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Personity aims to make communication quicker, easier and smoother
Thursday, July 05, 2001 By Daniel Casciato
Quickly glancing at his watch, Kit Mueller hopped on the scooter outside his office and glided to the end of the hallway to deliver a report to co-worker John Wilson.
"I need this back in 10 minutes.
Can you look this over? Thanks."
Mueller then pivoted around and scooted back to his office, narrowly missing crashing into another co-worker.
A visitor may get a kick out of the unconventional way that Personity Inc. employees dart around in the office, but as Dan Cohen, president and chief executive officer, explains, every minute counts.
"The scooters started off being a way to avoid the long walk to our single shared printer at the other end of the hallway, but now we use them to quickly meet with each other at the office," he said. "Things are very fast-paced here. In our business, execution and time to market is everything, so we need to move as quickly as possible. It's a great metaphor for our technology, which enables people to get together quickly."
The Carnegie Mellon University spinoff develops technology that identifies which communications media -- such as a wireless device, an instant messaging application or an e-mail application -- are available for communication at any moment.
This so-called presence technology provides users with control over how they are reached and by whom by applying preferences and rules that can be customized by each user and changed at will. Instant messaging, for example, is a "presence-enabled" form of text messaging in which it's known if the recipient is available before he or she is sent a message.
Cohen, not to be confused with the Pittsburgh councilman -- he sometimes gets phone calls from the councilman's constituents -- founded his first company, networking and systems integration concern USConnect, in the '90s. It was acquired in 1996 by communications technology giant IKON Office Solutions. Cohen stuck with IKON for several years, but decided his heart was in building and leading start-ups -- a desire that led him to Personity.
Cohen and Thanos Diacakis, Personity's chief technology officer, co-founded the company in April 2000. Diacakis developed the architecture for a large-scale Internet messaging and communications system as a result of work he had done for his master's thesis at CMU's Information Networking Institute.
"Our technology enables the people you care about to reach you more easily, while providing you with a way to control and optimize your communications," Cohen said from Personity's new Downtown headquarters on Ninth Street.
He noted, for example, that today's technology had made it possible to communicate in all sorts of ways -- via phone, voice mail, e-mail and instant messaging -- on all kinds of devices, including text pagers, cellular phones, wireless PDAs (personal digital assistants) and laptop computers. All this has made the simple act of trying to get in touch with someone a sometimes complicated and frustrating experience.
Personity's software is aimed at changing all that, Cohen said as he demonstrated by turning on his Internet-enabled cell phone. Instead of the typical cell phone "phone book," in which users store people's names and phone numbers, the phone displayed a list of people who are available for Cohen to communicate with at that moment.
Glancing at the display, Cohen saw that the name of Jonathan, one of his employees, was displayed along with two icons next to his name -- one showing Jonathan's availability for a phone call, and the other showing availability for an instant message. Cohen decided he wanted to talk to Jonathan by phone, selected Jonathan off of the list and immediately the phone placed the call to him.
"You don't need to know which phone Jonathan is using, or what his phone number is," Cohen said. "Personity technology takes care of that. At any given moment, I can figure out whether or not Jonathan is available, determine if he prefers a phone call or an instant message, and then automatically make that phone call or get that message to him -- regardless if he is using his PC, his home phone or his cell phone.
"Basically, Personity answers the question, 'Are you available?' rather than forcing you to call someone's home number, then their office, then their cell phone. At a glance you know whether or not the person you are trying to reach is available, and what phone and phone number they can be reached with," Cohen said. "And if that person doesn't want to be bothered ... if he's in a meeting ... I will know that as well."
Personity believes that this is the future of communications and has persuaded Motorola to incorporate Personity's offerings into its wireless phones, pagers and systems for wireless carriers.
"With Personity, we have chosen a partner that not only enables us to provide the best wireless presence and instant messaging solution for our customers today, but a whole new revenue opportunity for wireless network operators," said Jerry Upton, vice president and general manager of personal solutions and technologies in Motorola's Internet content and software group.
Ultimately, however, it will be the customers who will determine if this software will be a success. Cohen is confident, saying he believes his company's technology "has the power to revolutionize the way people communicate."
Mueller, the company's senior director of business development, agreed and said he wasn't concerned about the recent slump in the telecommunications business.
"Good companies are still succeeding in the industry," he said. "We're not a dot.com, we're a provider of core communications infrastructure that powers the Internet. We have an experienced management team, and we have avoided the mistakes and pitfalls that have killed so many technology start-ups."
Cohen also noted that Personity's technology could be applied to multimedia and video.
"There's a lot of potential out there," he said. "The wireless Internet is one of the most exciting and fun places to be right now for a technology company, and the next big enabler in the wireless space is [the] presence technology [that we make]."
Daniel Casciato is a free-lance writer.
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