With the Traveling Geeks @ Orange

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 2 mai 2010 - 3 commentaires -

This is the last part of my report of the Tra­ve­ling Geeks tour in Paris before Leweb.

We met with Orange to have a glimpse of all the solu­tions they pro­vide to their consu­mer cus­to­mers: IPTV, mobile solu­tions, web solu­tions, tablets, etc. It took place in the Orange Lab situa­ted at Cha­tillon, in the sou­thern Paris suburb.

We were quite well wel­co­med by mar­ke­ting, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and pro­duct folks in their sho­wroom, inclu­ding Sté­pha­nie Hos­pi­tal (Mar­ke­ting and Biz­dev VP in the Audience and Adver­ti­zing Divi­sion, in bet­ween the gee­kettes below) and Eric Barilland (Elec­tro­nic Medias Directors).

Tele­com com­pa­nies, par­ti­cu­larly those offe­ring triple-play solu­tions to their consu­mers, are willing to offer as inte­gra­ted solu­tions as pos­sible. Orange is not an excep­tion and is favo­ring ver­ti­cal inte­gra­tion of its solu­tions, while still wor­king on deve­lo­ping an eco­sys­tem of third party solu­tions. What’s inter­es­ting is they don’t men­tion the star­tups they use to source most of their ser­vices, whe­ther soft­ware or hard­ware. They pre­fer to men­tion stra­te­gic part­ner­ships with powe­rhouses like Cisco, Micro­soft, Face­book or Intel. It’s even quite dif­fi­cult to iden­tify what’s insour­ced and out­sour­ced in these various solu­tions. Although Orange (aka France Tele­com) has put in place an “open inno­va­tion” pro­cess, it doesn’t show up enough in the way they com­mu­ni­cate about it.

They struc­ture their mar­ke­ting in quar­terly “col­lec­tions” gathe­ring all new hard­ware, soft­ware and web ser­vices. Many of these are now intro­du­ced in a fast-track pro­cess bran­ded “TTM” for “Time To Mar­ket”. The latest col­lec­tion, for Novem­ber 2009, is des­cribe here. It’s a good way to struc­ture their mes­sages and sequence media soli­ci­ta­tions, but they still have such a broad offe­ring that you can easily get lost.

So, what did we see in the Orange Lab showroom?

Hard­ware solutions

• Their new Live­Box intro­du­ced in spring 2009, a DSL modem to serve their 12 mil­lion world­wide broad­band cus­to­mers (1st in Europe, includes 5m IPTV cus­to­mers). Sup­ports Wifi 802.11n, has 4 Ether­net ports, sup­ports both ADSL and FTTH, front but­tons to activate/desactivate Wifi, and to connect Wifi devices without using WEP keys and UPnP/DLNA support.
• Their new IPTV set-top-box, with the same look than the DSL modem, a consis­tency rarely seen in the telco space. It has a media cen­ter fea­ture enabling access to the content from your home net­work devices (DLNA com­pa­tible). It’s an hybrid box sup­por­ting both IPTV and DVB-T (ter­res­trial digi­tal TV) or DVB-S (satel­lite TV, to show-up in 2010), all in HD. It has an embed­ded PVR (per­so­nal video recor­der) of 160 Gb that is exten­sible through an exter­nal USB drive. Orange wants to go beyond Yahoo’s wid­gets vision with more inte­gra­tion bet­ween TV chan­nels and Inter­net wid­gets and appli­ca­tions. They pro­vide deve­lo­pers with their own APIs to do so, with some sup­port of Open IPTV Forum and of the new hbbtv consor­tium APIs. Their EPG (elec­tro­nic pro­gram guide) for catch up is howe­ver quite sim­plis­tic, with no shows book­mar­king or list. The UI is that of old gene­ra­tion STBs. You’ll have to wait till they release in about a year their Intel based STB, sup­por­ting ani­ma­ted user inter­faces. Their “time machine” contains four weeks of shows his­tory. After­wards, it’s “VOD” with a cata­log of 4000 movies. Things can easily get confu­sing bet­ween PVR, catch-up and VOD. You got to know that non-movies stuff has to be recor­ded or wat­ched in catch-up mode, while movies can be played through the three mecha­nisms. The first being the less expen­sive since inclu­ded in the 30 Euros/month sub­scrip­tion. Movies catch-up is pri­ced at 12€ per month and VOD is on a pay per view mode. They did show us Orange Sport, an IPTV appli­ca­tion for wat­ching sports events, with rich content around the TV stream (below).

• A 3G Wifi router/modem to be used in regions with no DSL, using a 3G connec­tion and SIM card.

• The Tab­bee, a tablet posi­tio­ned as a secon­dary home TV, bathroom tablet, digi­tal pic­ture frame. Uses Wifi to connect to DSL broad­band rou­ter. Built by Sagem and using Linux and some inter­nal (?) midd­le­ware. It’s ship­ped for 250 Euros with a couple appli­ca­tions inclu­ding “Cooki­neo” for get­ting cooking recipes. Cooki­nero is a ser­vice built by Domo­lib, a Pari­sian star­tup incu­ba­ted by Agoranov.

They also show­case a small Hi-Fi Deco­der, used to stream music in any room, for 69€. It’s not lin­ked to a par­ti­cu­lar ser­vice. You connect it to your ampli­fier and control it with a flat remote.

