Hot on the heels of our great coverage of Mobile World Congress, we now have out our very first Podcast. Chris Shipley co-founder of Guidewire, joins Debi to discuss Innovate!100, how to participate, and Chris takes your questions.

You can listen here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/telefonicadev

With the transcript available here.

The plan is for this to be a weekly show, both live and archived at BlogTalkRadio. Transcripts will be produced for all shows, including Spanish translation.

I hope you enjoy the shows, and it goes without saying – let us know what you think.

MPA 2010

Apologies in advance that my wrap up of the event is not complete. A scheduling conflict unfortunately meant that I had to leave before the end of the formal agenda.

I’m sure that the official round up of the event and publication of all the winners will be live on the MPA website soon, plus you can look for Twitter activity from the event on it’s two hash tags that seemed to be in most frequent use: #mpa and #mpa10 . The venue had no cellular coverage again this year hint hint Rudy so only the lucky few on WiFi were tweeting from the room.

This wrap up is therefore in the bite sizes pieces that I would have tweeted if I was online at the time!

Russell Buckley from AdMob and Rich Wong from Accel Partners gave the keynotes. I came in too late to do justice to Russell’s presentation, but Rich gave some important perspective, sprinkled with a little nostalgia. You can grab Rich’s slides here.

Rich rightly pointed out that there has never been a more exciting time to be in the mobile space. Just 10 years ago there were no high speed mobile data networks, actually no real data networks of any note regardless of speed, and phones were only just coming out of the grey scale age with the first colour phones appearing in 2002. I then started a mini personal flashback to my days of launching MMS with O2 UK, and the awe that the arrive of the little Sony Ericsson T68 brought – colour screen, java, MMS, clip on camera – that little thing, quickly followed by the T68i, was a turning point for the industry.

Rich then spoke about Smartphone growth driving new services and presenting a platform for innovative startup’s to really florish, saying that he believed the ingredients were now all there for a new Google or eBay sized company to emerge. Of course he rightly pointed out that geography is hugely important, and in emerging markets the feature phone and Nokia still dominate.

Rich took the opportunity to play back the demise of the walled garden of the Mobile Operator portals, with mobile now following the trend we saw on fixed Internet – Google now being the number 1 mobile site for traffic.

He then moved on to an interesting Alien vs Predator analogy to describe the hardware and O/S war in mobile over the past 10 years.

Alien vs Predator #1: Nokia vs Microsoft

Alien vs Predator #2: Nokia vs Asia (ref Sharp’s Voda Live devices)

Alien vs Predator #3: Apple vs The Droids

I guess the interesting there is the future relevance of Nokia.

Finally Rich wrapped up with some pearls for start up’s (see his deck for the accurate playback), but the bullets were:

1. Describe the problem statement clearly
2. Team background and credibility
3. Platform and distribution strategy
4. Stay capital efficient
5. Work with investors that have an in-depth understanding of your space

We then moved on the MPA award in Entertainment which was won by Layar – congratulations.

Next we moved onto the MPA in Innovation pitches.

Wikitude was in the augmented reality space, like Layar, overlaying information onto your phones camera image. There was a brief mention of Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) which is being reviewed by the W3C. They had also won the NavTeq Global LBS Challenge.

Spendino was from Mobile Monday Berlin and was focused on charitable donations via SMS, also providing the infrastructure and settlement for the charitable organisations in the back end.They said they had 100 organisations signed up.

Continuing the humanitarian theme, Lifesaversnetwork was focused on disaster planning and tracking – a kind of personal aid if you get caught up in a natural, or other disaster, situation with practical advice and LBS tracking etc.

Mobisiteglore was based on the insight that in emerging markets PC penetration is low, so this service allows people to build fully featured web and mobile sites directly from their phone. 50,000 sites have already been created.

Mobile Acuity from Mobile Monday Edinburgh was a product recognition app, with retailers uploading images and data for their product. They claimed 90%+ accuracy on standard products, and also good results when identifying houses.

TaxiPal was a complete mobile Taxi solution. Live booking which had a nice auction process where it seemed rival Taxi firms could make you offers to compete for your business. There was also integrated mapping to check your route wasn’t designed to ramp up your fare, and also more traditional local taxi firm listings if you just wanted a number.

Finally, before I had to run, was AudioBoo from Mobile Monday London. Small 5 minute voice recordings which can be stored and sharing across social media sites.

Apologies for the incompleteness of the write up, but hopefully this fragment is still useful for those that couldn’t make it to the event.

