First Integrated Unified Communications platform looking for something to do

I have been very busy trying to get the technology and market ready for (as far as I know) the world’s first truly integrated unified communications platform. I created the Perzonae brand and company to get it to market. The short story is that a number of things went wrong and the platform is now mostly ready but the market is not available for me at the moment. So I am closing down the Perzonae company and am looking for a means to make money of the UC tech I developed.

The platform I created combines address book, targeted presence, location awareness, IM, email, VoIP etc. all bound together with one sign-on. Today the service comes with its own self-updating client but a limited-service web interface was planned.

We found that the combination of multiple services and multiple identities works extremely well for anyone who really uses their on-line communication tools. Who has just one email account these days combining private and business emails, or one phone number, one IM account? The rest of us is spending too much time checking multiple (voice)mailboxes and other accounts just to get up to date. That was what the Perzonae service was to solve.

By integrating and not just aggregating accounts we had the ability to go multi-modal, so you start a conversation with mails, and then switch to IM, to speech etc and back to email again only to pick up the real-time conversation at some other time.

To make all of this possible I needed a new kind of middleware, one that is geared towards secure, real-time bidirectional communication. So I created MERCURY, an object oriented, real-time middleware platform. It communicates through regular routers and firewalls (so no user-configuration needed), keeps communication the link alive and automatically secures it. Yet one can dictate real-time behavior on the communication, so no annoying timeouts.

The complexity of such a platform I handled with a structured architecture based on the best practices from both the Internet and the telco world, both used to scaling networks in their own way.

It looks like I am the first to accomplish this feat.

So all revved up and no where to go I am sort of idling right now. There must be others who need a mostly done platform. Hopefully the volcano ash from Iceland will not mess up the Next Web Conference next week where I hope to meet people who want to have a couple of year’s head start for the next generation of communications.