What's New

Innovations in Electronic Billing and Customer Care

Billing

Usage-Based Billing

The Billing Mediation System (BMS), a joint product of Sigma Systems and Narus, delivers customer-care and billing applications with real-time usage information. Adding Sigma applications, Narus now will include usage-based billing for data service. By gathering detailed customer and network-usage information from many sources, such as server log files, routers, switches and high-speed IP networks, BMS makes information available to applications from Narus and third parties. Other key components of BMS are customer care, fraud detection, churn management and office-support-system applications.
www.sigma.com or www.narus.com

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Collection Mediation

Using TCSI's SnapAdapt technology, IncomeConnect 2.0 enables providers to snap on adapter-type software so that the meditation element and marketing element can communicate effectively. IncomeConnect 2.0 supports technologies such as GPRS, CDMA 2000 and UMTS. Product-upgrade features include transactional and summary-level revenue-assurance reporting with enhanced error prevention, correction and detection. Built on TCSI's InExchange universal mediation framework, this updated version also allows next-generation wireless and Internet businesses to apply 1-stop mediation by supporting multivendor and multi-protocol environments.
www.tcsi.com

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Traffic Rating

Pulse IP from Spectrum allows service providers to gather network-usage data from routers, switches and servers. After the Pulse IP data collector records, summarizes and compresses data traffic, it forwards it to the Pulse IP and rates the traffic based on definable criteria, including speed or duration of transfer, amount of storage space used, type of payload, packet size and quality of transactions. The resulting bill looks similar to an itemized phone bill. The usage-based data also can be used to generate reports that give providers a view of how networks are being used.
www.spectrumIP.com

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Pricing Models

Total-e from TeleKnowledge allows providers to deploy custom-pricing models using qualitative and quantitative metrics linked to the value perceptions of their target customers and trading partners. Total-e empowers providers to manage unlimited revenue-based content relationships such as Web portal partners and content aggregators. The upgrade also has added specifically designed broadband-service and content-provider applications. Now wireless-service providers and content providers can create and deploy advanced broadband services in real time as well as package and price those services based on usage or packets delivered.
www.teleknowledge.com

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EBPP

DOC1 4.0 from Group 1 produces XML output and HTML for electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP). DOC1-generated PDF now supports bookmarks and embedded URL links and creates personalized bills, statements, letters and other high-volume customer documents for print and Internet delivery. The ability to add URLs to the document allows providers to include "pay now" in the body of the bill and activate the PDF as a bill-payment interface for their electronic customers. DOC1 also will output XML, which will enable EBPP and ESP vendors to accept DOC1 output to process for payment.
www.group1software.com

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Billing Software

Exabill Web Applicator from Telesens provides 24-hour access to invoice data via the Internet and allows access, navigation and analysis of invoices. Exabill IP is a modular-designed system that provides registration of traffic on internal networks as well as communications with external networks. Different IP services can be registered accurately and billed on the basis of type, volume and duration of usage. Exabill Interconnect 2.6 is a connection-accounting solution. Providers even can bill traffic retroactively with this software. The software additionally supports least-cost routing or selection of the least expensive network link, and quality-of-service analyses.
www.telesens.de

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Rating Engine

PriceMaker 1.0 from RateIntegration is a rating engine and pricing catalog that gives companies the power to discount, bundle and price any type of IP transaction while preserving existing OSS investments. A GUI allows marketers to create pricing packages and to respond to changing market demands. The rating engine provides real-time rating capabilities that base service pricing on usage information from the network.
www.rateintegration.com

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Internet Billing Platform

BillCast from Just in Time Solutions is an Internet billing platform comprised of three components: notification, presentment and interaction. Notification allows bill publishers to alert customers via WAP-enabled phones or Palm VII PDAs when significant account-related events occur or when transactions have been completed. With BillCast, the bill and statement become fully e-commerce-enabled, allowing customers to access additional details about their bills or statements, request and activate additional services or real-time customer care. Because notification is sent directly to a known customer, no added authentication is required, and the transaction is secure.
www.justintime.com

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Billing System

Veramark's VeraBill 1.3 incorporates call-detail-record mediation, rating, billing, roaming settlements and customer-care functions into one scaleable client-server system that is configured for providers of convergent services. VeraBill supports dealer resale channels, and includes an array of management and financial-analysis reports.
www.veramark.com