Check out Mobile Entertainment’s excellent daily round up, of news coming out of MWC, and of course the brand new MWC coverage and content aggregation service provided by O2 Litmus, here.

Breaking news this morning from Mobile World Congress, sees the announcement of the Wholesale Applications Community to tackle this exact issue on behalf of Developers.

You can read more here: http://www.wholesaleappcommunity.com/

The full press release can be found here: http://www.wholesaleappcommunity.com/?q=content/leading-operators-unite-unleash-global-apps-potential-0

More news to follow…

Many of you will already know Debi, and you can see her work on her personal blog: www.mobilejones.com

This is a great win for the team and I’m really excited about the contribution Debi will make to help establish Telefonica in the Developer community.

Debi dives straight into the deep end, pulling together our coverage of Mobile World Congress. Keep an eye on my Twitter feed for the URL of the site.

You can contact Debi here: 

email: mojo@mobilejones.com
Twitter www.twitter.com/mojosd

If you are going to MWC, you will find the O2 Litmus team at the following events, and if you want to hook up there, ping me:

• 15th: Mobile Premier Awards
• 15th: Presenting on “Supporting Developers” in the main MWC conference agenda
• 15th: Presenting at the LiMo Foundation seminar
• 18th: Participating in the WIP Jam in App Planet
• And throughout the show we are sponsoring and hanging out at the Symbian Foundation lounge

There is a great Developers guide to MWC 2010 by WIP – download it here.

Anyhow, before the world goes into MWC melt down I thought I would post a quick update on the manic start to 2010.

O2 Litmus & Palm Bar Camp, 08.02.10. Snapped on my Pre, of course!

Last night our friends from Palm were back in town, and we held another well received joint O2 Litmus / Palm barcamp – you can check out the real time feedback from the event here, and you can check out the photo’s here. We also ran a competition with O2 Customers to win some Palm Pre’s, asking them to what ends would they go to get their hands on one. Some amusing responses here.

One last quick plug for our Developer research with Vision Mobile.  I’d encourage all mobile developers to participate and help set the standards for the future of mobile software development. All participants will be included in a draw for 21 great prizes, including 1 participant wins €500 in Amazon Vouchers, 20 participants win a glossy A1 wallchart of the Mobile Industry Atlas, the definitive who’s who of the mobile ecosystem.

Next up is Innovate!2010. Innovate!2010 is a global competition to identify and accelerate the Innovate!100: The World’s 100 Most Promising Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Startups.

Innovate!2010 is unique in that it features a series of distributed pitching and networking events 20+ startup centers across Europe and the US, and a completely transparent ranking based Guidewire Group’s G/Score Assessment Methodology. The program is being supported by a prestigious group of market-leading companies like Best Buy, HP, Motorola, O2 Litmus, RIM, SAP, Sun, SWIFT and Verizon, dozens of early-stage investors, and marquee media partners. 

 The program works like this:

• Startups apply online to compete for expert feedback & validation, promotion, and over $100,000 in prizes.
• Guidewire Group’s analysts will select 250-300 of the most promising startups – Innovate!100 Finalists – to pitch at one of 20+ networking events called Pitch Slams.
• At each Pitch Slam, a panel of judges trained to conduct G/Score Assessments, score companies as they pitch to an audience of more than 100 local investors, entrepreneurs, technology executives and members of the media.
• After all of the Pitch Slams, top-ranking are be named to the Innovate!100 and enjoy global promotion.
• A follow-on program, called the Innovate! Connection Program offers all of the Innovate!100 Finalists pre-qualified introductions to potential partners, investors and customers for a fee.

Startups with a completed alpha and at one full time employee are eligible to apply for $75 (approximately €54). All applicants will receive 2 free passes to their local Pitch Slams, online pitch training, and free online promotion through a network of over 5,000 news websites. Entrepreneurs, investors, technology executives and other member of the startup ecosystem are invited to register to attend Pitch Slams for $50 in the US or €40 in Europe.

Hear Mike Sigal, the organiser talking about Innovate!2010 here:

Ok, I think that’s enough for now – contiune to check out O2 Litmus, our sister communities in Spain and Mexico, and get invloved!

Continuing in this tradition, I’m pleased to announce we are sponsoring a new, ambitious research project by VisionMobile that will benchmark the developer experience across all 8 major platforms (iPhone, Android, Symbian, Java ME, RIM, Windows Mobile, Flash Lite or mobile web).

I’d encourage all mobile developers to participate and help set the standards for the future of mobile software development.

