Press Coverage

SurfKitchen rides app store wave

SurfKitchen will announce plans to deliver an app store experience across mid-range devices for mobile operators, at the mobile industry’s showcase event, Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona. The service, called SurfKit, has been on Orange UK since December, and is now being rolled out to Orange France, has already produced a 277% uplift in app sales, SurfKitchen claims. 

“We’re leveraging our existing cross platform widget framework to deliver an application storefront for operators,” Dave Evans, chief technology officer at SurfKitchen, revealed to mobileSQUARED. “Operators are looking at how they can deliver an easy to use retail experience on all their phones to retail mobile applications and Internet services.” As Evans says, this is a clear move away from SurfKitchen’s ODP moniker into a mobile Internet platform delivering three products; SurfKit Storefront, SurfKit Launchpad and SurfKit Widget Runtime, designed to meet the industry’s wholesale change toward on-device retail stores.

But unlike the Apple model, where all content and services within the App Store have been optimised for the iPhone’s screen size and APIs, there are significant challenges when moving into a broad device experience tackling the fragmentation of the device landscape. Evans says this is a necessary step for SurfKitchen to extend its client to have a much broader catalogue. SurfKit Storefront will have a number of different categories, each containing a minimum of 5 to 10 apps. Gaming is expected to be a key category because it has an established user base, but enterprise-based apps are also proving popular.

SurfKitchen believes SurfKit allows operators to extend their own developer partner networks and strengthen their ties with the developer community. “All the operators are looking to leverage the developer community better than they have at the moment,” Evans says. “Everyone’s driving into this new world. Orange, Verizon, and AT&T all have their own developer communities.”
Despite the enhanced retail experience delivered by Apple and subsequently Android and potentially RIM, it has resulted in the walled gardens previously associated with the operators shifting toward the device OEMs. In this Walled Garden 2.0 world, the device OEMs are trying to control the whole value chain within the Smartphone sector.

“The industry has coalesced against some key verticals,” Evans adds. “On high-end phones there are lot of dedicated apps, but as you move down the handset chain into the lower-end phones, there is a market for less sophisticated apps, such as widgets. On mid-range devices you could only store a few apps, but you could have a lot of widgets.”

Evans says most of its existing customers, including Orange, Telefonica, Maxis, Etisalat, Telstra, Cincinnati Bell and Aljawal, are implementing “this evolution”. In the UK, Storefront is on 10 mid-range Sony Ericsson and Nokia S40 series devices, with more devices to be added throughout 2009.

Not only will SurfKit Storefront house a significantly broader catalogue than previous ODP and widget incarnations, it will contain information on the application, and will also be supported by personalisation and segmentation permitting the operator to target relevant content to its subscribers.  The storefront will be supported by SurfKit Launcher – an initiative to create an operator environment enabling simple discovery of services and application. Each widget and application downloaded from the storefront will be available in the launcher. It’s one click more than the iPhone on a like-for-like basis, but considerably less clicks-to-access on its existing ODP. “Key is to get the subscriber used to a particular journey, built on the foundations of a retail and service creation environment,” Evans said. He believes that “widgets could potentially become more valuable than the apps,” but then he would say that.

nick@d2mobile.co.uk