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IBM's BusinessFinder technology to empower customers and optimize mobile resources
Researchers at IRL unveiled the business finder technology, a next-generation, real-time, presence based mobile resources management technology developed by IBM's India Research Laboratory. The business finder technology empowers a consumer to find and use the nearest, most highly rated and available service vendors like plumbers, electricians, carpenters or doctors. The business finder technology combines sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) applications and data analysis with mobile telephone networks to provide information, wherever and whenever, to a consumer who is looking for a specific near-by service. This technology has the potential to provide significant benefits to both consumers and businesses of all sizes.
The business finder technology offers a live and dynamic ‘yellow pages’ for consumers who use mobile telephones. It provides uniform search capability over both 'mobile' businesses and vendors such as taxis and plumbers and 'static' businesses and vendors including stores and gas stations. It combines various attributes including location, reputation, dynamic workload and feedback from consumers to ‘matchmake’ consumers with the closest available service vendors. The underlying technology allows telecommunications service providers to track and update data sources including mobility, presence and reputation of service vendors. In addition to service industries, the technology also has a potential to be applied to other industries including transportation & logistics, utilities, healthcare and manufacturing. As demand for speedier and more responsive services continue to grow, both consumers and businesses can benefit from the technology which will bring convenience to consumers and new business opportunities to service vendors and telecommunications service providers.
The business finder technology’s matchmaking solution brings various opportunities not only for telecommunications service providers but also for one-man businesses and consumers in India. It could be of great value to many micro-businesses, such as plumbers and mechanics with little or no market reach by accelerating traditional word-of-mouth marketing. The technology could either be hosted by an individual network operator (telecommunications service provider) or can cut across different operators. In the former case, it can be marketed by the operator as a differentiating value-added service to its consumer base. In the latter case, the business finder application would be a third-party service that draws its consumer base and its mobile vendor workforce from a number of telecommunications operators. The business finder technology provides a flexible, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based, Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) compliant services solution to telecommunications service providers. It will also help the evolution of service providers from existing networks into a converged network that allows easy interoperation using industry standards.
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