Prizes

All participants will be included in a draw for 21 great prizes:

 - 1 participant wins €500 in Amazon Vouchers

 - 20 participants win a glossy A1 wallchart of the Mobile Industry Atlas, the definitive who’s who of the mobile ecosystem.

+ chance to win 1 free MWC pass: Participants who register by Friday 5th February will automatically be entered into a prize draw for a complimentary entry pass to Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona (a value of €599), supplied by us.

Participate

VisionMobile is inviting mobile software developers to one-on-one phone interviews for an opportunity to have your say on the future of mobile platforms. Register today at visionmobile.com/developers.

Results will be published in Q2 2010.

Are you are a mobile application developer? Love or hate your mobile OS? Have your SAY!

A key foundation of our strategy is to broaden our appeal to the web developer community by making available web compatible tools, and by bringing through new innovative features and offers. This strategy actually is not so new. A kind of hidden feature of O2 Litmus is that you do not actually have to upload a native mobile application to be featured in the Litmus catalogue. It is possible to publish a simple URL to your web service which is then sent via SMS to the customers phone.

As mobile browsers become more sophisticated, I predict a huge increase in browser based services for mobile. The browser environment brings two key benefits:

1. It increases the appeal of the mobile opportunity to the web developer community, and brings to ubiquity of the web to mobile
2. It help address some of the fragmentation issues developers face, as you do not have to pick a mobile operating system to write a native app for.

O2 Joggler - SDK now available on O2 Litmus

To use the URL feature, sign into O2 Litmus with a valid developer account. Click on “My Apps” on the Litmus toolbar, then pick ”launch an app” . Complete the required fields for the publication process, simply inputting your web address in the ”Enter your URL” field, rather than uploading native app files.

Building on this diversification we have made available the SDK for the O2 Joggler device, representing a new category of connected home devices. O2 is very keen to tap into developer innovation to drive forward the Joggler story.

 An accompanying Joggler SDK FAQ has also been published, and feel free to ask anything that is not covered.

Finally, we have confirmed our first batch of sponsorships for 2010. I’d encourage you to check out these events and support them:

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

It was pointed out via Twitter that the Operator should concentrate on delivering a great pipe. I’d like to think we can bring more to the table than the pipe, but on reflection I should have included the delivery of a world class network as one of the assumptions listed in Part 1.

Before I move onto the role of Customer Services, the interest in the marketing discussion justifies a little more attention. Last week we announced that, uniquely, O2 Litmus has started a marketing campaign to promote the Litmus Developer community to 1 million of O2 UK’s consumer customers.

This coupled with the instigation of the O2 Litmus “App of the week”, where we promote an app across our social media channels, has hopefully raised the bar in terms of an Operator’s commitment to increasing the profile of 3^rd Party Developer offerings with its customers.

Throughout November 2009 we will contact 50,000 select O2 UK customers per day inviting them to participate in O2 Litmus via a personalised email invitation, with a competition incentive for completing registration.

The sample group of customers have been carefully selected based on a number of criteria including handset ownership, usage of mobile data services, and the customer segment they sit in. We will of course update at the end of the campaign, but the initial results are very encouraging. Our registered customer base has increased 28.5% over the first 7 days of the campaign. To maximise cut through we are also sending a follow up SMS message to all customers that successfully received the email but did not open it within a predefined timeframe.

A great example of the “hidden” value that this kind of exercise can deliver is we have discovered an existing O2 UK customer that has participated in beta testing for Microsoft products, and has agreed to become an O2 Litmus admin to help us support and engage the fledgling Litmus community.

To provide you with some insight into the high quality of the Litmus community, here are some interesting facts and stats about the registered customer base ahead of the start of our current marketing campaign:

• Impressive levels of previous testing experience amongst the target audience, from websites, phones and software through to novels and cosmetics.
• 59% of O2 Litmus customers are Pay Monthly Consumers
• Over half (53%) of the Pay Monthly customers on O2 Litmus are on £35+ a month tariffs
• O2 Litmus members have a tenure of over 20% longer compared to a typical O2 consumer customer
• O2 Litmus customers have higher Voice, SMS and data usage than a typical O2 consumer customer
• 38% of O2 Litmus members use over 10Mb of mobile data per month
• There is a higher Male bias amongst O2 Litmus customers (66%) compared to the overall O2 consumer customer base.
• Customers going for O2 Litmus tend to be aged between 18 and 45, with 32% falling between 26 and 35.
• From registration data, there is a very diverse handset ownership pattern in the membership base. The Nokia 6300 is the most common handset in the member base, but only represents 6%  base share

Hopefully this data reinforces the high quality of the customer resource that we have made available to our Developer partners for testing and co-creation. They represent the cream of O2’s consumer base, and more importantly they have opted in to participate with O2 Litmus, indicating their willingness to be hands on, if the right apps and services come through.

