Action Engine At CTIA

Action Engine is a mobile application platform company…it claims that its engine uses 80% fewer keystrokes and responds 20x faster. Obviously I can’t confirm those measurements but I did look at the platform and was impressed. It gains its speed by recording all the search info and sending it in one enquiry. So if you’re searching for a restaurant you enter the type of restaurent you want, the area you’re looking for, and all the other qualifiers to the search and send it all at once rather than sending each enquiry one at a time…which is obviously a lot quicker. An obvious way to do it? Sure, I distinctly remember waiting for each query to load on my phone and wondering (in a fairly aggrieved way to whoever I was with) why the expletive-deleted carriers didn’t do it that way.
The other thing the engine does is integrate all the applications, so if you find the restaurant you want and save the address, when you go into the map application it already offers you the address as a choice in the drop down menu, which saves you having to type it in.
One interesting point was that it sort of goes against the grain of carriers, who are attempting to drive more data usage. The MVNOs like it because it can be personalized and doesn’t use much of the network. But as Jim Souders (the guy I met with) pointed out customers want to pay for the experience, not for using kilobytes of data. So if the applications use less network space the carrier can fit more users on there, and then charge more per kb. I believe that SMS is still the most profitable for carriers on a per kilobyte basis…
They’ve just finished a trial with Australian telco Optus
Our CTIA/MES coverage is sponsored by Motricity: Booth 717.

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