You down with ODP?

You down with ODP? Action Engine has been creating on device portals (ODPs) since before most industry insiders knew what they were. Action Engine recently helped a major Web portal with their ODP, but the company could not disclose which major Web portal it was. ODPs were a long time coming, however. In 2000 a couple of ex-Microsoft employees banded together to start the company, which has been focused on ODPs since day one, Action Engine CEO Scott Silk said. When Silk joined the company in 2004, carriers and content companies were beginning to see that ODPs were not just a smartphone play anymore. Silk said that after 24 months of re-architecting their solution, big name consumer electronic companies like TiVo were ready to sign and carriers were soon to follow. "If you roll the clock back a couple of years, handsets didn't have the processing power or memory to support ODPs—that's been fixed," Silk said. "Now networks are high performance and there's a lot of mobile content available. The last barrier that needed to come down was making that user experience easier to use."