Hi,
That could be quite a philosophical discussion :-)
I presume "we" are "telcos", and you could say that we have ownership of some distinct capabilities like:
- A strongly authenticated connection via a SIM card and GSMA crypto
- An ongoing billing relationship (pre/post-pay, products & services etc)
- We always know where our connected devices are
How we exploit these via API's is a very sensitive topic. I think the best mindset is to consider each API as a distinct standalone commercial "product" that has to compete with market equivalents from OTT players. As such, you could iterate around the classic "
Four P's of the Marketing Mix":
- Product: Consider the functionality, design, ease of use, documentation, quality (eg: accuracy of location) as competitive product attributes. For example:
- Are you going to require your customers to sign an NDA, download a WSDL, get an SSL certificate, pass a test-suite etc - or just let them self-register on a portal, get an API-key and try out the API in a sandbox/live environment?
- Is your location API going to return a lat/lon, or a { street, town, city, region, country} name. What would be most useful to your target audience? What does the equivalent Google API do?
- Price: Are you going to charge per API invocation, based on perceived value to the customer, or as part of a wider freemium/entanglement model? Maybe the first 10-100-1000 calls/day are free?
- Place: A bit of a stretch in the context of APIs, but are you hosting the basic API yourself, or bundling/partnering/branding it with others (eg: the location of a dog-collar, a fleet vehicle..). Would it appear as a telco-API on a telco-portal or elsewhere, with the telco-API behind the scenes (B2B)?
- Promotion: Are you posting this on ProgrammableWeb? Writing a Blog about its launch and uses, an article in Wired, getting coders with Klout to talk about it etc. Are you going to run a competition for the best use?
That would be my starting point. You might have the most accurate location API in the world, but if it needs an NDA, SSL, returns a SOAP payload with lat/lon, and costs €1/call, no-one will be interested. Once you have a "competitive product" it will be a lot easier to inspire use.
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Stephen Harrop
Vodafone Group
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-10-2017 14:27
From: Erik Meijer
Subject: business models with OTT players
How do we incorporate our api s (ID, PAYMENT LOCATION ETC) in new business Models with OTT players or e.g. smart City solutions
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Erik Meijer
Deutsche Telekom AG
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