Mobile Internet: Innovation and Localization
I am pleased to announce two exciting new initiatives in Bytemobile Product Development. We believe that these initiatives will accelerate our momentum in China and advance our efforts to ‘green’ the mobile internet industry.
China Development Center
We have established our fifth development center – after Patras, Belfast, Champaign, and Mountain View – in Beijing. China is the world’s largest market for mobile services, and we are rapidly penetrating the provincial operating companies of China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom (see John Cole’s blog post on the China Mobile Web Gateway project). Given the growth of our customer base and the singular requirements of the market, it is only logical that China would be the next destination for the expansion of our global engineering team.
The new development center will focus initially on three areas:
• Customization of our products to meet local market requirements and support mobile devices used in China
• Localization of our product interfaces in Chinese languages
• Custom engineering to respond to customer requests with unique solutions
Our first priority is the adaptation of our products to local handsets. Therefore, our first engineer in China – who started last week – is focused on handset profiling and customization. Until now, we have performed this function in our handset laboratory in Patras. With the launch of our team in China, we will be more efficient and better able to meet local demand. We are also working closely with partners in the region to outsource parts of the process under the direction of the local team. As customer demand increases, we will ramp up the team to scale and manage the workload.
Our next priority will be custom solutions engineering in China. To date, we have performed this function in Patras and outsourced to key partners in Greece. The new center in Beijing will enable us to anticipate and respond to the local market and continue to drive our thought leadership throughout the region. We are actively recruiting solutions engineering candidates in the area and are also seeking candidates with a combination of global and local experience.
Green Network Platform
Greening the Mobile Internet and White Space Innovation are two strategic programs that we have launched in the last year. They intersect in a new research and development project designed to dramatically expand the capacity of the Unison Mobile Internet Platform and make a significant contribution to the sustainability of our customers’ network environments.
We launched the project – appropriately named ‘Fusion’ – on April 1, the day after general availability of the new Unison release. Our goal is to reduce our customers’ hardware requirements as they deploy and scale Bytemobile applications in their networks. The Unison platform is already the most scalable mobile internet gateway in the industry. However, Bytemobile has never rested on its laurels and isn’t about to start now. Rather than targeting incremental improvement, we aspire to the seemingly impossible: a ‘quantum leap’ increase in system capacity, which would yield a proportionate decrease in power, cooling and rack space requirements – and therefore in overall data delivery costs.
Because this is a white space innovation project, there are no limitations on methodology. We will evaluate technical solutions ranging from software changes to new operating systems to custom hardware.
Project Fusion will provide a useful model for white space innovation projects of the future. The ‘greening’ of the Unison platform will further enhance our strategic value to customers as they implement environmental responsibility in their network operations and service delivery.
Building a Great Company
Both the China Development Center and Project Fusion are ambitious undertakings. As such, they are consistent with Bytemobile’s history of global market and technological leadership. They also support our plans to continue building a great company that fundamentally changes the shape of its industry through innovation and localization.
-Chris Koopmans
Image use courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/dongbin/3296818794/ under Creative Commons attribution license.
Tags: beijing, china, china mobile, china telecom, china unicom, custom engineering, development center, green network platform, handset profiling, localization, mobile internet, mobile internet platform, mobile services, mobile web gateway, white space innovation