Mobile 2.0, Carlos Domingo, Director, Internet and Multimedia Lab, Telefonica: Open with care or care to open?

Revenue growth in traditional broadband and mobile is diminishing. New revenue sources are being collaborated over and fought over. Telcos can't capture any of the new growth using traditional methods.

The industry used to be a chess game (controlled and predictable). Now it's poker (living with uncertainty, requiring investment to see what happens next).

To get there we need a number of things:

• Open conversations with customers, "get naked"; be transparent on tariffs, billing, claims; have 2-way communication with customers; speak their language or risk a disconnect with them.
• Establish open innovation networks, work out how to collaborate with small companies, universities and large corps. For Telefonica they invested in Kyte, Loomia, Eventful, FestureTek and Amobee.
• Open innovation doesn't mean killing internal R&D. Get ideas from across the organisation.
• Open networks: become an open service platform to reach a long tail of developers. Telcos own lots of unique/useful assets: service delivery, call control, device access, infrastructure, SMS, QoS, identity, charging, location. Network resources are not the only interesting thing for developers. Knowing a customers social context is useful - imagine an API to tell you programatically if a customer is working or is at home.
• One API; we've loads of standardised APIs: OneAPI, Bondi, W3C, device/OS, network-specific.

But it's not enough to standardise: we need to be making money.