The theme for this year's Orange Partner camp is navigation, but not navigation in the sense that might immediately spring to mind for most mobile developers. "It's about navigating through the great and vast wonders of France Telecom and Orange," says Steve. "This is why we chose to come to Faro, as Henry the Navigator sailed from here and Columbus started his voyage to the Americas just over the border in Spain."

As with previous Partner camps this one is fully booked. It offers developers 72 non-stop hours of workshops, training sessions, and opportunities to network. This is supported by sponsors including ACCESS as platinum sponsor; with Sun, Nokia, and Symbian as gold sponsors; and a number of silver sponsors, including UIQ.

As the theme of camp is about navigating through the France Telecom and Orange organizations, there are more France Telecom personnel at camp than ever before. Close to one hundred according to Steve. "It's all about making our organization open to the developer community," says Steve. So, in addition to the informal networking, there are also speed dating sessions and a developer competition. The objective in all of this is to allow developers to showcase their applications to Orange and France Telecom and for Orange and France Telecom staff to identify those applications that fulfill their customer's needs.

One of the key areas of focus at the event is helping developers work with the APIs that Orange announced at MWC in February. The APIs allow third-party developers to create applications that integrate with the Web services offered by Orange and France Telecom to their consumer and business customers. For example there are APIs to interact with Orange customers' calendars or upload photos to Orange Pikeo. To support this initiative the Camp's Developer Centre has been expanded to become a "play-zone," allowing developers to experiment with the APIs.

Despite their recent release, there are already examples of applications successfully using these APIs. One such example is Shozu, which has added Pikeo to their application, providing users with one-click updating of photos to Pikeo from their mobile devices. Steve hopes the activities at Partner Camp will spawn similar developments.

One challenge facing Orange is convincing developers to build applications around a set of proprietary APIs. "Orange offers developers access to over a hundred and seventy million users worldwide," says Steve. "We have a desire to work with developers and, unlike many other carriers, we want to do this in a very open way. I believe that by remaining open and providing developers with real opportunities we will see many of them working with these APIs."

Steve notes that an unexpected benefit of releasing the APIs has been achieving greater synergy between the various technology groups within Orange. "This in turn has allowed us to create greater synergy in the products we offer our customers," says Steve. "This is a significant advantage for Orange, our customers, and developer community."

The APIs are a significant part of Orange's convergent strategy, which seeks to deliver the same experience to Orange customers regardless of the device they are using or whether they are on fixed line or wireless Internet. However, this strategy creates challenges for Orange and its developers. "It takes a significant amount of dedication from a developer to deliver their products across all the platforms we support," says Steve. "It's not just the application development for multiple platforms; testing and certification - to ensure that the application works first time and every time for Orange customers - is not trivial. It can often take developers eighteen months to go from conception to marketable product. This is also an emerging market, which means revenues are not yet mature. We do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for developers to create and certify their applications, with local test centers and Internet based testing services among others. I feel we are leading the way in making it practical for developers to deliver convergent applications and services."

Orange's dedication as expressed through Partner Camp, an event which Symbian has been involved with from the start, is indicative of the company's long term vision to offer its customers leading technologies and a state of the art Internet experience. It will be some time before the results of this approach are fully realized, but if future success can be gauged by determination, Orange and the developers that work with it have a bright future.

More details on the Orange APIs can be found in the Developer Play Zone on the Orange Partner Web site (www.orangepartner.com).