| Please register to receive the benefits of our network-wide features. |
Register (free) |
Log In
|
| Please register to receive the benefits of our network-wide features. |
Register (free) |
Log In
|
The last five years in telephony have been nothing short of a bombshell for the incumbent telecommunications companies. Dr. Norman Lewis of France Telecom, believes that the telcos have no one to blame but themselves and their own business models.
Lewis refers to many blunders made in recent years, such as the way most phone companies handled their implementation of 3G wireless services. Billions were spent to create WAP, a Web experience on the mobile phone that was too slow and cumbersome for most users. Instead, mobile phone customers turned to SMS text messaging as a primary communications channel, a move Dr. Lewis believes no business analyst predicted ahead of the phenomenon.
In this keynote address to the telephony developer community, Lewis explains why a company with billions in voice related revenue at stake finds it so hard to innovate on voice related applications. He outlines some of what France Telecom, recently rebranded as Orange, is doing to meet the needs of Web 2.0 developers. And he invites the developer community to explore Orange's new API for a new personalization application called the Octave platform.
Norman Lewis is the director of Technology Research for the Home Division of France Telecom. Prior to this he was the director of Technology Research at Wanadoo U.K. (formerly Freeserve). He is a member of the Executive Board of the Communications Futures Program at MIT, a global research partnership between industry and six different MIT labs.
Prior to joining Freeserve, Lewis was the head of research at web integration firm cScape Ltd. He has acted as a consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organization on issues related to the digital divide. He remains a member of the International Telecommunications Union’s TELECOM Forum Committee.
Dr. Lewis holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Sussex, U.K. Before going into the private sector, he lectured at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Sussex. He still lectures to the M.B.A. program for visiting Chinese post-graduate students and senior civil servants at the Institute for Higher and Continuing Education, Oxford University. He is writing a book with leading U.K. sociologist Professor Frank Furedi on the subject of digital children and their encounter with innovation in a risk-averse culture.
Resources
This free podcast is from our O'Reilly Media Emerging Telephony Conference series.
For The Conversations Network:
Play