Here comes the Carrier Advisory Group

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

Last week we held the first meeting of the new Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, which helps us figure out how best to shape Ubuntu to meet the needs of the mobile industry.

It was very exciting!

We mapped out our approach to the key question I’ve been asked by every carrier we’ve met so far: how can we accommodate differentiation, without fragmenting the platform for developers? We described the range of diversity we think we can support initially, received some initial feedback from carriers participating immediately, and I’m looking forward to the distilled feedback we’ll get on the topic in the next call.

CAG members get a period of exclusivity in their markets. We’ll close the CAG to new members shortly.  We don’t need a very large group; just a few clear-thinking and thoughtful partners who have experience introducing new platforms. And with this initial group of members, we are all set to get really good insight for a really great launch next year.

Next week I’ll be in Shanghai for the GSMA’s Mobile Asia Expo, and looking forward to a round of in-person meetings with our advisory group. Mostly we’ll be meeting by telephone and video conference, given the very global nature of the CAG, but there are a few events which attract critical mass of attendees in the industry where we’ll arrange a CAG face-to-face as well.

Thanks to everyone who is participating in the project – Ubuntu’s touch experience is really coming along in leaps and bounds. I love hearing about the new devices to which it’s been ported, or new apps getting started. This is the frontier for personal computing, and we want free software leading the way. You all make that possible.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 18th, 2013 at 5:26 pm and is filed under ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Here comes the Carrier Advisory Group”

  1. Jonathan Jesse Says:
    June 18th, 2013 at 6:58 pm

    Isn’t “differentation” what lead to the fragmented market that is Android? W/ a group of these carriers looking to run Ubuntu on phone want to be different, so will we see a type “sense” or whatever UI they try to put into place or is there something that will prevent from doing so? If I have an Ubuntu phone will I get the updates from the carrier or from Ubuntu sources then? If the first is the case then we will see the problem w/ Android where we have version 2.x through 4.x running w/ holes/etc. not getting patched…

    Also I noticed the Deutsche Telekom logo will it launch in the US then on T-Mobile or still to be determined?

  2. Prateek Says:
    June 18th, 2013 at 9:01 pm

    It’s unfortunate that carriers have a say in this at all. Being used to a system where I buy my handset separately and my SIM card separately, independently of each other, it seems jarring that the carrier/service provider should have any say or control whatsoever over my handset experience. Exactly like I’d like to buy a laptop without Microsoft being involved in any way!

  3. Enlaces compartidos Says:
    June 20th, 2013 at 6:00 am

    […] Mark Shuttleworth: Ubuntu se mueve hacia el móvil con cada vez más decisión […]

  4. Richard Says:
    June 28th, 2013 at 12:35 am

    Hey Mark,

    I love what you’re doing with phones and tablets. It will probably be pretty good with laptops too. Here’s my problem. I use compiz so that I can left click expo on the left of the screen and have over 20 clients set up that way. You can see from the rise of Mint how much ubuntubellion there is. All we ask is that you give us an option of moving the unity bar and a few more tweaks so I can come back to ubuntu. As it is I’m semi content with Mate but would rather come back and follow the innovation for the most part.

    -A concerned fan.