Orange developers flock to Cape Canaveral

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Hundreds of the globe's leading developers will join forces this week as they convene in Cape Canaveral for Orange's Partner Camp.

Starting today and for the next three days, innovation and idea exploration will be top of the agenda. Convergence will also feature heavily during proceedings.

The camp, which complements other work that Orange is doing to encourage developers to bring their ideas to the table, aims to provide a real-time, real-life forum for the experts to test out their applications and share their thoughts and experiences with their peers.

"We try and have two partner camps year, one in the US and one in Europe. They're very popular because we believe that developers get more out of the initiative if they feel that they're part of Orange and the community - working with us and for us just like an employee," said Steve Glagow director of the Orange Partner Programme.

"You can't get that [level of interaction] just by having a portal or sending someone a newsletter each month or responding to e-mails. It takes more than that. It takes eyeball time: eye-to-eye sitting down together and having meetings."

A key part of the camp's activities, and indeed Orange's Partner Programme as a whole, is the developer centre which lets developers carry out last mile tests on their applications.

During the three-day get together, developers can also make use of a 2.5 and 3G network for more advanced technical testing.

Since the Orange Partner Programme was formed a little over three years ago, it has grown as a community from a relatively small number of developers to a massive worldwide audience of experts keen to develop for the Orange platform, whether mobile or fixed line.

Once an application has been submitted for testing it can be turned into an Orange-approved product in as little as four weeks, but the average turnaround time is usually 10-12 weeks.

This week's partner camp will specifically focus on commercialisation opportunities and providing APIs and technical training to help attendees move their ideas beyond the beta stage.

"We have been actively encouraging US developers and developers from other countries to develop for other markets since the beginning because of our concept of innovation," said Glagow.

"There are 230, 000 people working for France Telecom but we know that there's a heck of a lot of innovation beyond just them. And, just like we recognise that all the smart people aren't located just in our company, we also recognise that the smart people we have aren't all located in the UK and Europe, they're all around the world."

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