Back in the days of computer telephony (the 1990s), semi-skilled folk who wanted to quickly and inexpensively assemble a IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system and/or auto attendant generally bought a PC with some Dialogic (News - Alert) cards and loaded it with a GUI applications generator such as the fondlyremembered Visual Voice by Artisoft, The Call Wizard by Parity Software, and VBVoice from Pronexus (News - Alert).

 

Interestingly, VBVoice has survived to the present day (it’s currently at Version 5.6) and remains a sophisticated IVR ToolKit for developing telephony and voice-based solutions. It combines its distinctive GUI with sophisticated programming in today’s Visual Studio .NET environment. The paradigm must be viable, since it’s now being applied to the production of today’s most advanced websites friendly to mobile devices.

 

Take Volantis (News - Alert), for example. Dave Roberts, Manager, Business Development, Alliance Partnerships at Volantis, says, “Our approach is to essentially insulate the sites developer from all that deep complexity that’s present in the devices and the browsers and the different networks. Fundamentally, we provide a platform that will automatically identify the device, work out what it’s capable of, and then dynamically adapt any sites and pages or apps that someone has built using our tools, so that they work well on the devices, being optimized for the devices, even down to simple things such as ensuring that they fit the screen. Content that doesn’t work on those devices, such as perhaps Flash animation, is removed or substituted with something else. This occurs without the developer knowing all the intricacies and detail about every single device out there.”

 

“We have a whole suite of tools for different purposes,” says Roberts. “For more technically-oriented people we offer the Volantis Mobility Server, which is basically a design GUI enabling developers to create an application in a language of their choice, and they can focus on the logic and functionality of that application. Using the Mobility Server, they create the design templates and the presentation layout, using a set of what are essentially GUI wireframe design tools. Again, the detail of what the mobile device does and how it works, what it requires, and so forth, is abstracted away, so they can very quickly develop a complete application using the Mobility Server tool, which is basically a java-based development and runtime platform, available under an open source license. It’s a tool suite for the serious, ‘real’ developer community. It inserts itself into their existing Integrated Design/Development Environments (IDEs). Volantis Mobility Server is being used quite extensively now.”

 

Roberts continues: “For less technically-oriented people who don’t particularly want to design and build a complete application – just a mobile website – we have a couple of other tools for them, each following the paradigm of ‘assembling’ a site with functional building blocks rather than ‘programming’ or ‘coding’ it. We’ve also made available an online service called UBIK, where a novice or anyone can register and create within minutes a mobile website that includes one’s own content. You can upload images, and even send in material via text and email to create your own mobile web gallery. Customers are using UBIK for everything from music fansites to sports clubs.

 

Pizza companies are advertising their own offerings. UBIK is perfect for people who don’t have mobile web development teams or the time and resources to tackle such projects. They just want to get something up and running very quickly. UBIK has been running for about a year now, and we’ve picked up several thousand users who have built sites with it.”

 

“Recently, we’ve announced a product called Site Builder, which is actually based on the UBIK concept of non-technical users being able to assemble a mobile-friendly site based on a number of templates,” says Roberts. “Volantis Site Builder targets the service provider or mobile operator market, so that they can set up their own suite of services and then in turn service their own customers. Again, the idea is that you go to a web-based GUI, pick the template that best matches what you want your site to look like and how it will be structured, then you ‘fill in the blanks’, enter your own content, upload your images and you can reference things such as RSS feeds. You can have dynamic content. Site Builder also integrates with Facebook (News - Alert), so that you can not only have your own mobile website, but you can extend that site’s reach into the Facebook community and get more exposure that way.”