I'm giving you access to a state-of-the-art video streaming technology that enables playback and recording to and from a 3G mobile phone. Think of something interesting that uses this technology and have it ready to demo at a wireless conference in six weeks.

That's essentially the challenge we were given about a year and half ago. What would you do with this challenge? While you're thinking about that, I'll tell you what we came up with.

At the same time we were pondering this challenge, April and I were conducting a user study on mobile video and we knew that people think video formats are confusing and frustrating. Video needs to be simpler.

So, we created a mobile video conversation system which we later called Conversa.

Consider your typical online discussion group - like a Yahoo! Group. You create a social group, invite your friends to join you, and then start posting text-based messages to the group and creating threads of conversation. It's a proven and effective way to collaborate and share thoughts "asynchronously". We used this familiar discussion forum model, but we implemented it purely in video.




The video streaming technology I referred to is the HP OpenCall Media Platform (OCMP). It's a product that our telecommunication business unit sells to mobile operators around the world like O2, Telecom Italia Mobile, and Cingular, etc (that's not necessarily a list of customers, but a list of well-known operators). Basically it enables customers to dial a number on their 3G phone, make a video phone call to a service, and play and record streaming video. This might sound foreign to Americans but it's pretty familiar to Europeans and Asians.

What we created is a hybrid of a Web 2.0 web site and a streaming mobile video service. Users can use both the videophone or the web site to browse conversations and record responses. The web site has all of the features we've come to expect like RSS video podcast support, video playback in the browser like YouTube, and an open HTTP API to support creative developers.

This may seem like a no-brainer combination, and we would agree, but it's new territory for the telecom industry. Think about it for a moment. What mobile services does your operator offer that integrate the mobile phone with a modern web site and aren't simply a partnership with YouTube or MySpace? The telecom industry is struggling to reconcile the web with mobile technology and they are hungry for ideas.

Conversa is running as a limited pilot in France and our European friends are happily conversing with streaming 3G video. We also recently launched Conversa in the US at http://conversa.hpl.hp.com. It's currently an invitation-only beta as we work out some bugs, but stay tuned. Since our young 3G infrastructure doesn't yet support video phone calls, we have created a client for Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphones. See http://conversa.hpl.hp.com/mobile for details.

Check out the (low-budget) video I created for the HP Shanghai Mobility Summit last week. It will give you a quick overview of what the service looks like.

I asked the question earlier about what you would do with streaming video and I sincerely would like to hear what you think. This technology will be coming to the US in the near future and we're always searching for creative uses for it.

P.S.  Keep in mind that this is a research project and not a product.  There are no specific plans for productization.