Orange has announced the launch of a Technocentre in Britain, which it says is designed to help develop new and exciting services for its customers in the UK and across the Orange footprint.
The Technocentre will open on 5 January 2009. It will expand on the work of other Technocentre facilities around the world and will see UK and Group developers working on products and services for more than 170 million France Telecom customers, including 115 under the Orange brand. The new facility will also work on projects that are specifically aligned to UK customer needs.
The Orange Technocentre will accommodate teams of marketers, engineers and researchers, whose brief is to identify changes in industry, culture and customer behaviour, and then select, conceive and produce new products and services to market to match these needs accordingly.
The UK arm of the Technocentre will have 80 staff based across existing Orange office locations. It will form part of the Orange Labs network, a global innovation chain that has over 5,000 researchers, engineers and marketers in 19 countries.
Orange says that the projects that the UK teams will be working on are currently confidential, but that recent work to come out of the Groups Technocentres includes Home 3D-TV; life-sized video-calling screens; IP telephony; the worlds-first electronic newspaper; and text-to-voice services for people with sensory disabilities. Orange and France Telecom currently have about 8,500 registered patents.
The Technocentre team will work closely with Orange UKs Consumer, Business and New Business teams. In addition, Orange Labs R&D, who already have a sizeable presence in the UK, will continue to work in partnership to support all Technocentre initiatives, using resources from the existing worldwide R&D labs network. It is expected that the first set of products and services from these teams will be released in the second half of 2009.
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