At March’s Mobile Monday London Demo event last week we managed to have a bit of a catch up with Giles Corbett. Giles is a project manager at Orange Vallée: a ’skunkworks’ style sub-division of Orange set up in 2007 whose aim is to understand mobile users’ future needs, and to offer them adapted mobile solutions. The firm is working on a lot of different mobile and internet based projects including the recently launched Tabbee, a tablet computer for the home, and Wormee, an on-demand music streaming website.
Giles Corbett from Orange Vallée at Mobile Monday London March 2010 Demo Night from Aurélien on Vimeo.
Giles demonstrated Orange Vallée’s latest project; a mobile application called ON (see video above) currently available on the Android platform and coming soon to iPhone. ON is a social network aggregator coupled to a real time address book whose aim is to help people use their myriad of contacts across different services to communicate both better, and smarter. ON enables you to back up and safeguard your address book for free, import all your main social network contacts (Gmail, Facebook and twitter) into your existing address book, organise those contacts into specific groups (workmates, friends, family, football team etc…), easily define your availability to each of these groups as an when needed (call, direct to voice mail, only text…) and view all your interactions with each of your contacts across all these services (Facebook message, email, voice message, text…) as a chronological stream.
What we think?
With the launch of Orange’s ON and Vodafone 360 it’s becoming increasingly clear that real-time address books and social media aggregation have been identified as important territories for MNO’s to start gaining more of a foothold. Orange’s choice to open up the use of ON to any mobile network’s customers across the world is both an interesting and a smart one and demonstrates a shift in MNO’s far more familiar ‘land-grabbing’ approach through the use of exclusives. It is both in the mobile user’s and Orange’s best interests.
It appears that Orange Vallée has lots of projects and expectations for Life Is Better ON and for mobile services industry overall and we look forward to keeping an eye on how this develops in the future.
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Aurélien Fonteneau
Account executive @ We Are Social London | Third year ESC Tours-Poitiers business school student (M2 – Advise, Poitiers campus)
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