My own private MWC... hectic days!

Back to the core of MWC week, here are my notes on my own personal experiences

Monday 11th

Monday was hectic, it started with a meeting with Bala Balabaskaran, VP of products of Schakra Inc, a Redmond based company that has started using BlueVia APIs. It was great to speak with a guy with his experiece and also motivating when he praised BlueVia.com because of having a proper business proposition. Please, find the link to its Case Study

GoGoStat Connect Case Study

View more documents from BlueVia

Then I headed to a panel at Telecom TV with a very motivating title "Applications: is it already game over for telecom operators". I joined Emma Mohr McClune, Research Director at Current Analysys and Erik de Kroon, VP of Devices and Products at WAC. Funny to see how they put my name in the video... Spanish names are a pain for foreigners :-)... I'm Jose A. Valles Nunez, Jose Valles to make it simpler... don't play with my name, please! :-)

And, with no time, rushing to see WAC keynote including our COO Julio Linares. It was good to have the chance, finally, to meet Peters Shuh, WAC CEO and meet my former boss there, Yotam Ben Ami, currently CFO and CSO at WAC. WAC is hitting their milestones but still have a long and tough way to become a success. They count with our support at Telefonica!

And to finish the day what's better than a party. I headed to the Mobile Premier Awards organized at the building of Telefonica R&D, that by the way is impressive, and also had the chance to meet Andreas Constantinou, who thinks really big in the Telco evolution to 2.0.

Tuesday 12th

On top of lots of different meetings I have to highlight two things:

First the discussions on how to speed up GSMA activities in OneAPI. I hope something good will come from there

Second an Analysts round the table, that was a good termometer of what is about to happen with BlueVia. Let's see what they write but the first reactions were really possitive.

Wednesday 13th

This was probably the hardest day but also the most exciting. On top of lot's of meetings starting at 8am, I want to highlight the meeting we had with Alan Quayle. it's always enriching to talk to Alan, his broad view of the telecom industry and like for details makes every meeting a learning session. Also a meeting with the team running Forum Nokia represented a chance to see, first hand, one of the most influencial orgs in developer engagement... Some chit chat on WP7 announcement couldn't be avoided, of course!

And finally, almost exhausted, headed to WIP Jam Carnival of Nations to see James bum bum Parton playing drums (or that's what he wanted) and the chance to meet Jason Silva, founder of JBBMobile Inc who left this great quote for the future... And we hope he'll start working with BlueVia soon!

Thursday 14th

After some meetings, thanks God, back home. Funny and disgusting when I opened the the door and my 19 month old daughter run away.... Not good to be so long far from family.

I hope next year we can bring 20 developers with us showing cool stuff done using BlueVia APIs!

Special thanks to Arturo Garrido, CEO of Twitea.me and Bala Balabaskaran, VP of products at Schakra Inc. for their collaboration spreading BlueVia message at MWC. And also to Carlos Domingo for this nice piece at TechCrunch Europe



Next year more

Jose Valles
@josevalles49

My experience at MWC 2011... the warm up

This year has been a special one. Finally we got to launch BlueVia.com and that gave us the chance to talk about this fantastic story to tell. However, despite what everybody could be expecting, we decided not to make any big statement, event at the MWC zoo. We know that we have still a long way to walk and prefer to keep working grass-rooted, directly with developers and ISVs until we gain speed, demonstrating that our value proposition for developers makes sense and works. But the warm welcome and what has been said really deserves a few lines.

Thursday 10th

This year MWC started a few days before for us. On Wednesday James Parton (@jamesparton), Head of Marketing BlueVia briefed UK press on BlueVia public release and in Thursday I did it with the Spanish one. So Thursday was a special day as we had all the press covering the story (see Press Release). Some pieces are:

Light Reading: "Telefonica shows developers the money"

Cinco Días: "Telefonica tienta a los desarrolladores con un nuevo reparto de ingresos"

Telecom TV: "Telefonica consolidates its app developer grooming effort"

Following what was said a few weeks before when we released our closed beta:

Intomobile: "launched a developer platform called BlueVia that’s just about the most innovative thing I’ve seen come out of the backwards telecommunications market since ringback tones"

Telco 2.0: "We believe that the thinking behind BlueVia is a major step in the right direction for the telecoms industry. One that other operators should emulate, and fast"

This is just a sample but shows the interest generated. Said that, the reality is that we need to demonstrate all that with delivery, delivery, delivery...

Friday 11th

Friday was a cool day, we announced the first four services using our APIs and demostrates the multiplatform approach makes sense.

Otter app, an android app
GogoStat, a WP7 app
Test Deck, a Mac app
Twitea.me, a service to tweet using SMS

And also we had the chance to have Sam Ramji (@sramji) in Telefonica's premises to explain how APIs are changing the way brands get connected to their customers. Following I explained how BlueVia can change the way we enhance our customers lives and also Arturo Garrido (@arturogarrido), CEO & Founder of Twitea.me explained how BlueVia is leveraging its Business Proposition and helping him to spread his service to other countries.

It was fun to share stage with Arturo and Sam


BlueVia evangelises API’s to Telefonica’s leadership team from BlueVia on Vimeo.




Saturday 12th

I arrived to Barcelona on Saturday because I was invited to by Stefan Rust (@srust99) and the Exicon crew to participate at the Qtel Innovation Forum. It was a great chance to see first hand the things that Qtel is thinking on deploying in their footprint.

To congratulate for the panel on MCommerce and mobile payments. Very thoughtful

About the part I was in, of course, Apps business, I shared a panel with actually a sample of all the ecosystem, from developers, Android, WAC, aggregators and, of course, a telco. It was cool to see the warm reaction of everybody to the approach of Telefonica through BlueVia and their willingness to collaborate in our challenge. Lot's of follow ups to be done

Sunday 13th

A part from meetings the whole day, it was cool to get to the first event of the MWC: Mobile Sunday Barcelona. I had the chance to meet with great people and friends of BlueVia like Caroline Lewko (@carolineWIP), Carles Ferrero and Rudy de Waele (@mtrends), these are people you should follow as are very representative in this new economy of apps and APIs


There are lot's of things I saw and enjoyed and then headed early to sleep as MWC week was about to start and the rithm expected was frenetic... and I promise it was.

I´ll write some more notes here on MWC plus the full story of the BlueVia crew at MWC to be published at www.Bluevia.com/blog

I hope you enjoyed this warm up.

Jose Valles
@josevalles49

The APIconomy growth in the retailer space: what about Europe and LatAm?

Yesterday I came across this article of a florist company offering an API to allow developers to ingest in their apps its flowers offer. They have a simple incentive for the usage of the API: they pay a 22% commission on flowers sales. Simple, straight forward and bloody brilliant.

We are already familiar with big consumer brands in the US taking this step forward. Tesco, Best Buy or Sears offering APIs with a different grade of maturity or commercial thinking but having something out there that others can use to create, out of the blue, a totally new way for those brands to engage with their customers. This recalls me more and more to the Business Darwin evolution shown by Sam Ramji in his Darwin's finches talk

But what about Europe and Latin America? Are there commercial brands already exposing APIs to generate a new "evolved" sales channel?

I'd love to have companies like Zara, El Corte Ingles, Harrods and others exposing APIs and enriching this new business space. I hope the Old Europe and the Promising LatAm react soon on this new space for competition/growth and this won't be, once again, a train that passes by without having us in.

If there are some examples out there, happy to hear about them

J