Welcome to my wrap up of 2009, looking back at the highs and lows in the run up to the first anniversary of O2 Litmus launching. It’s been a busy year, with Litmus growing from a standing start to a growing community of developers, customers and other mobile industry partners.

At the beginning of this year, we launched O2 Litmus and received a warm welcome:

We received positive feedback at launch from the media with coverage in places such as Yahoo News, Stuff and T3, with Telco 2.0 even declaring that O2 Litmus is better than the Apple App Store.

You can review all of the coverage we have received by checking out my Delicious account which holds the links to all our digital coverage to date.

We also received a fantastic welcome from the developer community, with comments such as “one of the better developer communities created by operators” and  “the first community to provide full resources for developers “ giving us confidence that we were taking the right approach towards fostering an innovative community that directly connects customers with developers.

We won our first award

O2 Litmus closed 2009 having attracted 925 developers from 64 countries, hosting 663 applications, and with a pool of 7,377 registered O2 UK customers available for co-creation and testing.

The recent marketing campaign to 1 million O2 customers resulted in a significant increase in the customer numbers within O2 Litmus, meaning that developers have access to more feedback and more potential revenue than ever before. So if you have been hesitating up till now about uploading your apps to Litmus, now’s the time to get them up there!

I’m really pleased we delivered on our promise to let the community decide the direction in which O2 Litmus goes. This is easy to say, but much harder to successfully implement. In the summer, we held an Open Road Mapping session, which involved approximately 40 developers coming along to a bar in Central London and working with the O2 Litmus team to decide on the roadmap for the second half of 2009. We also constantly monitor the forum for feedback and suggestions, many of which have been adopted into the site.

We also have struck up great relationships with a couple of O2 customers who have volunteered to act as Forum admins, to help increase the levels of community engagement.

Of course, there is a lot of exciting stuff that has been going on in addition to the above that you may not yet have heard about.

We have begun the closer alignment of Developer activity across Telefonica’s  global footprint. We now have sister communities live in Spain and Mexico. Telefonica’s unique geographical footprint provides Developers with an incredible commercial opportunity to enter the Latin American market, so if you are interested in developing your business do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

Just last week O2 launched the O2 Incubator Project. The O2 Incubator Project has joined O2 Litmus as part of concerted effort by O2 to reach out and engage the Developer Community.

Finally we saw the announcement that Telefonica has acquired IP telephony provider JaJah.  At O2 Litmus we are partially excited about the opportunity this presents for Developers and we begin working on integrating JaJah’s API’s into our offering in the New Year.

So all that is great, but it hasn’t been all perfect, right? Of course there are some things we could have done better in 2009:

A key part of the O2 Litmus proposition was that the apps with the most activity around them (downloads, highest ratings, most feedback) would be spun out into the main O2 UK app store. Unfortunately, we have been hindered in our ability to do this, as simply the O2 UK app store did not arrive in 2009. However, earlier this year we began speaking with several developers about taking their apps from O2 Litmus and launching them on O2 Active, O2 UK’s WAP portal. We are working on improving the path to market as our number 1 priority for 2010.

Although Litmus carries a number of innovative APIs for developers to use, we need more, and we need API’s that are revenue generating for both Developers and O2. Again, fixing this is a big part of our 2010 plan.

There is also the age old problem of industry fragmentation with so many platforms to choose from and so many more devices to build for; it continues to be a lengthy challenge to support developers in the face of an ever changing and ever growing mobile device and application market. We are continuing to establish the right industry relationships to champion the cause of the developer to attempt to address this.

So, 2009 in summary?  I’d give O2 Litmus 6 out of 10.

We have learnt a huge amount, but still have a long way to go. We have big plans for 2010, some of which you may have heard if you have seen me speak during the tail end of 2009. I will of course share more of this plan in 2010, but they will be built on three principles:

1. Scale
2. Tools
3. Monetisation

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