imran*

Category: Orange

  • My 7-Year Itch

    GoodbyeUhuh, it’s true. After seven years in a relationship, it’s usually time to see other people 😉

    Last Thursday , I became a civilian again, returning to a world where people pay for cellphones, where flights, trains and hotels cost money, laptops aren’t free and the English language rules 😉

    I came to Freeserve in 1999 with four other colleagues, when we were a startup in the midst of the first dotcom boom. One IPO, two CEOs and three brands later I’m leaving to join the second era of the web and return to my startup roots. It was fun, inspiring and exhilarating being part of the first generation of our company…and a privilege to work alongside some of France Telecom’s brightest minds from Boston and San Francisco to London and Paris, but most memorably, in Leeds 🙂

    As corporate R&D becomes eclipsed by garage entrepreneurs and technologists, most of our team is also heading for greener fields; Mark Taylor is joining Eircom as head of content, Ian Pringle will be heading up telephony startup Intelleme and collectively we’ll be launching a think-tank for emerging technologies – Carbon Imagineering – a vehicle for our startups, consultancy and publishing projects, operating in the US and UK. Funny, I always seem to leave as part of an exodus…

    Thank you to everyone, inside and outside FT, who has supported our research, been an audience to our ideas and sought our insights. I’ll miss you.

    It’s easy to overlook the impact that Freeserve, Wanadoo UK and Orange have had. We were there – right there – at the birth of the Web. We weaved its nerves from copper, glass, radio, pixels and code, enabling others to create ‘a new mind for an old species’…

    The future’s even brighter 🙂

    _________________________________________________

    Imran Ali • Acting Director of Technology Research
    Orange Home UK plc
    The Malthouse • Chadwick Street • Leeds • LS10 1LJ
    +44 7808 786814

  • Pixel(un)box-ed

    Pixelbox2006_1Even though we stopped writing in July, I’m still a little sad that I’m closing up Pixelbox this evening, after two years, 500-odd posts and a modest 75’000 page views, averaging about 100/day. Pixelbox also ranked 611’863rd on Technorati.

    Pixelbox was France Telecom’s first public, corporate blog and a collaboration between Wanadoo’s Technology Research and Design departments. A team of fifteen design and innovation professionals chronicled their observations of the design industry, technological developments and the work of inspirational artists and design practitioners; kinda like a mini-Boing Boing for designers 🙂

    From Eddy’s long, serious political observations to Key’s perma-stream of microposts, it was a lotta fun seeing everyone trying to find their voice. Indeed, some contributor’s bonusses were tied to how much they posted. I’ve just spend the best part of a day, republishing my own contributions to my personal blog…I was just behind Rich and Key in volume of posts!

    Most of the team have moved on to launch po-bo, to bring together designers from what was Wanadoo and the existing mobile teams in Orange UK. Me? I’ll be leaving Orange in three days time – yay!

    Pixelbox is dead; long live po-bo!

  • Orange Bill Of Rights

    Orange_bill_of_rights_1I’ve long believed that mobile operators, telcos and ISPs are well placed to resist the application of DRM and act to defend their users from rapacious copywrong enforcers.

    Last January, I listened to Rick Ringel’s VoIP Declaration of Independence talk at O’Reilly’s ETel* conference and was inspired to draw up an Orange Bill of Rights – of course this isn’t endorsed by my employers, but it helps to pse some provocative and demanding questions of the role of telco in the 21st century; perhaps as guardians of the consumer and of culture.

    So I mutually pledge to you my Vision, Standards and Sacred Interoperability 🙂

    Download Rick’s Declaration of Network Independence (286kb PPT)

    —

    * Full disclosure – I was on the ETel 2006 programme committee 🙂

  • Boredband/Fraudband

    Yes, yes – the 2.0 suffix is way overused. We (Orange) currently have 2.75m Livebox wireless routers installed in homes across Europe, with around 275’000 of those installed here in the UK. That looks like success, however we’re currently in the midst of a broadband price war; Sky, Orange and Carphone Warehouse have driven the consumer cost of broadband to zero in the UK.

    So where can operators like Orange begin to add additional value to a plain old broadband line? Music? TV? Cellphones? Free Calls? Everyone’s selling the same bundles. But how about just making that broadband line really useful and helping regular broadband-y activities become a little better – empower users to do the things they’re already doing, but better. Some ideas…

    • Orange Metro – turn 2.75m Liveboxes into the world’s biggest wifi hotzone, squishing FON, Wibiki and Placesight.
    • Orange Mediabox – a thin-client that can backup your computers, download torrents, share iTunes libraries and serve your files anywhere on the Web…something like this?
    • Orange Me – a place to manage store, share and syndicate your data, personas and relationships.

    Users aren’t going to buy their connectivity, communications and entertainment from one provider – so it’s perhaps sensible to grant them the freedom to unbundle – there’s still much value to be added to broadband.

  • Unintentional Fruit

    Apples_orangesThere appears to be an unintentional easter egg in our new TV ad, 42 seconds in there’s an Apple!

    It’d be great to see an Apple+Orange partnership (think of the branding puns!) but maybe I’m just seeing what I wanna see…

  • Life’s Better When It’s Open…

    the future’s bright…mobile & broadband

    Openness – many gaining from a simple impulse to share and communicate. Performers, labels, MNOs, ISPs, web service providers, computer manufacturers (and myself) all gain a small piece of the pie. This is because our networks are neutral; never judging, never loving, never hating, never shaping.

    Life’s Better When It’s Open… 🙂