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Overlay Media Strategy FAQs
Q: What lies at the centre of Overlay Media's strategy?
Overlay believes that context-aware applications and services will be increasingly important to the experience of the users of mobile phones and other personal devices. The simplest example of context is location, where the user is geographically, but in future context will mean much more, embracing what the user is doing (activity recognition), how the use of the phone fits in the daily life of the user, and how the meaning of places and activities mediate the behaviour of the phone and the experience of its owner.
Overlay's role is to:
- Provide world-leading, core, context-aware technologies
- Work with mobile industry partners to embed these technologies into mobile phones and other personal devices
- Demonstrate and help exploit the technologies through context-aware applications that deliver real value to the user
Q: What is meant by context-aware technologies?
These are underlying mechanisms and algorithms that can be used to make reliable inferences about activities and places, based on what the phone can measure. In some cases these mechanisms need to be augmented by inference and learning algorithms such as neural networks. Identifying, patenting, developing and demonstrating these technologies is central to Overlay Media's innovation-driven approach.
One example of a context sensing technology is Cell Signal-strength Fluctuation (CSF), a method of inferring the motion of the phone, to work out whether the user is stationary, walking and traveling at speed in a vehicle. Other context sensing technologies are in development. Overlay Media generally seeks to license the basic core context-sensing technologies on a non-exclusive basis, so they can be re-used for different purposes for different clients.
Q: Do these context sensing technologies require access to software or hardware features manufacturers generally do not make available to developers?
Overlay Media is frequently able to develop and demonstrate context sensing technologies without accessing such features. But to get optimal performance on a particular mobile device it is often advantageous to access core operating system services not generally accessible via public API's. Overlay Media wants to develop partnerships where such confidential technical details can be shared as part of building long-term co-development relationships. Naturally such development streams are exclusive to particular partners and Overlay Media will ring-fence particular areas of innovation to make the partnerships successful.
Q: How do the core context sensing technologies get used?
They can be used on their own or in combination with each other, with or without using proprietary features of the devices, to build more or less sophisticated layers of inference and learning. The resulting combination of technologies we call an inference layer, meaning a set of context-information-derived capabilities that can be used directly by application developers.
An inference layer will normally be expressed as an Application Programmers Interface (API) specific to the context capabilities. However, sometimes a 'layer' is a purely internal mechanism for using context to affect the behaviour of the phone in an application-independent way, for example controlling the use of power, or the screen intensity or sound level.
At an early stage of the company Overlay developed moLocate, a system for location (independent of GPS), the most basic aspect of context, and implemented an API for partner developers to develop location-based directory applications.
Designing an inference layer frequently requires close co-operation with a particular manufacturer or software platform provider, or group of application writers, because the capabilities of the inference layer shape the ease with which applications can be written, and hence the users' experience using the phone.
Overlay Media has several design ideas about how inference layers can be created, and which supporting context-sensing technologies will be needed in each case, though each design needs to be shaped in discussion with partners.
Q: Having built these application capabilities does Overlay also provide/write the applications?
Overlay Media is not primarily an application company, but in any situation our role will depend upon the wishes of the partner and may include application-writing. Frequently we provide demonstration or pilot applications, documentation and training for application developers, or oversee the launch of context-aware services. Overlay Media wishes to make sure the context-aware technology gets fully and correctly exploited, so that the technology effort has maximum benefit. The most important thing is that Overlay Media's clients and partners have a successful project introducing the context-aware technology.
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