Vcast store finally destroys walled garden at Verizon

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Vcast store finally destroys walled garden at Verizon

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 29 July, 2009

READ MORE: Verizon

Verizon's Q2 results, announced this week, highlighted the importance of the wireless joint venture with Vodafone to the carrier's growth - but also that the unit needs to grasp back some of the momentum in new businesses from its competitors. Right on cue, Verizon Wireless came up with a series of announcements geared to new revenue streams in the emerging world of the mobile cloud and open web services. As well as its M2M venture with Qualcomm, it hosted its first developer conference, showing off the Vcast application store and throwing open the doors to its traditionally tightly guarded network. "Our future success is no longer in the walled garden," Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam told the developers gathered in Silicon Valley.

The Vcast app store will launch in the fourth quarter, like Vodafone's revamped storefront - the partners, along with China Mobile and Softbank of Japan, are using the same widgets framework to offer developers as large a potential market as the vendor platforms like App Store. McAdam said its store will offer programmers quick and simple tools and distribution channels to generate revenue from their apps, and would showcase their wares effectively with a new approach to the user interface, designed to make it easier for consumers to discover and buy software and content. This will build on the existing Verizon Web portal, which the carrier says is one of the 26 most visited sites on the web and has 60m registered users.

"It's a new day [in wireless]," McAdam said in his keynote and webcast to developers. "Our success is tied to you." He stressed the advantages that carriers stores - as opposed to those from device or software makers like Apple, Microsoft and Google - bring to programmers, notably access to mobile subscribers and their personal data and preferences, plus a familiar billing platform. Like Vodafone, the US cellco is creating open APIs to allow developers to hook into Verizon's billing system, to support one-click purchasing, and into other subscriber platforms within the network, such as location-based services, presence, and messaging.

Another important lure to developers will be a rapid and transparent approval process. Verizon says it aims to have most apps approved and loaded within 14 days and there will be particularly rapid certification of products that have already been through the process for a store belonging to a Verizon partner, such as RIM App World. As in Apple App Store, developers get 70% of revenues.

Verizon Wireless already generates over $1bn a year from selling apps, said VP of marketing John Stratton, via its old-style store, based on Qualcomm's Brew content framework. This will now be extended to a wide range of devices and to open web services frameworks and open access policies. He told CNet: " Our concern as we move from the monolithic Brew platform for featurephones to one that is pretty wide open for smartphones, is that there is a greater risk of fragmentation. We don't think that Verizon will solve all the challenges of fragmentation, but we do believe we can help."