VeriSign Alliance, Robocall and Varolii, HaiVision Goes to Church,

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
| CRM, ERP, Contact Center, Turkish Coffee and Astroichthiology:

VeriSign Alliance, Robocall and Varolii, HaiVision Goes to Church,

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is a nice twofer from jazz saxophone great Sonny Rollins -- known to rock fans for his lovely solo at the end of The Rolling Stones' song "Waiting For A Friend" -- Saxophone Colossus and Freedom Suite. First Coffee does not pretend to be anything close to a jazzhead, can't tell a Mingus from a Monk, have no idea where Rollins fits in the pantheon of jazzdom, but we knows what we likes and we likes listening to this man play the sax:

Its still Saturday here in northern New Zealand, we now have Sonny Rollins playing in the background, still a nice warm sunny day, feeling good from having played tennis in the morning, my wife and oldest son are now back from checking out a new beach, Steinlagers in the fridge for the barbecue later on tonight as well as the All Blacks-Wallabies Bledisloe Cup match, so why don't we look at a few more news items that don't fit the normal weekaday CRM-focused coverage of First Coffee:

VeriSign, a provider of Internet infrastructure services, and Giesecke & Devrient GmbH, a vendor of smartcard products, have announced an alliance to provide end-to-end products for consumer authentication.

The alliance will give organizations a unified product for protecting users' identities, personal information and assets through VeriSign Identity Protection services, according to the VeriSigners.

VIP services are designed to provide an additional layer of authentication for online transactions and communication, company officials say -- "authentication that goes beyond entering a username and password. VIP's two-factor authentication works with the GDC4000 display card from G&D, an OATH-compliant credential."

To achieve two-factor authentication enabled by VIP, the card displays a one-time password which the user provides online to further verify his or her identity. The password changes with each transaction, ensuring that every VIP-enabled authentication combines something the user knows (username and password) with something he has (the OTP generated by the card).

Giesecke & Devrient sells banknote paper, banknote printing and currency automation systems, as well as smart cards and complex system products in the fields of telecommunications, electronic payment, health care, identification, transportation and IT security. In fiscal 2007, the group employed close to 9,000 people and generated revenue of almost EUR 1.5 billion.
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Gotten any of those obnoxious robocalls from the candidates' campaigns this year? Or any unsolicited automated calls, pre-recorded communications. You do what any normal person does -- hang up. "But what if the messages contained important information, such as a flight cancellation notification or a call alerting consumers to suspicious activity on their credit card account," says Varolii officials.

Fortune 500 companies are using automated calls more and more as a means to reach more of their customers and employees with actually important need-to-know information. In other words, get used to robocall.

Varolii Corporation, a vendor of personalized automated communications nationwide, offers the following tips to help tell the difference between a robocall and a need-to-know call.

An automated call with vital information will always be relationship-based -- you'll recognize the caller as someone you already do business with, such as their bank, pharmacy, or employer.

It'll be courteous, Varolii officials say, in that the calling organization will identify itself right away, using a natural-sounding voice in a conversational tone. It will be personalized in that it will ask for you by name, and even pronounce it correctly. First Coffee's sister, named Devyn (pronounced Devin), hung up on a caller asking for "Mrs. Divine Farley?""

The information will be relevant, specific and applicable only to the individual receiving the call, and valuable in that it'll be something you need to know, such as a fraud alert, flight delay, or prescription pick-up reminder.

It'll be a private call, in that you'll be asked to authenticate yourself before receiving confidential information. And Varolii officials say a legitimate call will be interactive -- "there is an opportunity to have a 'conversation' by answering questions and confirming selections," such as a new flight to be booked or confirming a credit card purchase.

"It's all too easy to mistakenly dismiss an automated call as a nuisance," said Jeffrey Read, Executive Vice President of Field Operations at Varolii.

Varolii is headquartered in Seattle with offices in the Boston and Denver metropolitan areas.
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HaiVision Systems high definition telepresence technology is helping The Church Without Walls to "build a greater sense of shared community among its three campuses in Houston," according to HaiVision officials.