Orange web sites

Orange chose a while ago to run its own consu­mer web ser­vices. I still won­der how they could suc­ceed with these besides a couple excep­tions. They laun­ched Pikeo for pic­tures sha­ring but it hardly com­petes, even in France, with Fli­ckr or Picasa. Many of these web sites are telco neu­tral, mea­ning any­body can use it and not just consu­mers with a Live­box. How can a ver­ti­cally inte­gra­ted player become signi­fi­cant as a hori­zon­tal player? No idea.

They pre­sen­ted a couple new web sites recently laun­ched or cur­rently in beta:

• videoparty.fr is a catch-up and video on demand web site. Some contents are free (such as music clips), VOD is on a pay per view for any­body, and some contents are exclu­sive for Orange cus­to­mers. You can search pro­grams, get some recom­men­da­tions, share with friends what you like, orga­nize a video party, open it to everybody.
• tendancesanté.fr is a heal­th­care site aimed at mothers. Orange is part­ne­ring with the paper maga­zine “Santé Maga­zine” to get content. They’ll launch a rela­ted mobile appli­ca­tion for the iPhone early in 2010. This com­petes with the local lea­der, Doc­tis­simo. I heard about the Heal­th­care busi­ness at Orange not really doing well. A mar­ket dif­fi­cult to penetrate.
• City­vox is a city guide Orange has acqui­red in 2008. The site is popu­lar and there is a lot of com­pe­ti­tion in that space.
• 2424actu.fr is a video and radio news aggre­ga­tion web site show­ca­sing in its home page the most impor­tant news. Then, you can access the most rele­vant video/audio and all others. Orange has made deals with local news pro­vi­ders (TV, radio, news agen­cies like AFP) so all the content is legit. Obviously, it’s got a search engine, and it can search text in audio. It does face and voice recog­ni­tion. Content can be rated by vie­wers, pos­ted as links to social net­works. It would be good to have such a tool in IPTV set-top-boxes and to use it with a remote.

The Orange team also pre­sen­ted “On”, their new mobile social net­work hub. It’s avai­lable free of charge to all mobiles regard­less of the car­rier. Sup­port starts with Android and will come to iPhone, Black­ber­ries and others. It enables the mobile user to get their sta­tus and how to best contact his/her friends and send emails, SMS, voice mes­sages, mes­sages in social networks.

They men­tio­ned a wealth of other ser­vices, some being spe­ci­fic to other coun­tries where Orange ope­rates:  a part­ner­ship with wiki­pe­dia to enrich content sites (in Poland) inclu­ding ads sha­ring (quite new for Wiki­pe­dia), a Twit­ter deal in the UK.

At last, let’s men­tion the for­mal launch of App­Shop at Leweb. The Orange approach is without any sur­prise. All mobile plat­form are sup­por­ted besides the iPhone which has its own AppS­tore. Deve­lo­pers get their usual 70% share of revenues.

Tra­ve­ling Geeks Epilog

I should also men­tion that we had din­ner with folks from Mobile Globe on Sun­day eve­ning. This star­tup pro­vides a solu­tion to make cheap calls with your mobile when cal­ling abroad, whe­re­ver you come from.

The stay in Paris didn’t end with all these visits since we were toge­ther during Leweb. We went to par­ties, visi­ted the Paris City Hall and had din­ner. We sha­red views on Leweb, and I’ll cover that later.

The cli­max of these two days was Robert Scoble’s outing on those damn star­tups who didn’t have a Twit­ter account, but also a contact name in their web sites. And Eliane Fio­let who asked him to be nicer with the folks around the table. Robert explai­ned in details why he went nut during that mee­ting. Most of these rules make a lot of sense but it may be slightly dif­ferent when you sell “busi­ness to busi­ness” and don’t need a broad reach buzz.

Renee Blod­gett makes a sound contri­bu­tion in a com­ment for that post: there are many issues star­tups face and not just being or not on Twit­ter. There are many rules of the game that French star­tup don’t know, even within France, and there are many more when you want to sell in inter­na­tio­nal mar­kets. And not just in the USA. In Asia, cultu­ral dif­fe­rences and busi­ness habits are dif­ferent as well, and not the same as in the USA. You need to learn about it if you want to do busi­ness there. The French folks here should cer­tainly bet­ter learn all these rules ins­tead to trying to bent the rules, or to refuse it. Although extre­mely rude in its for­mat, Scoble’s point has had some impact on the visi­ted star­tup. They have lear­ned the hard way stuff they should do. Some just crea­ted a Twit­ter account!

But many star­tups make mis­takes, all over the world, and even in the US. To have a glimpse of these, just look at the KillerS­tar­tups site which pre­sents five news star­tups each and every day, mostly from the USA!

Other reports

Here are some other reports from the Tra­ve­ling Geeks on the two days Paris tour before Leweb:

• David Spark’s video reports of day 1.
• Tom Foremski’s “Put­ting French back into entre­pre­neur” and its wel­co­med posi­tive stance on entre­pre­neurs he met in Paris.
• Mathew Buck­land sum­ma­rizes the star­tups seen on day 2.
• Beth Ble­cher­man finds out that “Tra­ve­ling geeks like their gad­gets”.
• Kim-Mai Cut­ler writes on Pearl­trees and on Stribe.
• Ewan Spence has a per­so­nal retros­pec­tive of the tour.
• Renee Blod­gett writes about Pearl­trees.
• Sky writes on what it takes to manage the IT under­lyings of the TG tour.

And again, as a remin­der, my (nice) pic­tures from these three days on Picasa (Sun­day din­ner inclu­ded): day 1, day 2 and day 3.

Now I’m done with the TGs, I can move for­ward and cover Leweb…

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Digital media, France, Innovation, Internet, Médias, Post in English, TV et vidéo, Traveling Geeks | 3 commentaires