I met with Simon Bransfield Garth, CMO of Carrier IQ and we chatting about a topic of mobile device management. Carrier IQ is embedding diagnostic software in the phone for the use by mobile operators to gain mobile service intelligence about devices that are in the field. The software logs everything from button presses all the way up to the software and applications on the phone and how the subscriber is using it.
What is this useful for? Well, lots of people have been discussing ways to enhance the Customer Care aspect of running a business that involves mobile devices. The variety of devices makes it a challenge for any Mobile Operator’s Customer Care organization to resolve problems quickly. Customers get frustrated because any and all problems they dread having to call Customer Care. But what if you diagnose problems in real-time and by the time people started calling about it, you could have fixes put up on the web or your first-line customer support agent.
Launched at the CTIA show today, IQ Insight Device Analyzer gives mobile device manufacturers unprecedented visibility into mobile device performance in normal use. Specifically focused on the critical period leading up to and immediately following the launch of a new model, the product builds on Carrier IQ’s successful Mobile Service Intelligence solutions for carriers that are currently deployed on over 35M devices worldwide.
…
Carrier IQ’s IQ Insight Device Analyzer uses data from the device itself combined with powerful analytic applications to enable management and optimization of mobile phones based on actual detailed experience data, such as availability, throughput, latency and reliability, across the entire user population.Source: Carrier IQ
I asked Simon about how CarrierIQ fits in between a Mobile Device Management product such as Innopath who provide FOTA as one of their features and a Network Monitoring tool such as Keynote Systems. Simon said that CarrierIQ’s product fits in the middle of both. For MDM services, it simply pushes out updates, but has no historical context. You need to first understand what to fix before rolling it out. With respect to the Network Monitoring, the CarrierIQ solution is taking real customer input and logging it at the handset level. It takes each and every device and turns it into an active network monitor. So while most probes are stationary, this is giving you real-time, in motion monitoring based on real usage, which is even better than drive-testing. Simon sites Sprint as a customer who has deployed this across several different phones and seen some interesting results.
Well, I’m all for making the user experience better on the phone. Dropped calls and slow data rates amongst other things is certainly a major inconvenience. If CarrierIQ and others can reduce problems, it makes all of us more productive and happy.
Related Posts:
Great concept…