Video Portals (Interesting Mobile Company #1)

Voxsurf are an interesting company with a neat 3G video portal solution. You can dial a number with a mobile and watch video content, but because it's a video call you can also leave a video message. This allows many interesting services, such as participative TV where viewers can leave opinions or just deposit their own content. The dial-up aspect of the video portal concept makes it powerful. It means users can instantly access the service - as simple as dialling a number. This is far easier than messing around with portals and URLs and other barriers to access.

What's neat about Voxsurf's solution is the service creation tool. It is a visual tool that allows a sequence of video events to be set up and and made navigable via pressing buttons during the call (using "touch tones"). The extensibility of the framework allows powerful events to be programmed. For example, a user could leave a video comment on someone's blog and their comment could cause an alert to the blog owner who subsequently watches the comment via a video mailbox. This is also a way to introduce the user to video messaging.

Interactive video services are of great interest to mobile operators and potentially to MVNOs.

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Tags: 3g, video, messaging, portal, mobile TV, mobile, voxsurf