I had the opportunity to chat with Clarity Communications Systems Inc VP of Business Development Tom Carter earlier this week.  Clarity is a wireless company focused on location based services and push to talk. They differentiate from competitors like Kodiak in two ways: market focus, and technology. Kodiak is targeting the tier 1 player with a circuit switch solution.Â
Clarity’s technology provides their services over 1x CDMA networks. All IP, it can bridge connections from any number, IP address, or URI to any other. The implications are that Clarity’s future is in far more than push-to-talk — push data, video, clips, real time sessions are all possible. Combined with location based services, it means new scenarios like “push to call at a particular location”, geo-fencing, or push advertising delivery.
Clarity is staking out a position in the market providing hosted push to talk services to tier 2 and 3 carriers. These are the carriers providing services in the places that Sprint/Nextel doesn’t touch, and potentially very lucrative accounts. Their hosted model allows the carrier to be up and running with push to talk services in a matter of weeks. So far, they’ve been experiencing some great success to, with four new deals done in the last few months.
Push to talk is a pretty interesting application. It’s instantaneous, like IM, but voice. By combining push to talk with location, Clarity’s building a full-on New Presence application.Â
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Too much jargon, dear boy. GU reader has no idea what it means. I generally have some idea of what you are on about. Dad