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Does mobile video work for voicemail?

The utter failure of videophone calls may not mean that people don't want video images in their voicemail, says Comverse.

One theory says that video to video calls are not popular because people want to walk and talk. Another says that it's latency: the frame-rate on a live call isn't good enough to get lip-synch, making the other caller look like a bad robot.

According to an announcement by Comverse today, however, if you can sort of the lip-synch problem, people go for it - and in voice-mail, it seems, this can be done.

Full announcement follows below

7 April 2008 - Comverse, a leading supplier of software and systems enabling network-based multimedia enhanced communication and billing services, has announced the final results of recent visual voicemail research conducted by a third-party firm. These results and key issues affecting the mobile messaging market were the focus of Comverse's recent pan-European conference in Budapest, Hungary.

Prominent figures from leading European operators, standards bodies and international industry organisations addressed the conference on developments and trends in messaging, voicemail and call completion, and the associated business models that have an impact on mobile operators and their evolving needs.

One highlight of the seminar agenda was the presentation of the final results of recent user research conducted by one of the world's top global market research firms. Comprehensive analysis of the research reveals favourable user response to the ongoing evolution of voicemail. The research results reveal the degree of user attraction to - and willingness to pay for - Visual Voicemail, which makes message retrieval and management more efficient with an intuitive visual interface, Converged Mailbox, which unites accounts (home, mobile, office), devices (fixed, mobile, PC), and message types (SMS, MMS, voice, video and fax), and Personal Space, which integrates storage, calendar, albums, and easy-to-use sharing capabilities, such as Mobile Blog.

"The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) believes that it is important for key industry players to develop relationships and exchange views on the evolution of services and the development of new technologies that help build and sustain the data applications market," said Mark Cataldo, chair of the OMA Technical Plenary. "In Budapest, we shared our standardisation work around the convergence of IP and mobile messaging services and devices. Our mission is to provide market-driven, interoperable mobile service enablers for world-wide deployment. The Comverse event helps us to understand what others in the industry are doing to forge new messaging paradigms as well as receive feedback on the work we have done to achieve global interoperability. This exchange is crucial to the integration of the many messaging systems that exist in the market today, including SMS, MMS, IM, email and more."

"The Budapest conference is one of the international forums that Comverse sponsors as an industry leader delivering the most relevant information to mobile market players to help ensure their success," said Dror Bin, vice president and general manager, Comverse Messaging. "With our active role and high profile in standards organisations, ongoing market research and leading global Value-Added Services market position, we have much to share, and gatherings like this are compelling proof points of Comverse's leadership and the influence we have on the mobile market."