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Customer Care

Billing Management

Usha's Unicorn 5 architecture is designed for packaging, discounting, billing and roaming management. Follow-through capabilities include point of service, inventory management, trouble-ticket management and dealer management in a multi-language GUI. The software can be used for 2.5G operators with unbundled billing value chains. The settlements module can help with zone billing and enables Internet self-care for connected subscribers.
www.ushacomm.com

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Connecting Customers System

Cygent's eBSS 2.0 connects service providers to their customers and channel partners over the Web. Upgraded abilities now combine service-bundling infrastructure with a flexible portal architecture and simplified integration. The software includes online shopping and ordering supported by DSL and VPN, and electronic bill presentment and payment applications. EBSS 2.0 also enables providers to do targeted 1-to-1 marketing. Offering combined Web self-care functions, eBSS 2.0 provides customers with management to their communications portfolios online.
www.cygent.com

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M-Commerce

Internet Portal

SemaPortal from Sema is an Internet portal that gives users direct and transparent access to information and services from the Web, WAP phones or PCs. SemaPortal encompasses front- and back-office functionality necessary to build a multi-access service portal. Preferences are collected continuously using contact-sensitive profiling. The system, in effect, can learn a user profile. Channel-independent navigation and customized user interface also allow for personalized marketing-content management and customer self-care. An integrated transaction-management module includes prepaid, postpaid and cash-payment customer profiling.
www.sema.com

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Storefront to Portable

LiveMind's ASP offers a B2B2C solution for enabling wireless e-commerce storefronts to transmit information to portable devices. LiveMind ASP allows an e-merchant to transform a wireline-accessible site to WAP-enabled appliances. A service provider can publish its own Web content safely in XML behind the corporate firewall and LiveMind ASP retrieves it.
www.livemind.com

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Security

Toolkits & Services

WTLS Plus from Certicom is designed to give your subscribers a secure connection. Based on wireless-transport-layer-security protocol, the combined elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), secure socket layer (SSL) and embedded platforms provide plug-and-play integration for both WAP and non-WAP-enabled devices. Ideal for securing financial or e-commerce applications, mutual authentication of the communicating parties is achieved and standard ECC X.509 v3 certificates are supported.

Certicom's Smart Card Developer's Toolkit provides a set of tools to implement ECC smart-card-based solutions. This new toolkit can be integrated with Certicom SSL and public-key-infrastructure technologies to deliver authentication and non-repudiation to mobile and enterprise e-commerce applications.

Certicom also offers MobileTrust, a digital certificate service, that delivers managed certificate services to mobile-application developers, service providers and enterprises that require standards-based digital-certificate-service capabilities.
www.certicom.com

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Digital Certificate Management

Keon Certificate Server 5.5 from RSA is a digital-certificate-management system that enables your server to issue new digital certificates for multiple users in one step. This system offers customers transactional security based on digital certificates quickly and accurately.

BSafe Cert-C, also from RSA, is a software-development kit for building public-key-infrastructure (PKI) applications that provides the certificate processing and cryptographic software needed to deploy secure applications for a variety of PKI vendor environments, including Keon and VeriSign OnSite. It is available for Windows NT, Solaris, HP-UX and Linux.
www.rsassecurity.com

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Web Design

Diagnostic Tool

SiteRx from Digital Idea is a free online self-diagnostic tool, which enables e-tailers to evaluate their Web sites against industry benchmarks. SiteRx provides an effectiveness score and directional recommendations based on a short battery of questions. SiteRx helps managers of existing and planned Web sites understand how they can improve their Web efforts by addressing which components of their sites are successful and which are not. Separate tracks are available for live and planned sites. SiteRx probes key areas, including business strategy, user expectations, site appearance/navigability, content customization, inquiry response time and success measurement. Guidance offered by SiteRx covers selecting optimal URLs, serving your users and Web metrics optimization.
,a href="http://www.digitalidea.com" target="blank">www.digitalidea.com

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Web Traffic Statistics

HitBox from WebSideStory allows providers to view their live Web-site visitor traffic statistics on the Internet via PCs or wireless devices. HitBox is an Internet audience-intelligence service for e-business. It provides remote Web audience measurement and certified third-party reporting — all in real-time without requiring log files or server resources. HitBox and its ASP form of analysis provides up-to-the-second information on more than 500 visitor statistics, including unique visitors, page views, referring URLs, time spent on site and most-requested pages. The new wireless feature allows corporate strategists, IT specialists and other executives to evaluate Web-site activity at one or more Web sites. The application can be used on portable Palms as well with the addition of a snap-on modem solution.
www.websidestory.com