The 7th Berkeley-Stanford Cleantech Conference will explore how China and the U.S. will collectively (and competitively) create green jobs from the perspectives of policy, business, and technology.

We will welcome U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu as a keynote speaker as well as major players in Academia, Policy and Industry to discuss:

• Panel 1: Clean Technologies: Job Creation or Destruction?
• Panel 2: The Role of Policy in Green Job Creation in the U.S. and China
• Panel 3: Implications for Businesses, Professionals, and Students

The event takes place on April 9th at PG&E Headquarters in San Francisco, CA. Tickets also include access to the BSC Launchpad Showcase and Business Plan Competition on Friday, April 8th at Stanford. Please visit us at http://bscleantech.org/bscc7/ for additional information and tickets.

Contact centers that want to easily interoperate with other vendors, partners, and worksites must standardize with Session Initial Protocol (SIP) over their Voice-over-IP (VoIP) communications systems. Once an organization’s VoIP is SIP-enabled, they open themselves up to virtualizing multiple operations, increasing flexibility, reducing costs, and improving overall efficiency across an endless array of communications options.

Here’s how organizations are improving customer service with SIP-enabled VoIP communications:

Virtualize. An all IP-based solution doesn’t require PBX hardware to be physically installed at remote locations. Dynamically turn on and manage communication services at any location, even home offices.

Presence. Always-on, available IP communications let others know of an employee’s availability, thus eliminating the need to manually call to see if someone’s available. Let others know if employees can help through an “I’m available” icon on a web page, email, or calendar.

Deploy best-of-breed. Don’t be stuck on someone else’s communications protocol. You can always integrate the best available SIP-enabled solution.

Multimedia. Communicate visually when voice alone can’t solve the problem.

Unified communications. All employees, irrespective of expertise and location are equally accessible across multimodal communications. Bring in expert help right away without digging through layers of communication handoffs.

For a much deeper understanding of SIP’s benefits in the enterprise, read “Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center,” “Genesys SIP – Empowering Enterprise-wide Customer Service,” and take a look at how Genesys is doing it with its SIP contact center solution.

Here’s how organizations are improving customer service with SIP-enabled VoIP communications:

Virtualize. An all IP-based solution doesn’t require PBX hardware to be physically installed at remote locations. Dynamically turn on and manage communication services at any location, even home offices.

Presence. Always-on, available IP communications let others know of an employee’s availability, thus eliminating the need to manually call to see if someone’s available. Let others know if employees can help through an “I’m available” icon on a web page, email, or calendar.

Deploy best-of-breed. Don’t be stuck on someone else’s communications protocol. You can always integrate the best available SIP-enabled solution.

Multimedia. Communicate visually when voice alone can’t solve the problem.

Unified communications. All employees, irrespective of expertise and location are equally accessible across multimodal communications. Bring in expert help right away without digging through layers of communication handoffs.

For a much deeper understanding of SIP’s benefits in the enterprise, read “Taking a SIP: What Executives Should Know About IP Transformation in the Contact Center,” “Genesys SIP – Empowering Enterprise-wide Customer Service,” and take a look at how Genesys is doing it with its SIP contact center solution.

1. Walk through your presentation.
There’s nothing worse than sending over a PDF before a meeting and having your client sneak a peek before you talk. Instead, start a join.me session so your participants can see one page at a time while you share your point of view.

2. Collaboratively build a document.
Start a join.me session to brainstorm on a topic, wherever you are. You can keep a document going live so everyone can see the updates as they happen. In the end, when your document is complete and agreed upon, you can instantly transfer it to everybody.

3. Have an impromptu meeting.
Good ideas don’t always happen when a meeting is scheduled. Grab your colleague on the fly whenever genius strikes by sharing your screen at join.me. It’s an instant ad-hoc meeting.

4. Start a cult.
The point is, you can do whatever you want with join.me because it’s so flexible, easy and instant. If you want to get people together and on the same page, whether it’s for a business presentation or to convince everyone to wear red sneakers and worship some lesser-known sea creature, then hey, to each his own.

Ready to try it out for yourself? Head over to join.me and start your meeting now.

Similarly, but to a far greater level of efficiency, speed, and safety, 4G LTE networks self organize. They have to, because they’re constantly in conflict.

LTE cells are packed together in a tight matrix with each one able to utilize any available licensed frequency. When two adjacent cells pick the same frequency there’s interference.

To solve this problem, LTE networks self organize, making sure no two neighboring cells have the same frequency or color. The self-organizing procedure is known as Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC).

First step for ICIC is for each cell to pick a frequency or color and see if it’s conflicting with neighboring cells. Those cells that conflict remain uncolored and then negotiate with their neighbors to find non-conflicting frequencies. Each time the topology or Neighbor Relation Table changes, this self-organizing negotiation repeats itself.

The whole procedure is standardized by the 3GPP, and Alcatel-Lucent’s implementation of ICIC maintains the service provider’s LTE network quality with no additional operating expenses.

Additional benefits of ICIC, according to Bell Labs, include:

• Five-fold reduction in Handover Failure
• Thirty percent increase in throughput
• Performance increase in call set up

Learn more about 4G LTE from Alcatel-Lucent.

