@Hit Barcelona Head of Mobile Bebo on why we don’t need mobile operators

Sean Kane Head of Mobile from bebo @Hit Barcelona Open API panel.

I loved Sean Kane’s edgy almost arrogant stance at Hit Barcelona. When Paul Strzelecki asked him to talk for 3 to 5 minutes on operator Openness and what it means for Bebo, he came back with a punch.

He said that apart from messaging, Bebo didn’t need mobile operators. He said that the most important asset an operator had was mobile messaging and the SMSC was vital for bebo. But that was about it.

Bebo was already a leader in social networking. It was already a leader in mobile messaging boasting the largest youth exchange of messages already that it was an asset.

He said that mobile was great but that the mobile operator were only one obese side of the equation and bebo was like an application that by-passed the operator.

He said, the network operators do very very little for bebo and this was mentioned before by Get Jar as well.

Another major point that Sean made that had been echoed at Mobile 2.0 is that he cared more about tariffs and commercialisation than he did openness. Making money on mobile is vital and data rates and tariffs are more vital for social networks and application developers than openness.

What we think?
Now, everything that Sean said made a lot of sense. Making money is vital and any one that thinks there is something more or else than money out there – is just wrong.

On top of that anyone with a business model that depends on operators and is not D2C at this stage - is flawed.