News

New Programme Director
Dr. Ir. Daan Velthausz has stepped down as programme director of Freeband Communication's BSIK programme on 15 June 2006. Dr. Patrick Strating, senior scientific researcher at the Telematica Institute will replace him. Strating has been involved with Freeband's programme management since it was founded, and has worked closely with Velthausz over the last two years. Velthausz has been working for Freeband since 2002. His drive and practical approach have played a crucial role in the creation of the Freeband Communication BSIK programme. Velthausz will move on to develop and manage an international innovation programme for the Telematica Institute.

Super-API
Until recently there were only a few network connections available for mobile phones, but besides GSM there is now an array of possibilities such as UMTS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Wimax. Connections via these networks have their own specific characteristics and therefore each needs its own Application Programming Interface (API) to communicate with the underlying applications. This creates a lot of work for programmers who want to make their applications suitable for several networks. The CoSPhere Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) is bundling all the characteristics of the connections into one API and only shows the crucial information, making things a lot easier for the programmers. CoSphere NAL was developed by Arjan Peddemors within Freeband Awareness, as part of his PhD research. The open source software was created for Windows CE.
http://cosphere.telin.nl/nal/

Bled Outstanding Paper Award
Timber Haaker, Henny de Vos, both from the Telematica Institute, and Harry Bouwman, from Delft University of Technology, won the Bled Outstanding Paper Award for their Freeband FRUX paper 'Mobile service bundles: the example of navigation services' at the eValues Conference in Bled, Slovenia. The research trio's paper offered solutions to questions about how to offer bundled services as marketing strategy. Questions like 'which combinations have added value for the consumer and strengthen the position of the provider?' and 'how do you measure the value consumers place in mobile services that they're not using yet?' were included.  The international jury that awarded the prize consisted of experts from the fields of science, government and business.
Paper

Putting the service back in Social Services
Why is it that consumers on the internet can combine products, but not services? Ziv Baida must've been asking the same question before he started working on his thesis.  Baida will be obtaining his doctorate with a thesis on a computer model that reduces the complex and vast amount of care services to elements that can be combined in bundled services. He calls it 'serviguration': services defined by configuration. Baida's computer model works similar to how a customer can choose from different parts such as a processor, a motherboard and a hard disk to build his computer. With Baida's model the services offered by Social Services are also reduced to elements that can be combined and reassembled to create tailor-made solutions. The client will benefit from these bespoke solutions, while the care supplier can look forward to cost reductions and a larger product differentiation.