Device Arena

Following its successful launch in February 2009, the ng Connect Program founded by Alcatel-Lucentis experiencing strong growth as industry interest in next generation networks and services continues to grow at a rapid pace. The ng Connect Program today announced four new members including leading companies from the music, telecommunication and education sectors bringing the total number of companies in the program to eighteen in the two months since its inception.

The ng Connect Program is a multi-industry initiative dedicated to establishing a rich and diverse ecosystem of infrastructure, devices, content and applications for both mobile and fixed broadband networks including 4G, Long Term Evolution (LTE), GPON and other ultra high bandwidth technologies.

The new members include:

Atlantic Records – Atlantic Records, which celebrated its 60th Anniversary in 2008, currently ranks as the #1 label in the music industry according to Nielsen Soundscan. Atlantic has released a string of recordings that have had a profound impact on the course of modern music, its rich history including such musical icons as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, and Led Zeppelin.

Kyocera Communications Inc. (KCI) – the newly formed sales, marketing and service organization for Kyocera and Sanyo-branded wireless devices in the Americas. The company’s devices are driving the convergence of telecommunications, broadband and multimedia.

LearningMate – a leading provider of end-to-end e-Learning education solutions. LearningMate develops engaging, instructionally sound, interactive learning experiences on a variety of technology platforms and devices. The company has a significant presence in the United States, United Kingdom and India, and serves a global clientele comprised of education publishers, online schools, universities, government agencies, non-profits and education consortia.

MediaTile – a worldwide supplier of award-winning, all-in-one cellular digital signage and kiosk solutions that are remarkably easy-to-deploy and operate. Just add power to MediaTile Digital Sign in a Box™ or Kiosk in a Box™ systems and use the web-based Mediacast Portal to manage and monitor your advertising, informational or interactive communications network. Backed by MediaTile best practices, Return On Message™ (ROM) Methodology, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, end-to-end service and support, and a creative media team, your network will be up and running in record time, with record results.

“We are really pleased with the tremendous industry interest in the ng Connect Program generated in just a few short months since our launch,” said Derek Kuhn, vice president of Emerging Technology and Media, Alcatel-Lucent. “The ng Connect program is making great progress signing up new members who are actively working together to build an open ecosystem that we know can bring whole new classes of services to market; services that can leverage the growing capabilities of service-aware IP networks, IMS and more.”

New Proof of Concept Demonstrations
The ng Connect Program will demonstrate end-to-end next generation broadband applications at the CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show and exhibition in the Alcatel-Lucent Booth (#6714). Demos will include a new dynamic digital signage demonstration and an e-Learning experience showing a two-way audio visual exchange between student and teacher. Other demonstrations are a next generation music and social networking service recently updated to include Atlantic Records’ Rich Application Suite, Fanbase, a multi-player mobile gaming experience, and a real-time next generation healthcare application that allows patients to be monitored remotely using a combination of mobile handsets and televisions as well as a next generation augmented reality viral advertising application in a multi-screen environment.

Fanbase – Atlantic Records launched Fanbase as an extension of the artist.com online destination. The platform includes official and unofficial audio, video, chat, news, photos, tours info, and more. “The content within Fanbase is aggregated and streamed from the Internet. LTE and the NG Connect program allow us to learn from the next generation wireless technologies to ensure the best fan experience possible, whenever and wherever they are,” said Paul Sinclair, SVP of Digital Media at Atlantic Records. The Fanbase platform includes a social networking widget, desktop application, connected CD with bonus album content, and mobile application.

Dynamic Digital Signage – ng Connect Program members Alcatel-Lucent, SIGNEXX and dimedis collaborated on a new dynamic digital signage demonstration which highlights their ability to provide real time content updates to digital signs via LTE.

e-Learning – Members Words & Numbers, Alcatel-Lucent and LearningMate have created a new Proof of Concept showing a two way audio and visual teaching experience demonstrating the potential for wireless broadband technology to support fast, ‘anytime, anywhere’ learning experiences. The demonstration integrates the Alcatel-Lucent Omnitouch My Teamwork Conference and Collaboration Tool, LearningMate’s QuAD assessment portal and LMS Interoperability Framework (LIF) as well as learning content from Words & Numbers.

The ng Connect Program, by helping bring new applications and services to market more quickly, will facilitate an expansion of the revenue base for service providers and provide new opportunities for others in the value chain. To accomplish this, the ng Connect Program is developing a variety of pre-integrated solutions featuring the latest innovations in network, device and software technologies.

Alcatel-Lucent