What are Operators Doing to Support Developers and Innovation?
Last night’s MoMo London was themed ‘What are Operators Doing to Support Developers and Innovation?’
There were presentations by James Parton from O2 and Terence Eden from Vodafone followed by a panel additionally including Steve Wolak from Betavine, David Wood from Symbian Foundation and Jo Rabin representing dotMobi. Here’s what I took away from the event…
James spoke about O2 Litmus. I posted about Litmus in December after I had attended the launch event. There was nothing new here. In summary, good stuff but the lack of direct link from the O2 portal to Litmus still comes across as a lost opportunity.
Vodafone Betavine was more interesting in that, as of last Friday, it’s possible for Vodafone customers (in I think Germany, Spain and South Africa) to click through (Home… mobile apps…free apps) from the Vodafone portal to Betavine. As Betavine is all about beta software, there are obviously no paid listings.
David suggested there should be more communication and synergy between network operator developer offerings so as to reduce the barriers to selling via a larger number of operators.
I have previously posted about the Symbian Foundation ‘Store of Stores’. However, it appears the original RethinkWireless article I referenced might have been misleading or is now out of date. David revealed that the Symbian Foundation ’store’ is going to be more like an API that other stores can use to gain information on developer applications.
There was much talk of openness and giving end users a say (crowdsourcing). David explained how open technologies might lead consumers to have a choice of providers. He said this should be seen as a positive thing in that people are more likely to choose a provider if there is less lock in. However, Steve reminded us that the greatest success of the moment (the iPhone and app store) are very much closed, controlled and not crowdsourced.
Jo spoke of the need for a new way to monetise mobile web applications without the use of premium SMS that’s too costly for developers.
The several conversations I had afterwards centred on why network operators are now more interested in applications. Here are some random (and some might say wild) thoughts from various people. There’s obviously Apple’s recent success but are the AppStore revenues really that large compared to typical network operator voice/data revenues? Have operators given in… are applications a way for the operator to become a successful bitpipe? Why aren’t the carriers committing to fully (developer) accessible application stores? Maybe their current efforts are just something to appease the shareholders?
