Blogging VON: Availability, i.e. context aware communications

I arrived in San Jose for the VON conference mid-day Tuesday and immediately went to Henry Sinnreich's session on context-aware communications. Context-aware communications is the generalization of "presence" as popularized by instant messaging and Henry gave a very complete tutorial from the SIP/SIMPLE-centric point of view. Very thorough. Your availability to accept a phone call can be estimated much more accurately with knowledge of your location -- perhaps including your location within your corporate building as determined by interacting with corporate security systems.  Beyond that, if location is combined with knowledge of your calendar, it's possible to figure out when you are in meetings or conference rooms and guess what kinds of communications you are available for, if any.  Henry's slides should become available, at least to attendees, through Pulver Media shortly after the conference ends.  An good independent source of information is Rajaniemi and Yanev's paper "SIP and Presence." 

My only complaint is with the word presence. The goal is to provide availability information.  I'm always present somewhere. With instant messenger clients on PCs, we get information about whether I'm at my PC or not by whether I have typed anything in the past five minutes.  But the most important phone I use is my mobile phone.  It's always on and always with me, but I may not answer you call ! 

So with a mobile phone, we might want to recognize when I've got the phone in vibrate or silence mode.  At those times, I might be available for text, photos or video, but I'm clearly not interested in audio connections.

My only other quibble: why so negative on presence gateways?  Yes, SIMPLE is a much more comprehensive system, but ubiquity is important for forming communities and there are enormous populations that have more limited forms of presence.  If this initiative works, why not contemplate interconnecting with the resulting large population, even if there is less that complete functionality?

Comments

[rita]

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