it's all like marc canter said: it's all about open standards and digital lifestyle aggrigation: Telecoms.com:
There's been a great deal of buzz recently around several related IT-world trends, described by the generic terms, service-oriented architecture or software-as-a-service.
Simultaneously, the web community has been stimulated by the potential of SOA-like application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow new, creative uses of existing services. (The buzzword is 'mashup')
In essence, all this boils down to the increasing trend for applications to be available as managed or hosted services on the one hand, and the willingness of big IT companies to publish APIs that comply with open standards on the other...
There's a Google API. Anyone - literally anyone - can register for the key you need to use it. Why is there no Vodafone API? Or even better, one for UMTS or GSM itself? Imagine the possibilities of plugging into the LBS, messaging and billing interfaces. Here's one for you - press a key on your phone to download the Google Maps page for your current location. Getting the location into the correct URL query for the map is trivial - in fact it doesn't even require the Google API.
But extracting your own location data from Vodafone, or more accurately, your network operator, is like getting milk from a cock ostrich. If you wanted to pay Vodafone for it, you'd find it even harder. Andrew Bud, executive chairman of mobile payments firm mBlox, told me that some of his content provider clients were paid as much as 90 days in arrears for premium SMS billed sales by the networks. MBlox makes a very nice living out of sorting out this sort of thing.
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