So, after a great day at Mobile 2.0 yesterday I am back at Hit Barcelona. I have just entered the Telecom room and am getting ready for the mobile panel on open networks. After developer day yesterday and back here today – I can see how Open Networks and Openness is an enormously hot topic.
The panel:
Moderator Paul Strzelecki – Managing Director
David wood -Leadership team – Symbian foundation
Michael Crossey CMO Aepona
Sean Kane – Head of Mobile bebo
Igor Douplitzky – Head of Web 2.0 services and strategic marketing Orange.
The panel was extremely interesting and I will discuss Bebo’s contribution in the next article –but the messages were clear.
Paul Strzelecki made some interesting points to set the mood of the panel. He spoke about innovation and highlighted SpinVox as an innovator. In fact, it was strange to hear Paul speaking about something other than barcodes and NeoMedia. As the MD of Yorkville – that is our primary subject of communication.
Anyway, Paul found an article he wrote a few years ago highlighting how “open” was vital and operators had been missing the boat for some time. This set the tone and one by one each panellists explained his or her position on the GSMA’s openAPI initiative.
Highlights:
The GSMA has created an open API initiative. But from the panel and from the Mobile 2.0 conference it seems that everyone has an Open API strategy above and beyond what the GSMA is offering.
There is no launch date for the API initiative but it might be ready for Mobile World Congress 2010.
I hate to say this, but everyone was not on the same level in the panel and it seemed that everyone knew that Open API was or sounded like a good idea – but no one really knew anything else.
Igor from Orange however did an excellent job on highlighting operator assets such as billing, LBS and messaging. He also said that Orange had been focused on Openness for the past 2 years and was a leader in this area.
