inbabble.com

Mobile applications developers need to make friends with mobile carriers if they want to have any customers. On Friday we spoke with Jeff Black, founder of TalkPlus, about their mobile telephony application. Today he told us what changes he’d like to see in the relationships between carriers and developers.

How are you able to maintain good relationships with mobile carriers?
Black: Mobile carriers like what we are doing, since TalkPlus brings more flexibility to the mobile phone, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and driving more minute usage. TalkPlus has the ability to add additional lines to a mobile phone, so that your phone can have dedicated business and personal lines. This means that businesspeople can better serve customers, doctors can better serve patients, and legal professionals can better serve clients. The carriers are very excited about this.

Do you believe that the mobile telecom industry will become more dominated by mobile applications and less dependent on mobile carriers?
Black: Mobile carriers are going to fight intensely to maintain their favorable position in this industry; it will be very difficult to shift the power structure elsewhere. Intelligent players are finding ways to work with carriers, as TalkPlus is. We have a number of interesting plans in discussion with carriers. With that said, I do believe that mobile subscribers should have the freedom to load any application on their mobile phone as long as it does not violate any local laws or damage the carrier’s networks.

What technological changes would you like to see in the mobile realm?
Black: From a technological point of view, I’d love to see more open APIs that allow 3rd party applications to look into the native phone book for information. I’d also like to have the ability to create new fields of information in the native phone book that will allow software providers to add functionality to existing phones.

What changes in carrier policies would you like to see?
Black: Open Decks would allow a level playing field. Anyone building mobile applications should be allowed to list their application as long as they don’t harm (i.e., a quantifiable “harm”) the network. Open Billing would allow applications providers to use the carriers as a billing agent. These rates should be in line with credit card companies and the like, around 5%. Early Contract Cancellation without Penalty should be allowed by anyone cancels their contract due to a carrier blocking their favorite application. In other words, if I want TalkPlus on my phone and a specific carrier says, “NO”, then I should be able to cancel my contract with that carrier and move to another carrier where the application is available.

And regulatory changes?
Black: The government should institute “carrier prohibition periods” for anytime a carrier terminates a mobile company’s products from their deck. In other words, no carrier should be allowed to cancel a download agreement (e.g., a software backup application) expressly for the purposes of launching a competing product on their deck. This has been done by carriers in the past. They have stated that something was bad for the network and simply killed the product, yet months later, they introduced their own version of the application. If a carrier allows a small company to build a new market (i.e., revenue stream) on their network and they cancel their contract for any reason, then they should be restricted from entering the same market for a 24 month period.

Will platforms and handsets become more standardized in the near future?
Black: It would be great to see more standardization of operating systems and APIs, but we don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.

Do you expect that mobile carriers will move to unlimited data plans, just as most Internet service providers have?
Black: Mobile carriers will likely resist the pressure to move to unlimited data plans for as long as possible, since data is a profitable business, there are network constraints, and opening up unlimited plans can have the effect of people wanting to download or stream large files, such as video. The network is not to the level yet that you can have the average consumer downloading large files on a regular basis without experiencing severe performance constraints. That said, Apple’s iPhone is helping the industry move in this direction. It will be interesting to see how that works out.

Michael M.