Dilithium receives World Economic Forum Award, deal with Europe's third-largest mobile operator

Last week, Europe's third-largest mobile telecom company, Turkey's Turkcell, chose Dilithium Networks’ DTG 3021 Multimedia Gateway to deliver multimedia and enhanced video. In addition, earlier this month, the Petaluma, CA-based company received the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 2010 Technology Pioneer Award.

Turkcell currently uses Dilithium's DTG 3021 to deploy video-enhanced services such as video blogging, Facebook video upload and augmented reality. ("Augmented reality" superimposes information and images on the view seen through a mobile phone's camera. Industry pundits are predicting a $1 billion market). Turkcell has 36.3 million subscribers in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Moldova, Cyprus and Ukraine.

Dilithium received the WEF's Technology Pioneer Award for its Dilithium Content Adapter (DCA), which brings video to PCs, set-top boxes and any 2.5G/3G mobile phone. The award recognizes companies that have developed and applied new, transformational technology in energy, biotechnology and health, and IT.

Using Dilithium's DCA, operators can launch mobile TV and other video services regardless of the client on the terminal. The technology can enable live mobile TV and VOD on any kind of handset, according to company founder and CTO Marwan Jabri. The DCA has the ability to detect the device connecting to it, and based on the device capabilities, it can detect, identify and adapt content on the fly," Jabri says. "For example, if the device only supports downloads, the DCA will only do a download. The DCA can [operate from] the operator's network, a content network or even a data center."

Dilithium has a pioneering pedigree in mobile TV and video, growing from Jabri's participation in the ITU-T H.324/H.324M workgroup. In his 20-year research career, Jabri has developed intelligent signal processing algorithms for multimedia coding and transcoding, as well as some of the first protocol stack implementations of the H.324/H.324M standard. The company was among the first to launch mobile TV solutions for smartphones, including the iPhone, Blackberry and Android.