Advertising Revenue
College students and pizza: an inseparable combination. Imagine you own a pizza parlor just blocks away from the largest dorm on campus. The university has deployed Cisco AVVID IP telephony and there are Cisco IP phones in every dorm room. For a fee, you can promote your pies to students through the phone's display. You get to advertise your pizza to the hungriest demographic in your market—right on the phone they'll use to order the pizza—and the university gets to pocket a recurring return on investment.
Universities, hotels, cruise ships, and other hospitality industries can benefit from the Cisco IP phone's capability to display advertising on the phone. Ads can be displayed automatically when the phone is not in use (Figure 6) or a service can provide restaurant listings in the area. Soft keys allow phone users to select a restaurant to browse its menu or speed dial the restaurant at the touch of a button (Figure 7).
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FIGURE 6: You can use the IdleURL setting to specify a banner that
displays on the phone when it is not in use.
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FIGURE 7: Services can provide a wealth of information through multiple
screens accessed via soft keys.
Developing useful phone services that increase productivity or solve business problems is not a difficult undertaking. All it takes is some code and a little imagination. Deploy a few simple services and your users will soon be wondering how they ever got by without their IP phone network.
Developing Cisco IP Phone Services
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FIGURE 8: Book cover
Developing Cisco IP Phone Services: A Cisco AVVID Solution from Cisco Press provides all the information you need to create your own phone services. Written by Darrick Deel, Mark Nelson, and Anne Smith, the book takes you from basic concepts to advanced programming, and includes detailed service examples and descriptions of all the objects, tags and HTTP headers you'll need. A CD-ROM included with the book provides additional development tools such as the XML Validator, which checks your service for validity against the Cisco IP Phone Services Schema, and the CallManager Simulator, an application that mimics a Cisco CallManager so you can write phone services with just a Web server and a Cisco IP phone.
The book and CD also contain many code samples and a free phone service called Voice Anomaly Tracking which allows phone users to capture voice quality statistics and automatically log the information to a file that the system administrator accesses. Developing Cisco IP Phone Services (ISBN: 1-58705-060-9) is available at local bookstores, online booksellers, computer and electronics superstores, and other venues where computer technology books are sold. For information on corporate bulk or education purchases and sales outside the US, visit the URL ciscopress.com/sales.