iAnywhere Solutions' Crystal King profiles how out-of-the-box thinkers are altering media habits.

Breakthrough technologies tend to morph uncontrollably beyond their creators’ original intent. Take Edison’s first phonograph, designed to record business dictation, or Fermi’s atomic pile, an energy miracle that raised the specter of nuclear winter.

But shape-shifting technology need not always conjure up images of Frankenstein’s monster running amok. Two recent examples of product evolution are a testament to human ingenuity and the inherent nature of things wanting to evolve -- for the better. First there was the lowly personal digital assistant (PDA), which expanded from humble day-planner to web-connected, personal productivity powerhouse in just a few years.

Following closely on its heels came the mobile phone -- possibly the greatest breakthrough in interpersonal communication since speech itself. Combine the two, and you create an omnipresent interface between humans and the great and powerful wizard known as the Back End.

Profiled here are pioneers that are taking advantage of new device capabilities, stretching the limits of technology and helping sculpt our mobile futures.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

When Sprint touted its first camera phone a few years ago, some saw a post-adolescent plaything, others an ill-advised grafting of incompatible devices. Scanbuy founder and CEO Olivier Attia envisioned an optical window connected wirelessly to infinite possibilities.

“Camera phones were developed to take a picture and send a picture,” explains Pat Scorzelli, Scanbuy’s president. “But the natural progression is for people to start thinking, ‘If I can send a picture, I can SMS [Short Message Service] and send data and combinations of pictures and data.’”

Attia is just one of several out-of-the-box thinkers around the world exploring use of camera phones as barcode scanners. For Scanbuy, a lightweight application (only 32K) on the phone employs patented algorithm technology to convert any bar-code image into a data stream that can trigger a variety of actions. There is no need for painful key entry of queries, commands and URLs. Your personal scanner will do it for you -- just point and click.

Among the more promising partnerships is one with Pricegrabber.com, to dispatch competitive pricing information to the phone. A major entertainment company is considering the technology for a theme-park treasure hunt.

“Phones are becoming intelligent lifestyle devices,” explains Scorzelli, who has visions of bar codes dancing on everything from TV screens to cereal boxes, calling out URLs that will deliver interactive experiences right to your phone.

Just Ask

Camera phone scanners are not the only technology designed to circumvent cumbersome data entry on mobile devices. As wireless users are typically in a hurry, companies need to anticipate their aversion to clicking and waiting. Mobile applications should conform to users’ natural expressions of command, not the other way around. Natural-language interfaces are the Holy Grail of personal computing.

The vision of natural language technology is to allow people to say what they want in their own words and let the machine determine their intent and execute the command. Because the range of human expression is so varied, the key to success is customization in order to narrow the query parameters.

Sybase subsidiary iAnywhere Solutions’ innovations include Answers Anywhere software, which can cut the time for developing a custom application from weeks to a matter of days or even hours, greatly reducing the cost and time of deployment. Among iAnywhere’s biggest customer success stories is the European phone service Orange, which uses Answers Anywhere technology to power an SMS-based Yellow Pages information service. By utilizing SMS text messaging, the Answers Anywhere solution for Orange overcomes two major shortcomings of the current phone generation: low processing power and limited deck space for device-side applications.

The real workhorse is the back-end software, which fields a query and runs it through a gauntlet of servers to determine the intent of a user’s request and deliver the desired information, making it easier for users to request information, in their own words, in any language.  

When Are Two Screens Better than One?

How we shop and how we interact with informational databases are not the only relationships under review in the Mobile Age. The way we entertain ourselves is also changing.

Silly ring tones and resuscitated '70s/'80s video games such as PacMan are just the start. The next frontier is wireless interactive television.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the initial vision of interactive television never lived up to its hype. Who really wanted a TV with clunky desktop performance? And although the research pointed to a large number of people with a computer and a TV in the same room, that didn’t mean that everyone wanted to look at both simultaneously.

