Jim Udall: Research Director MobileMuse.ca

Jim's my name and technology is my game.  I've been involved with the MobileMuse.ca project since its inception over two years ago.  In spite of my titular reference of Research Director, I'm probably more accurately described as the Chief Technology Officer in the MobileMuse.ca network.

A mathematician and computer scientist by training, I've been involved in the high tech industry for close to 30 years.  The vast majority of that time has been spent in the Ottawa area and specifically within the telecommunications domain.  I'm a serial entrepreneur and have participated or co-founded 5 startups in my career.

I was the co-founder of Vienna Systems - an early VOIP equipment provider that was ultimately acquired by Nokia in 1999 (a lesson to serial entrepreneurs: It took 5 times before I realized a commercial success).  With Nokia I moved to Vancouver to assume the role of Chief Architect at the product creation centre here and helped that site evolve from about 20 to 500 employees,  Along the way I became enamoured with mobile media and the potential it has to augment and transform our day to day lives.

My new passion in the mobile space is to understand, develop and deploy services that will make it as easy to create content and applications in the mobile space as it is in the traditional wired Internet domain.  My experiences at Nokia taught me an awful lot about the technologies and business models in the mobile space but I was frustrated at the barriers to innovation there.

My role within the Mobile MUSE project today is to define, acquire and develop services that will facilitate the simple creation and deployment of context-aware, rich-media content. in the mobile domain.  MobileMuse.ca offers by far the most eclectic group of people with which I've ever worked.  We are strongly focused on assisting true content owners to realize the value of their content and assist them in navigating the waters of mobilization for that content.  At this point, that tends to consist of throwing a lot of cold water on some wonderful ideas as I explain the realities of cellular technologies and business to these visionaries.  Though I am working hard towards the day when those barriers crumble and innovation in the wireless domain becomes led not by technocrats like myself, but rather the true artists and creators of this world.