On the 30th October I gave a webinar entitled “Telco adoption of Web 2.0 principles and open innovation for rapid application development.” The presentation is shown below:
The webinar was also recorded, and is available here.
The purpose of article is to act as a follow-on discussion forum, so please add comments, questions you were unable to ask in the webinar, or points you think should be raised.
In the presentation I identified a number of critical issues.
- Operators must implement processes to ensure ADC (Application Development Community) is used by the operator and not repeat the mistakes of the past; and
- Reverse developer skepticism by listening, implementing what they need, and show the ADC working.
- Application developers will not pay for capabilities exposed, e.g. location;
- Customer access is critical;
- REST and in some cases SOAP/XML are the preferred APIs;
- Full testbed is essential to the ADC; and
- Copy Apple’s App Store, just copy better.
What’s missing in the above list from an application developer’s perspective?
Can operators meet these requirements?
What are the critical remaining gaps in enabling operators and application developers to work together?
Hi Alan,
I heard (and watched) your webinar yesterday and thought it was excellent. One of the questions I posted but which the moderator was unable to get to within the set time was: In the UK we seem to have adopted the Swedish approach to operator API development i.e. a proliferation of them and not the “common API” approach taken by Norway. Will this not result in a similar problem here i.e. poor adoption by the development community? And will this not make the Apple, and possibly Android, platforms even more appealing?
In your work with operators, do you see that this is something they’re looking to tackle together? Thanks.
Hi Ade,
Good questions.
The UK situation is not ideal. I sometimes describe the start of my career as: I started working for a small operator on an island at the NW coast of Europe (BT). There is a tendency for operators to think their customer base is large enough that they can gain competitive advantage from not choosing open standards. To meet the needs of developers, web-based open standards are essential. The GSMA has a 3rd Party Access Initiative, which from a mobile perspective could create the commonality the whole industry requires.
On the iPhone, there’s no reason an operator can not provide branded apps through the Apple app store. Those operator apps could use capabilities from its network to provide an enhanced customer experience. We’ll also see app stores from Blackberry, Google and Nokia. Check out VzAppZone (http://support.vzw.com/information/vzappzone_landing.html), as an example of an operator building such as App Store. The Apple App Store will likely be the preferred application discovery and delivery method for iPhone users, so operators will need to conform to that customer expectation. Smart-phones are only 10% of the market, there’s another 90% of customers that also have unmet needs, to which an operator can choose to satisfy.
The critical decision point for an operator is to decide on being either a pipe provider or a service provider. If the answer is service provider, there is no choice but open innovation.