Paris, 27-28 November 2007
Chiswick, 5-6 November 2007

Many members of the Orange Partner Programme gathered together at the Orange Labs building in Chiswick and the Bastille Design Centre in Paris to learn, discuss and develop; all about the exciting new world of web 2.0.

With Orange tapping into this area with our own products such as Bubbletop, Pikeo and our APIs, we wanted to bring together our own experts from the Orange teams in France, UK and San Francisco, and many of our members to talk about the commercial benefits and then to actually start developing.

The outcome was fantastic, products were developed and everyone walked away feeling excited about the opportunities open to them.

So what exactly did happen over the two days?
 the commercial overview
 technical overview
 the workshops and the results

The morning of the first day was for commercial people who wanted to learn more about what Orange are doing in this area and how their companies can make money out of it.

here's what happened...
Steve Glagow welcomed everyone from Orange Partner, giving an overview of the Orange Partner programme and its involvement with the other teams within France Telecom Group, and provided a clear introduction to the two days ahead.

Patrice Slupowski (Chiswick) and Pascal Thomas (Paris) followed by talking about what Orange is doing in the area of social networking as a light introduction to the specific products that Orange is working on.

Luca Pisati (Chiswick) and David Nahmani (Paris) discussed the mash-up opportunities for everyone for Pikeo, Soundtribes and other social networking products.

Bubble what? Bubbletop! Patrice came back on to talk about why developers should be developing widgets for Bubbletop and most importantly how money can be made from it!

Bertrand Mignot then gave an insight into the Web Service APIs we're planning to open up and asked the audience for their feedback on our progress so far.

For the Chiswick event, Graham Fisher, who heads up the Orange Labs in Chiswick, showed some demos of the R&D work carried out it the Chiswick Lab and gave an insight into new products in the pipeline for Orange.

As the commercial people departed, the technical people stayed to get down to some serious work! The afternoon was spent going into the technical intricacies of...

 Bubbletop
 Pikeo
 Orange APIs - in particular, Contact Everyone.

Armed with all of the tools, it was now time to get down to the nitty gritty of developing. Our technical attendees took their seats and started to code with the our Orange experts on hand to give a bit of support.

The overall aim of the two days was to get real feedback on the new products that Orange are developing and to give developers a first look at what we are doing and how they can contribute. With the Orange technical experts at hand, the results were fantastic and have helped to improve these Orange services and provide developers with the opportunity to potentially work with Orange and possibly commercialise their products.

and the results?
Several widgets were produced, everyone had the opportunity to present their work to the judges who picked some of the best.

 Chiswick results
 Paris results