Features

Orange woos software writers with its first Code Camp in France

Code Camp has kicked off in the Futuroscope centre near Poitiers, France, with Orange dedicating itself to avoid the road of price discounting, and determined to "go down the road of value add" - by wooing software developers.

Vice-President Richard Hanscott, in charge of partners, welcomed two hundred and fifty developers from as far away as Australia, as well as several European countries. All being given their sleeping bags, their overnight kit, and being sent, perhaps courageously, up to the tents on the roof of the code camp centre

Why? Because developers don't love operators, said Hanscott. "We did the focus groups. What we heard: that mobile operators are difficult to get in touch with, too many people to talk to, many mixed platforms, quite a mixed bag of commercial deals and ways of operating. It sounded like quite a nightmare."

The code camp grew out of that. There it is Orange's plan to have developers all network together, and get to grips with what Orange hopes to achieve with its Orange Partner community, announced back in Java One.

Hanscott said the partner program was: "A new journey for us."

"I think the mobile industry is at the beginning of quite a revolution," he said. "All mobile companies are looking at a stark choice; we're seeing pressure on margins; and there's a risk of going down the road of price discounting. The other road is customer intimacy, to service customers with more value added options."

That's the journey Orange has decided to take, he said: "but we can't do it we don't have the resources. That's why we've turned to the developer community to take advantage of those resources."

He was supported by Nokia's Matti Vanska, director of Operator Accounts Technology Platforms, who was launching the "Series 60 Challenge" - aiming to find up to twenty "most enticing applications" using Orange WCDMA, Series 60, Symbian, and launch them.

Vanska said that he would be making resources available through the Orange developer program.

Vanska quoted figures: for example game Alpha Wing from Macrospace had 1.2m downloads in the first year; 15% of which, he said, were to Nokia Series 60 phones. Given the tiny market share of those phones, he pointed out, it was logical to deduce that smartphone users were more likely to download applications.