I was able to attend a portion of Orange Lab's Open House in South San Francisco this Monday to hear Orange's perspective on Web 2.0 as they introduced two of their new Web 2.0 products - Bubbletop (their webtop product) and Pikeo (their photo sharing product, which has actually been around for a little bit). Pascal Thomas leads Orange's Web 2.0 efforts as the head of an internal program there called NExT.com. Both Bubbletop and Pikeo have been developed under the NExT.com program. I enjoyed hearing a carrier's perspective on Web 2.0 and appreciated Orange's willingness to offer their view in an open forum.

I found it interesting to hear the internal dynamic that Pascal needs to deal with by virtue of operating within a company like France Telecom, whose annual revenues are in the order of tens of billions. Any new opportunities, including Web 2.0 opportunities, that could be projected to be worth hundreds of millions are hard to justify within such a dynamic.

There were some questions from the audience about why Pikeo is not just another photo sharing site, how it could compete in a relatively crowded field and why a third party should choose Pikeo as a partner rather than another more established player with a larger user base. Earlier in the day, Pascal made an interesting observation that carriers are in a fairly unique position in terms of having an incredibly large consumer user base that has been "trained" in a sense to receive and pay a bill each month. Being able to leverage that type of paying user base seems incredibly powerful to me and for those companies that can offer synergistic technologies for the Web 2.0 initiatives of carriers (such as a Pikeo or Bubbletop), access to such a pre-existing willing-to-pay user base seems compelling enough to at least think about partnering with a carrier-owned Web 2.0 newcomer versus a more established player.