivered over any wireless or wireline device on today’s networks.
Volantis, a venture-backed company formed last year, takes its name and, with a bit of poetic license, its mission, from that of the constellation that is visible anywhere in the skies of the Southern Hemisphere.
In the United Kingdom, a new federal law designed to eliminate economic discrimination, requires that information, particularly e-mail, that is available on the desktop computer also be available to interactive television, handheld computers and mobile phones, said vice president of U.S. business development Steve Statler, who is based in Portland, Ore.
Mariner, which handles device management and the presentation layer, is designed to eliminate the inefficiencies inherent in the typical requirement for a separate wireless server. Sitting atop a Sun Microsystems Inc. Java applications server, Mariner identifies the kind of device communicating with a Web site and automatically tailors the content to it, eliminating the need to hire personnel to handle that function.
“We’re essentially a fourth-generation approach, which looks like HTML using standard Java tags,” Statler said.
“We sell the software and the support, which offers the latest definitions via an XML feed, similar to the downloads of upgraded definitions for anti-virus software.”
Mariner eliminates old-style transcoding, which has numerous disadvantages, particularly for wireless communications, Statler said. It creates an additional step, which slows transmission. It filters content and abridges it in such a way that companies can run into legal problems for providing different descriptions of their products and services to different devices. It also distorts and degrades the visual quality of graphics.
“We optimize graphics for the particular device. Lack of clarity on wireless devices has nothing to do with the lack of 3G,” Statler said.
Volantis currently is shipping Mariner Version 2.0. In August, Version 2.2, which includes Voice XML capabilities, will be available, said Yonas Maru, sales engineer for the Eastern region, who is based in Morristown, N.J.
Version 2.2 will provide improved scalability to a large numbers of users, fast data loading speeds and support for architectures that are specific to the United States, like the Palm Inc. system for Web clipping, Maru said.
Both versions give WAP phones access to more content, and more content that is relevant to people on the move, Statler said. Content providers that deploy Mariner also will be able to simplify life for end users in another way, by permitting the use of a single URL (Universal Resource Locator) for their Web sites, regardless of the device by which people access them.
