WIP Jam Sessions - Connecting Developers

Came back from Geneva where I was 2 weeks ago for ITU Telecom World! And haven’t had found to finish this blog… but here it is now! In a self admitted mixed bag of thoughts and things seen.

For those of you who cannot remember ITU Telecom World, it used to be the craziest / biggest / unmissable event in the telecom space! Well of course it was in 1999, we were all going to be wheeling in our personal optical cable behind us to  get our necessary 100M/s dose of “bits”… Now we know better and have realized that carrying a mobile phone is much better than carrying a cable wheel… So the show had to rethink about itself… So the ITU Telecom World now concentrates a lot more on mobile than it has done before moving away from its fixed roots (can one have mobile roots ).

So it’s all mobile.. It’s all about cybersecurity…  It’s all about about governance and standards… it’s all about ICT being a key driver for overall economic development especially in times of recession… It’s all about the next 1 Billion users and the deployment of mobile in developing countries… And… a lot of suits, lots of ties and lots of government representatives. (I even had to put a tie on to participate to a videoed Telecom TV debate on the subject on “Show me the Money” available here)

A different crowd then different discussions for sure but still mobile application and services development was at the center of many discussions, as the mobile phone becomes a quasi universal information, communication and computing device. So a lot of attention and demand for application and content providers which was also reflected in the official theme of the conference “open innovation” or more exactly “Open networks, connected minds”. Developers and content providers were praised by all as being the future of the telecom industry and critical to further economic development either through eHealth, sensors, mobile banking. Unfortunately examples of activities, exchanges, lessons learned in the field of open innovation were rather spurious.

WIP on the invitation of NGMN organized a panel to bring in those very practical examples: our objective being to cover the various aspects of “open innovation” with the developer community and how to deliver on this innovation in a sustainable way (scoring high at the ITU buzzword bingo here). Or in more down to earth terms “how can operators, OEMs and all platform providers work more collaboratively with developers rewarding risk taking more appropriately and facilitating decision making for developreneurs”. A great panel then covering a wide range of subjects from open source, to appstore, to end-user analytics sharing, to the importance of mobile to redefine customer relationships, to the increased importance of making mobile data available on the cloud. The panel available for NGMN members here , thanks a lot to the panelists :

• Joe Barrett, Qualcomm
• Emiliano Ceraldi, Telecom Italia
• Jérôme Lepeu, Mobile Distillery
• Dr Toshitaka Tsuda, Fujitsu Laboratories
• Mike Yonker, Nielsen Mobile

And for those of you interested in the geeky stuff on the show floor, they were sparse but here are a few cool things spotted:

• The Docomo booth was rather impressive with 2 prominent demos of Augmented reality both given on HTC Android phones. (not so surprising when you see popularity of Layar in Japan)..With a couple of Blackberry’s added to their product lineups this made for a not so usual Docomo booth.
• Augmented reality was hot among developers with a few more companies demonstrating their solutions. One that caught my eye was a demo by KDDI, because .. it was running on a mid-tier Brew device, basically stating that embarking the correct hardware on mid-tier phone could open a much wider market for Augmented Reality.
• The OPhone and Mobile Market were massive on China Mobile’s booth. I could finally make a mental and real pictures of the OPhone OS and Developer Network as well as the whole collection of OPhones from 5 different manufacturers showing the impetus behind the platform. So mental picture is:

OPhone OS =  a variant of Android, -2 hardware buttons,  + China Mobile APIs and improved navigation + JIL widgets + Chinese character hand writing

Looking forward for your views on the mental pictures… In the mean time here are the physical pictures:

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