Yesterday, I attended the Verizon Open Developer Conference – an event that was attended by a lot of old friends in both the application and network operator spaces.

 

First of all, let me say that Verizon showed incredible desire to work with the community. Not only did the carrier come to Silicon Valley, but the telecom giant made its intentions clear on working collaboratively with the community to develop a library of APIs and not just a single network API.

 

Among the promises made were $100.000 in prize money and an incredible amount of advertising and promotion for six winning applications associated with various forms of applications.

 

Many of the developers were more interested in the promise of just being able to attach to the billing system and to have a reliable network. For some, the speed promise of LTE (said to be 15 MB down) was a driver for applications in the areas of gaming and video. That’s only logical, since some of the developers there had participated in the VCast Brew program past which accounts for more than 1.4 million downloads.

 

However, this was a commitment to a J2ME strategy that was being supported not only by Verizon, but also by China Mobile, RIM, Softbank and Vodafone.

 

The initial APIs include the ability to access messaging (mostly SMS in the demos I saw), location-based services and, of course, billing. All of this was good, but the issue for many developers was a desire for the API to be further abstracted and available via XML. Many of the support people in Verizon understood the requests, but it was also clear that this was not going to be part of this first release.

 

As for the need for an app store from Verizon as compared to the device manufacturers, Jim Basilie, co-CEO of RIM, made it clear that app stores should be considered as a distribution channel and for any application developer the more channels the better.

 

The intentions of Verizon are there, and I think it marks a commitment to support a more open network. If the walled garden is still there, doors and windows are being opened or created as we speak.

 

At 4GWE – an event collocated with the TMC-hosted ITEXPO West 2009 – we will have developers from the web centric side as well as the network operators discussing what makes a good app and a good store.