As a refresher to Part 1, I explored the marketing support a Mobile Operator can bring to the table in answer to the question: “What role does the Mobile Operator have to play in the Developer ecosystem?”

Now on to the second part of the answer: Customer Service.

The world of mobile apps is still a very scary place for the average consumer.

Our consumer research tells us that trust and reassurance in times of trouble is the number 1 deal breaker for consumers getting involved in Developer programs.

Customers are fiercely protective of their personal data, and do not want to be spammed by Developers promoting apps to them. There is a clear role for a trusted middle man to “referee” the interactions of the community to ensure all parties are comfortable and respected.

Secondly the risks of beta testing unproven software are not clear in customer’s minds. There is a lack of understanding if software can damage their handset, corrupt or lose their personal data, or introduce viruses and other malware. Therefore having the confidence that a trusted brand is there providing a safety net is a huge value add to unlocking the vast potential of customer led innovation.

Who is best placed in the App ecosystem to step in to address these consumer concerns?

I would argue there is only one kind of organisation that operates in the value chain that can bring the necessary Customer Service competences to the table; experience, investment, infrastructure, backed with a trusted brand: The Mobile Operators.

Also, importantly, the Mobile Operator can take a more agnostic approach in supporting the high degrees of fragmentation in the market. Operators support multiple device manufacturers and operating systems as a business as usual activity.

Customer Service provision is costly and complex, and not for the fainthearted. It is unsurprising that other players in the ecosystem have, to date, avoided providing the required consumer safety net that is so important to unlock the value in this nascent market.

Of course it is a broad statement to say Mobile Operators can step up to this challenge. Execution is an entirely different thing. Already there is big variation in the levels of service provided by Mobile Operators around the world, and many Operators are already struggling to face up to the significant  challenges of moving from supporting voice networks and billing, to supporting data services, laptops, smart phones, IPTV and other advanced services.

However I maintain that the Operators are in the best position to exploit this opportunity, should they choose to compared to the other organisations in the ecosystem.

As I have already stated, the Mobile Operators have the foundations in place to do this, and more than anyone else, they will be impacted by the move to 3^rd party apps, regardless of their own in house Customer Service strategy, as more and more of their customers use open internet access to experiment with new non Operator services.

The simple question is then; if this is going to happen anyway, why not turn this into an opportunity by differentiating through service and delivering a unique selling point for their organisation in the industry. By getting this right it unlocks the commercial opportunity for the entire value chain.

With the support wrap in place, customers will increase their experimental behaviour, driving adoption of smart phone devices, usage of apps, usage on the network, and build an engaged audience that advertisers are looking for, thus driving value for all stakeholders.

It’s clear that Mobile Operators have a poor reputation in the Developer community, much of this negative sentiment due to their historical behaviour and an irritating habit of over promising and under delivering.

I suspect many Mobile Operators move into this space with the best of intentions, but the day to day challenges of big companies get in the way,like changing management priorities and reorganisations disrupting both the teams running the Developer programs, and their corporate sponsors. I think another important factor is they still think like Telco’s and not like a software company.

We conducted a comprehensive Developer research project from across the world over the summer. A typical quote was:

“I still don’t ‘get’ why Operators even have development communities – all the information we require for development comes from the Apple Dev site for iPhone, Microsoft sites for WM, Symbian / Forum Nokia for S60 etc”

Common problems cited from trying to work with Mobile Operators were:

• The Operator is greedy. They either charge too much for APIs, or take too much revenue share.
• The “ecosystem” is as important as the customer – Developers feel unappreciated
• Too much focus on mobile apps / widgets (on device apps), need to focus on PC and communication / network services.
• Lack of direct customer access
• Lack of timely technical support
• Lack of clarity on processes
• Lack of flexibility in experimenting with business models
• Lack of clarity on purpose of Operator development communities
• Lack of test phones
• Operator specific APIs put too much risk on Developers
• Difficult to determine if an ROI is possible
• Device fragmentation remains unaddressed by Operators
• APIs in silos – need integrated framework
• Too many communities – Operators should partner with device communities, providing APIs. Device communities are far easier to work with.

