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How a Femtocell can spoil the fun for your daughter's boyfriend...

Following up yesterday's femtocell announcement by Vodafone, Airvana gave a live demo of a femtocell application at the Femtocells World Summit. It's called the "boyfriend buster" application, or the "Party Alert."

All it does, is tell the householder when a new mobile phone comes into the house, by sending an SMS. It's the first "presence" application for this new technology.

Sanjeev Verma, vice president of femtocell business and co founder of Airvana was due to lead a discussion about the business case for these new services in his presentation entitled ‘Femtonomics 2.0: Making the Case for Services’.

The CTO of the company, Vedat Eyuboglu, was also due to participate in the discussion panel “Is There an Urgent Need for LTE Femtocells or are 2G/3G Femtocells Enough?”

“The femtocell is already acknowledged to offer mobile subscribers improved voice coverage and dramatic improvements in mobile broadband data performance,” explained Sanjeev Verma. “With the development of femtocell-based applications, operators will also be able to position the femtocell as a platform for applications that will enhance communications and entertainment in the home.”

Airvana has developed a number of simple applications that take advantage of the presence capabilities of the femtocell, which become active as soon as a mobile phone is within range. These applications are able to run on different mobile platforms including but not limited to the iPhone, Google’s Android Phone and the HTC Touch Diamond. The applications provide an example of the types of services that the operator and developer communities will have the opportunity to create for the femtocell platform.

The "party alert" which is activated when the femtocell detects mobile phones within the home, can contact the home owner via an SMS, email or even a message on Facebook. "Applications like this are made possible by the femtocell’s location intelligence. This type of feature presents the developer community with the opportunity to design a range of applications from home security to social networking and entertainment services," said the company.

Doug Knisely, vice president of technology and responsible for standards at Airvana, will today (Wednesday) participate in a discussion panel, “Standards Updates - 3GPP, 3GPP2, Broadband Forum, WiMAX Forum”, which takes place at 16:40.