O2 Offers £1 Million To Developers For New PC Business Service

O2 CEO Ronan Dunne

Looks like Ronan Dunne’s O2 means business when it says it wants to tap the developer community. The mobile operator, owned by Telefonica (NYSE: TEF), is now on the hunt for a brand new service, and it is promising to pay up to £1 million to buy the best one. But there are strings attached…

The O2 Incubator Project is a bit of a departure for the operator: it is focused on PC-based web services, not mobile, and the service needs to be for the small and medium enterprise market, rather than something aimed at the operator’s much larger base of consumer users.

But it’s a departure that makes some sense: O2 currently has the largest small business base of all the mobile operators, and it is keen to grow its broadband footprint, both with fixed and dongle-based services.

The Incubator Project actually launched in December, with the aim to find one company that O2 would fund for 12 months while it developed its service. Today it announced that it wanted to expand this to create a shortlist – of an unspecified number – to fund for the next twelve months. The change in structure, claims a spokesperson, is not down to little response, but the opposite: multiple projects worth considering. Interested developers have until January 31 to apply for a place on the shortlist for funding.

The program will complement other initiatives O2 has to work with developers more closely. Last year it launched O2 Litmus for mobile apps in the UK and has similar projects in Spain and Mexico.

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