Mark Cohen our developer and I are just putting the finishing touches to web software to connect to the Snom 800 series phones. We have tested the software with a Snom 870 and a wireless dongle and we have some great results.

What can we do with the online software?

At the moment you can:

1. Send messages to individual phones or groups of phones directly from the portal
2. Send  PRIVATE messages to individual phones or groups of phones directly from the portal (lets just say that you don't want your message popping up for anyone to see so you can send a button that when pressed reveals your message)
3. Send a message with an image
4. Send a PRIVATE message with an image
5. Send a video feed
6. Send multiple video feeds
7. Connection to an LDAP database online for central company stored contacts
8. Add contacts to an LDAP database online for central company stored contacts
9. Connect to the feed reader online (it's a bit like your company news or bulletin board

We next want to add the capability to edit and create new feeds and add them to the phones remotely. If you look at XML online you will see a lot of code but within the XML minibrowser on the Snom the feed looks pretty cool. We want to add the function to edit the feeds online in a GUI type menu.

What market could we sell this software to?

Scenario 1:

Shopping centres have a need to keep their shop clients informed and they would like to send pictures of undesirables (thieves and fraudsters) who may be targeting certain shopping centres. The security could build a feed of pictures (like a rogues gallery) so that these shop owners can look out for these people and alert security if they come in. Thinking bigger than that, the security can then distribute this rogues gallery and updates to every shop in every shopping centre in their network. This would give then ostensibly their own intelligence delivery system saving lots of money in fraud and generally subverting 'Skullduggery' (that's not a word I have used much, I wonder how many points that is in scrabble?)

Scenario 2:

Betting shops have a lot of fraudulent rings going on and save that they have a 'self exclusion' policy. Let's say you have a gambling problem, then you can go to the local bookmaker chain and say "hey don't serve me when I come in please as I have just sold the wife and the ironing is piling up". What these bookmakers do is take a picture of the client and distributes there picture to up to 4 shops in the local area. This is really all they can do however the chap is just going to travel out of town to gamble and they can not circulate his picture to all the shops in the chain economically. This is where the B-Cast over Snom would be perfect as they can build an excluded gallery and they can refer to it when a client walks in.

I am sure there are a tonne more application certainly with the video feeds but we are just building it and I will keep this blog updated.