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Founded: 2008

O2 Litmus

O2 Litmus, is a new web-based platform for the initiation and development of new mobile applications – with a twist. Unlike many other operator-driven co-creation projects on the web, Litmus is not just about developing profitable ideas for the network operator. It has been designed specifically to bring mobile developers and users closer together, to collaborate – a critical factor in ensuring that customers get something they want, while making sure that the people with the ideas and technical skills have an appreciative and profitable market for their products.

Litmus has been created to help anyone with a good idea and modern technical skills create applications that somehow use mobile networks to bring new services to users – anything from actual mobile applications running on handsets to desktop/laptop widgets. But it has also been designed to ensure that those applications are tested and evaluated by a group of technically savvy customers with a proven interest in new mobile technologies and a real thirst for new ideas. And crucially, Litmus has been designed to foster and nurture the creation of applications with real commercial potential for developers as well as O2 itself – a fact which will give the people with the best ideas real incentive to take part.

Opening an apps store has become the new mobile vogue. But for O2 it misses something fundamental, the collaboration of customer and developers and the network operator. O2 Litmus takes full advantage of the tremendous creativity and energy of the user and developer communities themselves, not just the ideas of the industry. In the process, it is creating a new future for itself and its customers – a future in which people get the products and services they actually want, not just the ones the industry tells them they need. So the developer wins, the customer wins and the network operator wins. Quicker, better, innovative mobile apps that can be tried and used in days not months. That is what will propel Mobile 2.0 into the next generation, not another apps store.