Josip Zoric

Sharing enriched multimedia experiences across heterogeneous network infrastructures

Todays consumers have a wide variety of interactive media and services at their disposal, for instance, through IPTV networks, the Internet, and in-home and mobile networks. A major problem, however, is that media and services do not interoperate across networks because they use different user identities, metadata formats, and signaling protocols, for example. As a result, users cannot easily combine media and services from different network infrastructures and share them in an integrated manner with their family and friends. In addition to limiting peoples media experience, this also hinders the introduction of new services and business models as providers cannot easily develop and operate cross-network services. The goal of our work is to overcome this problem by means of an open and intelligent service platform that allows applications to easily combine media and services from different network infrastructures, and enables consumers to easily share them in an integrated way. The platform includes support for managing multi-user sessions across networks, context-aware recommendations, and cross-network identity management. While there has been prior work on platforms for converged media, our platform is unique in that it provides open, intelligent, and interoperable facilities for sharing media and services across network infrastructures. In addition, our work involves several specific innovations, for instance, pertaining to cross-network session management and synchronization. In this article we discuss the platform, its most important enabling services, and some of the applications we have built on top of it. We also briefly consider the new kinds of business models our platform makes possible.

Evaluation And Design of Business Models for Collaborative Provision of Advanced Mobile Data Services: A Portfolio Theory Approach

Design of platforms for provision of advanced mobile data services is at the center of current industrial and academic research in mobile telecommunications. Provision of such services requires combination of different types of expertise and capabilities and for this reason needs a concerted effort of different industrial actors. While the main research focus has been on the engineering of services and technological design, much less is done for understanding of business and economic issues which such collaboration between different actors with different interests entails.

A Session Model for Cross-Domain Interactive Multi-User IPTV

This work proposes a session model for crossdomain interactive multi-user IPTV. The model has been designed to Support the creation and consumption of multi-user multimedia sessions that span multiple technology domains like managed IPTV, mobile network, home network and the Internet. These sessions can combine content and services from various domains and the model enables shared experiences between users at different locations, connected across diverse technology domains. This paper describes the session model, gives an overview of the general architecture and presents the results of an implementation that spans home, internet and mobile networks. This session model has been and first application demonstrators have been realized.

Business models for networked media services

In this paper we consider business models for networked media services, i.e. services that enable users to share interactive media experiences across multiple domains. We start from the applications and services provided by an enabling service platform for cross-domain networked services. In particular we derive a generic value network for service offerings enabled by the platform and consider the required business roles. We find that different business configurations may arise, i.e. different mappings of actors on, as well as clusters of business roles. The configurations have a varying degree of openness and different focal actors, i.e. operators, device manufacturers or service providers. Also a roadmap is considered for the transition from currently single domain towards future cross-domain configurations. Customer demand and economies of scale and scope are driving an increasingly open cooperation between operators, service and content providers, and device manufacturers towards a service centric model.

Scenario based techno-business analysis of service platforms and their service portfolios

This work focuses on techno-business analysis of service platforms and service portfolios. Service platform (SP) hosts services and enabling service functionality. Service providers deliver two main products: end-user services to their customers and enablers to other business actors. 3rd party service providers combine enablers with their own functionality, wrap them in end-user services and deliver them to their customers.SPs are very complex systems technically as well as in user and business aspects. Ignoring or oversimplifying any aspect can decrease the realism and value of techno-business analyses. On the other side, including all the aspects would make the model too complex to be practically useful. We present in this paper a scenario-driven approach for techno-business modeling and analysis, which is sufficiently simple to be practical and complete enough to give realistic results. It is based on a generic service platform model (GSPM) (represented by ontology, structural and mathematical models) combined with scenario-based modeling of service portfolios and model-based mapping and projection techniques. It enables techno-business analysis at an early stage of service development to serve as a foundation for investment decisions.This analytical framework has been used in a series of practical cases. One of them, provision of mobile service bundles, is presented in this work. We discuss our experience and suggest future improvements in the proposed approach to model driven techno-business analysis.

Analysis of service platforms by a portfolio approach

This work provides a framework for techno-business analysis of service platforms that can be used for evaluation of business models and strategic positions in collaborative service provision. It is based on the following modeling tools: techno-business model, generic service platform approximate, scenario modeling techniques, and service and enabler portfolio analysis. Our modeling approach is a synthesis of qualitative and quantitative analyses. We show that Markowitz’ portfolio theory (financial risk-return analysis) can also be applied on service and on enablers portfolios if their specificity is realistically modeled. We demonstrate the most important modeling procedures theoretically and evaluate them practically on a chosen service delivery platform. Our research results and experiences show that service portfolio theory is very useful for evaluation of business strategies of different industrial actors, participating in collaborative service provision.

Experiments with Semantic Support in Mobile Service Architectures

Next generation services are challenging todays telecom service architectures with triple awareness: context, connectivity and information/content. Their heterogeneity, distribution and dynamics make the transformation to these properties demanding. As in most of the Internet-based architectures these transformations are heading to direction of: semantic Web properties, service oriented architectures and service/information ontology. In this paper we present a practical analysis of design and implementation efforts, and performance overhead introduced by reorganizing the example service architecture in the above-mentioned three directions. We focus on the service discovery and composition tests, in particular two cases: (1) when if is possible to find an end-service providing the wanted results (2) when it is not possible to find a wanted end-service, but it is possible to find components/enablers that can be combined and produce the wanted results, or the results with similar QoS and quality of information.

Service Mobility a challenge for semantic support

Information and service data aspects of service mobility are in the focus of this paper. Service platform mechanisms (such as service discovery, composition, brokering and mediation) are crucial for the service and information precision, in particular when user enters service domains with unknown service and information offering. Semantic web service properties, service oriented architectures, and service and information ontology are suggested as tools for upgrading existing service platform mechanisms. However, many of todays platform solutions cannot be restructured, so the improvements have to be applied on top of the legacy service platform designs and current network service roaming solutions. This is taken into account when practically analysing the design, the implementation efforts, and the performance overhead. We focus on ontology-based service discovery and composition tests, in particular on the organization of the service information /data. Several solutions for discovering and composing the services when entering a new service domain are discussed, and the complexity of the design / implementations and performance penalties of such solutions are considered.

Incorporating the effects of business environment in investment analyses of service platforms

Analyzing business models of service platforms and calculating their financial estimates is a complex task, depending heavily on the quality of the input data. This paper is assessing whether the techno-business analysis [1–3], scenario and driver-based modeling techniques and real option models can be intuitively combined, for use in business analyses and management of service platforms. This paper provides: (1) a theoretical analysis of available scenario techniques and their application in investment analysis, (2) a unified framework, combining real option analysis modeling techniques with techno-business-analysis and scenario techniques, (3) a verification of the framework on a practical case - a service platform for cross-domain services.

Business Model Evaluation for an Advanced Multimedia Service Portfolio

In this paper we analyze quantitatively a business model for the collaborative provision of an advanced mobile data service portfolio composed of three multimedia services: Video on Demand, Internet Protocol Television and User Generated Content. We provide a description of the provision system considering the relation occurring between tecnical aspects and business aspects for each agent providing the basic multimedia service. Such a techno-business analysis is then projected into a mathematical model dealing with the problem of the definition of incentives between the different agents involved in a collaborative service provision. Through the implementation of this model we aim at shaping the behaviour of each of the contributing agents modifying the level of profitability that the Service Portfolio yields to each of them.