Network Advantage: How to Unlock Value From Your Alliances and Partnerships

Chapter Seven

Assessing and Increasing Your Status: Extracting Energy from Waves

Kai Bergman, founder of the Finnish start-up AppMall, had a grand vision.¹ He created this company in 2008 to battle Apple and Google in the market for mobile applications, which at that time was estimated at $10 billion globally, with an expected 100% annual growth by 2011. This was a great market for Apple and Google, but not for telecom operators. Most of the content provided through Apple and Google was (and still is) in English, a foreign language for many customers outside the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Kai wanted to create a service to help mobile operators set up “white label portals,” in other words their own branded “app” stores. This way, ...