Orange Social Life is a winner

On March 18 2010, Orange Social Life won the mobile news award of the most innovative service social_life_web_r500

Launched in August 2009, Social Life has consistently attracted customers and offers a wide range of social networks integration.

Having worked on it since it’s very very early stages, it feels great to look at it and feel proud that we all made it! I remember the day when my boss came around and asked my availabilities for ‘the months to come’ =)

These months started by creating an HTML and JavaScript mobile prototype to be demonstrated around the business units. It already has live update of a twitter feed and notifications.

The interface was going to be really different from anything that had been done so far, promoting social activity through some cleverly expanding friends icons on the home screen depending on their amount of activity, easy access to communication functions directly from there, and deep integration of the social networks in the usual device capabilities.

Things have slightly changed since then, but the concept is the same, and it works! The whole service sits on top of a pretty big architecture to allow integration through a single access point into all the required social networks. We’ve worked together countless hours into the specifications of this API, the integration with Orange’s partners, developers, manufacturers and vendors, done quite a few business trips around Europe to finally bring it all together!

Now, it’s been rewarded for it’s simplicity over some bigger players in the market and from the point where I stand in R&D, for most of my work to be hidden from the outside world, I am exstatic to see that what we do in R&D (along with Snapshot) is real stuff that makes it out.

Happy about my second award in the month =)