What does make sense, however, is the idea of couch potatoes interacting with programming via a smart phone or a wireless PDA. Millions have already granted proof of concept by using SMS or plain old voice technology to vote on Fox’s "American Idol," complements of a Seattle-based startup called Mobliss.

Among the other pioneers in the fledgling field of two-screen interactive TV, where the second screen is a mobile device, is Proteus, headquartered in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Although the real promise of the medium awaits wider adoption of smart phones and wireless PDAs, the company is building a foundation with “dumb” phone technologies such as SMS. Fans of HBO’s "The Sopranos," for example, can download wallpaper images of their favorite characters and get the show’s theme music as a ring tone or play Mafia trivia via SMS.

In the future, says Proteus’ vice president of business development, Craig Shapiro, fans will interact synchronously and asynchronously with their favorite shows. “It won’t matter if they are riding a bus or are in a bar,” says Shapiro, “or whether they have a TV in front of them. If they do have a TV and phones are able to handle more-advanced apps, I see more of a true interactive television experience.”

ET, Don’t Phone Home (We Already Know Where You Are!)

Combine the power of peer-to-peer social networks such as Friendster, global positioning technology (GPS), mapping software and mobile messaging, and you have a new formula for human interaction. Among the first to recognize the value of putting these elements together is the fledgling Dodgeball.com service, which was launched by two NYU graduate students last spring. 

Rather than require users to download software or own a smart phone, Dodgeball -- like many of the other pioneering technologies explored here -- utilizes the popular SMS capabilities intrinsic to most phones. “I wanted to create something my friends would use,” says founder Dennis Crowley. “None of them are really downloading software to their phones. But they all use SMS.”

Once they have registered on Dodgeball’s website, members can send an SMS with their location -- say, a Lower East Side bar -- and the service will notify any friends or friends of friends who have checked in within 10 blocks of their location. The beauty of services such as Friendster and Dodgeball is that they can take advantage of a network effect and grow in so-called “viral marketing” fashion, with little or no paid marketing. And as the number of people with more-powerful, GPS-outfitted multimedia phones reaches critical mass, more-compelling services, including location-based content and targeted offers, can be provided.

While admitting that a pioneering SMS-only service has its limitations, Crowley says that Dodgeball still has a lot going for it. How many applications, mobile or otherwise, he asks, “can change the course of an evening?”

Now Customers Are Just One Sync Away

Dodgeball didn’t invent viral marketing. AvantGo boasts an audience of 7 million unique smartphone and PDA users, largely via word-of-mouth.

Bundling deals with Palm and Microsoft’s Pocket PC in the early years didn’t hurt. Nor did the 1,200-plus name-brand media sites that send customers our way. But the glue that has allowed AvantGo to survive the dot-com bust and prosper is the ease with which our customers are able to manage content delivery, whether they synchronize via their desktop or wirelessly through a modem, cellular or Wi-Fi connection.

Free to end users, the mobile Internet service, which was acquired in 2003 by Sybase’s iAnywhere, has paid its way by pioneering the field of mobile marketing and advertising, partnering with media companies such as The New York Times, CNET and Yahoo! and with marketing spending giants including General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and American Airlines.

It isn’t easy staying in touch with your best customers -- especially when they are always on the go. This is particularly true for the travel industry and is one of the reasons major airlines such as American, Delta, Northwest, Singapore Air and United have turned to AvantGo to increase frequent-flier loyalty and reduce the costs of providing critical information, such as flight schedules and gate information, to customers on the go.

Crystal King is Senior Product Marketing Manager at AvantGo, a service of iAnywhere Solutions, a Sybase company. King oversees marketing, branding, communications and public relations for the AvantGo mobile internet service. Today, more than 2,500 major brands, including American Airlines, CNET, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Volkswagen leverage AvantGo to target a highly desirable demographic of more than 7 million registered users. Prior to joining iAnywhere, King was marketing director at Taxware, a First Data company. She has worked in high tech marketing for over twelve years at companies such as Nexaweb, Bowne, GE Capital and a handful of dot.com startups. She holds an M.A. in critical and creative thinking from the University of Massachusetts-Boston.