To help network providers be successful, Alcatel-Lucent introduces Business and Operations Enablement (BOE), a program to guide providers through the transformation process of improving network utilization, developing new revenue sources, and onboarding new services with application and content providers (ACPs).

Step One: Plan the evolution

Depending on your customer base, your availability to ACPs, and the viability of your current service offerings ask yourself and answer the following questions:

• What are the implications and revenue potentials of each potential business model?
• Weighing both revenue-generating potential and security concerns, what assets should we expose to ACPs?
• What’s the best way to transform our business from managing networks to managing services, which requires delivering QoE to partners, ACPs, and end users?

Step Two: Simplify the involvement

The best way to simplify involvement is to expose operational capabilities through portals and APIs. We’ve already seen an example of this with end users. Through a network provider’s portal, customers can access, review, and pay their bill online. Similarly, with ACPs, network providers can offer self-customizing access to subscriber data and dynamic management, which allows partners to self-configure and onboard new services.

For more, read Alcatel-Lucent’s Business and Operations Enablement program.

Providers are realizing that an IP network transformation makes it possible for them to handle more applications and varied devices. More importantly, the IP structure is a necessity if carriers want to be able to work with and generate revenue from third-party developers and application content providers (ACPs).

Still, there’s trepidation because there are so many unknowns. What’s the business case? Will we see a return on our investment? This is such a change to the way we do business, can the corporate culture adapt?

Carriers questioning the validity of an all-IP network move are often trying to do it alone. For guidance, look to third-party integrators like Alcatel-Lucent that have handled many large-scale IP transformations. They’ll address all of your concerns such as assessing and capturing marketing opportunities. For example, did you know that 75 percent of app developers are willing to pay for subscriber preferences and location?

Alcatel-Lucent can also help recruit the right developers, run market trials, and launch new services.

The goal with an IP transformation is to easily enable and monetize the proliferation of applications throughout your network. Learn more about realizing the full potential of your network capabilities (Make sure to watch the videos).

Issues:

Got overloaded pipes? – Most common issue is capacity. Video and the never ending stream of real-time media can cause content to queue up and buffer.

Digital Rights Management a bottleneck? – Middleware updates and DRM processing can convert prime video to subpar video.

Retransmission clogging up channels? – Retransmission of bad packets can overload your system and affects the overall delivery of video content.

If your video good enough? – Using both subjective and objective measurements, determine the threshold quality level your audience expects and what you can deliver.

Solutions:

High Leverage Network – Dynamically allocate bandwidth depending on the service (voice, video, or data) when and where it’s needed.

Alcatel-Lucent Video Operations Center (VOC) – Rules-based video monitoring service instantly detects and identifies failures across any video TV technology.

Assured and Optimized IP Video Delivery – Handles retransmission of lost packets and fast channel change.

Success in video requires carriers to clearly identify issues and proactively attack solutions in real time. When you solve video problems intelligently you reach more subscribers (increase revenues) without having to send out more technicians (lower operational costs).

For more about managing video quality cost efficiently, read “Keeping quality in view: The Alcatel-Lucent Video Operations Center.”

Free Report: Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web (20 page PDF)

Having dealt with this carrier issue before, Alcatel-Lucent has developed the Cost Transformation program to help providers avoid the looming cost sink hole of trying to meet demand by increasing capacity. Carrier must attack problems and opportunities intelligently.

First step is to reduce network and operational cost drivers through business modeling and network testing. Feed those savings into growth opportunities for new and highly demanded customer services. Manage new services through a strategic go-to-market network launch.

The most popular way for carriers to reduce and manage costs is through Alcatel Lucent’s High Leverage Network (see “Wake Up, Service Providers – You Can Make Money Selling More Than Just the Pipe” and “Best Practices and Keeping Costs Under Control for Next-gen IP Network Transformation”) which allows a provider to dynamically allocate bandwidth depending on the service (voice, video, or data) when and where it’s needed.

To increase revenue opportunities, Alcatel-Lucent recommends focusing on application enablement, which requires carriers to provide easy access to network services for developers and content providers so that they can make applications your customers want to use and pay for.

For more, read our previous posts on application enablement.

Consumers of multi-screen video can experience the same video quality and services (e.g., DVR time shifting, pause and resume) they love from a fixed TV on any connected device, such as smartphones, tablets, and PCs. And by using mobile smartloading, devices don’t necessarily have to be connected when the consumer views video content on their mobile device.

Alcatel-Lucent is helping companies seize the multi-screen opportunity by:

• Adapting and extending existing media platforms to new screens.
• Distributing assets to access customer data for greater customization/personalization to trusted partners.
• Working with carriers to develop and monetize new media business models.
• Allowing your media to launch from anywhere thus providing scale and access to a mass market of customers.
• When all the technology and services are in place, providers can address consumers’ pent up demand for multi-screen video content and services.

For more, read “Seize the Multi-Screen Opportunity.” And for more on mobile smartloading, read Alcatel-Lucent’s whitepaper, “Mobile smartloading: Enabling smarter delivery of mobile video.”