Aswath Weblog

Tello, iotum and Synergies

The announcement from Tello is more than one week old. I m sure you would have read about it from many sources by now. Jeff has neatly assembled many of these references. Based on his conversations with Jeff and Doug Renert, CEO of Tello, Andy has summarized the idea behind Tello. It took me this long to fully grasp and internalize what Tello is all about. This post is a summary of my understanding.

Tello service has three major components:

1. Synthesized Presence information
2. Real time and Near real time communication
3. Screen sharing.

These descriptive titles may give the impression that there is nothing new here. For sure, all the features have been known for a while; indeed many of them have been available in FWD Communicator (or pulver Communicator, as it was previously known). The newness is in the whole packaging as a commercial service.

For example, the Presence feature collects presence information from many sources - “public” IMs like MSN and Yahoo, mobile device like Blackberry and status of phones connected to a PBX from one of the partner companies. As Om has observed, this is lots of information and the presentation of this vast amount of information in a usable manner is critical. I think Tello recognizes that and presents only a synthesized version. For example it combines the presence information from all the IMs to a single value.

Tello client can be used for text messaging and also for real time communication like voice and video. The communication can take place as long as both the parties belong to the same “public” IM service or they belong to a partner service provider (“federation partner”). I suppose they will build up their partner network over a period of time. The interesting twist is that there is no need to launch the native client but use Tello client alone.

They use Persony’s web sharing application for the screen sharing feature.

Alec has commented that Tello and iotum are complimentary. I am not sure whether I agree or disagree. In some respects they have different approach in presenting presence information to the user. Tello gives information on different modes of communication and let the user select a mode of communication for a session. iotum on the other hand selects a mode of communication based on multiple factors. In other words, with Tello the calling party has the choice and with relevance engine, the called party decides. I am not suggesting one is better; but there is a clear difference in the approach.