Mobilaris

Company Profile

Mobilaris, with headquarter in Stockholm Sweden, was founded in late 1999 as a spin-off from Telia Mobile and Telia Research. The ambition of the company is to become a major player in the telecom arena for mobile internet service platforms. The company currently has four customers who have commercially launched Service Management Platform systems supporting location-based services. Mobilaris employs 25 people with its major investor in the company being Prosper Capital Fund.

Technology

LBS Middleware
Pacific Ocean Service Management Platform is the core product in the Mobilaris offering. It resides inside the operator's network and is the central link in the delivery chain for mobile services. It enables mobile end-user services to interact in a standardized way, with central mechanisms in the mobile network and handles information databases, billing data, security and integrity, subscriber databases, provisioning, positioning, and service accesses through SMS, MMS, WAP and Web. Pacific Ocean also contains instrumentation including Application Level Billing Mediation to allow operators to charge end-users, based on services and not only on traffic or airtime.

Pacific Ocean provides client authentication and privacy management features and also contains standardized toolkit capabilities that help application developers and third party service providers to create location-based
applications. Pacific Ocean is equipped with two types of API for service application developers and service providers. A Java based for internal services, hosted by the operator on Pacific Ocean, and an XML-based for external service applications provided by third party service providers. The API (internal and external) allows service applications to access necessary support systems in the network in a simple and coordinated way.

Location-based Services Support
The Locator module handles all requests for position. Service applications are independent of underlying positioning technology and the LOCATOR informs service applications about where a certain user is, or his last known position. The locator also provides accuracy by taking into account surrounding areas, network topology and real-life measurements.

Integrity Protection
Pacific Ocean offers integrity protection mechanisms in order to guarantee that positioning information or other personal data cannot be misused. The integrity solutions are supported over SMS, WAP and Web. End-subscribers can be notified when third parties (services or other users) initiates positioning requests. End-users can also turn on or off positioning via SMS, WAP or Web. By providing integrity mechanisms in the Pacific Ocean, service applications, regardless of provider, are forced to comply with security and integrity policies set by the operator. End-users may log-on to the Pacific Ocean, via the operators Internet portal, to check service usage and positioning request made involving their MSISDN.

Service Usage Data (Statistics)
A statistics module is included in the Pacific Ocean system, providing statistics presented in html and is available via a Web interface. The statistics may be presented as diagrams but normally the operator already has a statistical analysis system to which log data from service usage is fed.

End-User Management
Pacific Ocean provides an open web-based interface where end-users can login to manage their private service portfolio, turn positioning on or off, create "white-lists" containing users and services who are authorized to position them. Normally this web-interface is accessible via the mobile operator’s web portal.

Operations and Maintenance
An existing alarm system can be connected to Pacific Ocean. The alarm server inside the Pacific Ocean performs continuous heartbeat checks on every system module and every service application in the Pacific Ocean system and reports errors to the operator's existing O&M system or via an integrated graphical surveillance system. The alarm server can also monitor external systems such as MPC, SMS-C, WAP GW or other systems connected to Pacific Ocean.

Customer Care Interface
Pacific Ocean offers full customer care support functionality. All service transactions performed through Pacific Ocean is continuously logged. Customer Care can follow service transactions in real-time and perform error tracing and follow service usage while end-users are executing services to correct problems.

System and Services Administration
Pacific Ocean contains a web-based administration tool for configuration of all system components, services and subscribers e.g. user administration, internal service administration (add, remove, configure etc.), service billing models, statistics and more.

User Interfaces (SMS, WAP and Web)
Pacific Ocean supports service accesses through SMS, WAP and Web. Services can be designed to use any of the three access methods.

GIS
Pacific Ocean provides a generic GIS interface, which can support a number of GIS providers. Service application developers can use the Java-methods defined in the generic service application interface to add mapping and routing to java-applications running on Pacific Ocean. For example an information service can, using standardized queries, ask for maps or routing information, independent of GIS provider.

Applications

Weather Near You
The “Weather Near You” service lets a user retrieve weather forecasts based on his/her current position or another specified region. Local weather information is presented a colour maps on MMS enabled telephones, or as text and simple graphics using SMS and WAP.

Yellow Pages
Mobile subscribers can use their mobile phones to search and obtain geographically oriented information about near-by points of interests (hotels, petrol stations, restaurants, pharmacies etc.) or any other object by a simple query using SMS, WAP, or Web.

4Sale
The 4Sale application enables wireless carriers to create live and dynamic location-based databases where subscribers (content providers) can enter their specific information or offers directly into a database while being automatically positioned by the network. Information submitted is immediately accessible to all location- based services offered by the operator. The wireless operator can, with 4Sale, act as bridge between end-users searching for location specific information and businesses that publish local offers.

Find-Your-Buddy
Find-your-buddy is a non-content application that enables people to locate each other through network based positioning. With Find-Your-Buddy, a user can locate friends, family members, or colleagues that carry a mobile phone or device. All privacy management issues are handled by Mobilaris Service Management platform

Deployments

Mobilaris has currently four commercial deployments of its platform worldwide
Westel / Hungary: The offered solution consists of Mobilaris service middleware Pacific Ocean and 2 applications, Yellow Pages NearYour and Find Your Buddy, a combination of LBS and MMS functionality
Vodafone / Ireland: In co-operation with Ericsson Mobilaris was selected by Vodafone to deliver and implement a full-scale middleware (Pacific Ocean) solution. The complete project also includes the positioning server (MPS) from Ericsson.
Orange / France: Mobilaris Pacific Ocean, has been selected for the "MLP" Mediation Location Platform part of Orange France LBS architecture
Telia Mobile: Telia Mobile launched one of the first commercial LBS' in the world called "Yellow Pages near you", during June 2000, together with Mobilaris and Ericsson using the Mobilaris service platform. After 6 months an enhancement of the service "Yellow Pages Near You" was done by implementation of a map engine to provide maps and routing information to WAP terminals.

Further Information

Further information on Mobilaris and its products can be viewed at www.mobilaris.com