The church is using hai1000 multistream encoder/decoder systems to deliver high-quality low-latency live video between campuses and "thus tie together the experiences of members attending services" at three separate sites.

"I did a lot of research into different streaming technologies, looking for a company that would stand behind its product and provide a high level of service," said Roderick Hammonds, director of IT at The Church Without Walls and owner of IT consulting firm Net FX, which integrated the HaiVision systems.


One hai1000 encoder is installed at each of The Church Without Walls campuses, and the three are connected over a VPN. Each campus has a different Sunday worship schedule, and Hammonds and his colleagues use live video broadcasts to create a window into worship at other sites.

If the pastor is speaking in one place, for example, his message now can be shared with members at other sites as they prepare for their worship service. Next summer the church plans to migrate its use of the hai1000 encoder to a simulcasting model and move from five services to three.

The Church Without Walls Media Group also takes advantage of the hai1000 systems, pulling video directly from the encoder for more efficient live recording of worship for media creation, distribution, and Webcasting. The church reaches national audiences through weekly television broadcasts and Internet streaming, and its worship services are watched online by as many as 1,000 people over the course of a week.

The Houston church was founded in 1987 as Brookhollow Baptist Church and 10 years later, with the opening of its doors at Queenston campus, became The Church Without Walls. Today the church has three campuses and embraces 21,625 members.
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And here's a real shocker, hope you're sitting down: When it comes to viewing TV and video, growth in consumer markets "is more limited by consumers' ability to absorb new usage models and new applications than by limitations of technology," according to a new US consumer survey from ABI Research.

"The willingness to adopt new forms of entertainment delivery is in many cases determined by the age of the consumer," says ABI Research principal analyst Steve Wilson. "That means that market growth is simply a matter of time." It also means your eleven-year old can program your TiVo intuitively, and why you recorded that dull Obama infomercial valentine to himself instead of the World Series game.

The online survey, which examined avenues of video delivery and consumption, found age influencing several patterns of consumption:
 
In game consoles, penetration in the 18-25 year old segment showed no gain over last year, whereas penetration in the 65+ segment grew more than 200 percent. Granted, it was starting from a smaller base. Remember, it's percentage improvement.

DVR ownership is up uniformly across all age groups. The technology has been available for some time and has permeated the mass market, as has video on demand -- 65 percent of the respondents over 65 have never used VOD, while only 30 percent of those in the 25-29 age range haven't.
 
However, 40-50 percent of those who have tried it continue use it at least once a month regardless of age. Says Wilson, "The first key to VOD success appears simple: get consumers to try the service."

Internet downloading is only really popular with consumers under 30. Wilson thinks it's because of "inconsistencies in the process, a result of the industry's immaturity." Anecdotal evidence reveals the fear of those over 65 who use the Internet exclusively to e-mail grandchildren and pass around pictures of cute puppies that if they download anything phishers from Nigeria will redirect their Social Security checks to a Swiss bank accont.

-- Video cell phone usage: consumers in their 30s are four times more likely to have watched video on their handset than those in their 50s. The wealthy, willing to pay the extra costs, are much more likely to watch video on their handsets than the less affluent.

Consumer Video Preferences and Profiles (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/research_brief/Consumer_Video _Technologies_Market_Update) presents the results of an online consumer survey conducted by ABI Research in March, 2008, querying 1,002 video consumers on their viewing preferences and activities. It analyzes the results in terms of the respondents' ages to draw some conclusions about generational changes in video consumption.

It forms part of the firm's Consumer Video Technologies Research Service (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/service/Consumer_Video_ Technologies_Research_Service).

ABI Research is a leading market research firm focused on the impact of emerging technologies on global consumer and business markets. Utilizing a unique blend of market intelligence, primary research, and expert assessment from its worldwide team of industry analysts, ABI Research assists hundreds of clients each year with their strategic growth initiatives. For information, visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.

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