I will attempt to address these concerns in future posts, and share additional insights from our research, but initially in a three part post I will expand on the arguments I used at the recent Mobile 2.0 Silicon Valley conference to tackle the over arching question: “What role does the Mobile Operator have to play in the Developer ecosystem?”

 Firstly two assumptions:

1. No Mobile Operator should assume they have a birth right to play in this space. Apple has shown that a flourishing Developer community can be created without the cooperation or permission of the Mobile Operator community.
2. If you are an Operator reading this, you have already made some level of investment to open up API’s and provide basic Developer support and encouragement.

It is vital that Mobile Operators take a step back and assess the unique assets and knowledge they can bring to the party. Just offering “me too” API’s, which themselves contribute to a key industry problem – fragmentation, is going to do nothing to address the perception problem of Operators “just not getting it”

So, with this pause for thought, what are the current issues facing both Developers and the nascent apps and mobile data industry? Secondly, if we can identify those challenges, what can a Mobile Operator do to help, if anything?

Part 1: Marketing Support

The over riding thing we hear back from Developers time and time again, is help me make money. We are in the middle of the current trend for launching App Stores, but 99% of these stores are simply retail environments.

In this situation the Developer is reliant on download counts, user ratings, and comments to drive their positioning & prominence in these stores. Whilst community endorsement of the apps and services within a store is absolutely essential, it should not be the only method to drive visibility for the Developer. Data from September quoted 85,000 apps for the iPhone in the iTunes Store alone. So how does a Developer stand out from the crowd?

Spotify famously drove it’s own PR campaign ahead of receiving approval for it’s iPhone app from Apple, building pressure on the store owner to accredit their app, and also helping to build user anticipation ahead of launch. However these tactics, even if they largely leverage free mediums like social media, are out of the question for smaller software houses because they just don’t have the brand equity of a Spotify to stand out in the noise of the market.

Gambling your business’s potential on a user generated star rating seems risky to say the least. That view was backed up by the VC panel at Mobile 2.0. Only GetJar currently seems to understand and address this problem from within their own version of the App Store model. They offer Developers an advertising package which effectively mimics Google Adsense. Developers bid to promote their apps on GetJar’s store and only pay an advertising fee when someone downloads their app.

Most Mobile Operators are pretty effective marketing machines. There is a huge latent opportunity to utilize the weapons in the Operators marketing armory to help support the Developer community.

Of course there are always a million and one things that Operators want to push to their customer base each month. How realistic is it to expect a product manager to sacrifice their customer messages so the Operator can promote a 3^rd party application instead?

Key to success is effective segmentation of the customer base to ensure you hit the right type of customer with the right kind of message. Identification of customers that may be interested in experimenting with apps can be deuced from a mix of the demographic and behavioral data available to the Operator.

Indicators like the type of phone the customer owns, their usage of mobile internet services, their consumption of premium content, and their demographic information can be layered to build up a target audience profile which can be tested with Developer related marketing communications. When we launched O2 Litmus in January 2009, even a fairly rudimentary profiling of the audience lead to a dramatic uplift in the performance of the campaign verses a standard “blanket” direct email campaign. The Litmus campaign delivered a 24% email open rate.

If direct customer communications remain challenging, increasingly Mobile Operators are embracing Social Media as an opportunity to engage their customers in conversation. A quick, and non scientific, scan provides the following data:

Sample Mobile Operator Social Media Accounts:

These emerging channels represent a growing opportunity to promote the Developer’s wares to a switched on digital audience who will be receptive to the message, and peers via the Developer community specific accounts. Currently, there is also less internal competition to use these channels compared to traditional channels controlled by the Operator. At O2 Litmus we are now promoting an “App of the week” on the O2 Litmus Twitter account to help support our Developers.

Finally another huge area of differential and value add a Mobile Operator can bring to the ecosystem is the effective use of its retail footprint. Unlike many of the other non Telco Developer communities, Operators can leverage physical retail stores and a face to face relationship with end users / customers.

Today’s reality is the retail footprint is mostly utilised for selling standard tariffs and handsets and customer service, but there is no reason to not consider creating a “store within a store” environment to promote 3^rd party apps and services. On the Mobile 2.0 panel I described a shopper experience of walking into a store, placing your phone onto a Microsoft Surface table and flicking app’s onto your handset to try out. That step alone could revolutionise the sector by bring apps into the physical, mainstream, world.

In part 2 I’ll discuss customer service, and the opportunity for Operators to step up to provide the support wrap around the world of apps.