While the future of shopping may not be televised, it is already significantly mobilized. Even though “Coupons” (meaning promotional offers from the likes of Groupon and Coupons.com) was ostensibly the first topic under discussion, mobile commerce immediately reared its head. As Paul Kultgen from Nielsen pointed out, the use of wireless devices for search or consultation occurs in almost 50% of local shopping instances. This is not surprising. In the past, we had seen that nearly 3/4 of calls to wireless directory assistance culminated in a visit to a local business.

Today, arriving at that business is often just the beginning of the process of using resources on the other end of the phone connection to help choose the right product, figure out “the best” price, determine whether to buy it then and there or treat the local retailer as a “show room” for items that are ultimately purchased on the Web. Meanwhile, it also presents an opportunity for the phone’s owner to check-in, make a comment, provide a review, earn recognition or rewards, which are all becoming routine shopping-related activities.

But therein lies the rub. I’m going to conflate several of the subsequent topics, which included “curation,” “customers,” “the close” (meaning billing & transaction processing” and “the cloud,” and make it into a seamless take-away about the current state of “curated” customer conversations. If I were to assign a single “c” word to the current state of C3, it would have to be “chaos.” While there was general consensus that the discounts arising from the group-purchase and other promotional programs (like Groupon, LivingSocial, Coupons.com), several people noted that there are hundreds of such companies around and the result is a cacophony of offers with little rhyme or reason.

One early suggestion for a new business would be to act as a third-party that aggregates offers, makes them searchable and presents the ones that are tailored to a specific user (ideally with relevant reviews and suggestions from like-minded peers). Such “personalization” amounts to the sort of “empowerment” that leads to the ideal user experience and, ultimately, customer engagement. These are only the first baby steps toward providing a compelling user experience that leverage some of the other topics under discussion at this Spotlight session and future C3-oriented events. Topping the list would be the tools and platforms that help individuals to manage the scads of personal data and metadata that permeates the e-commerce landscape (this is the Personal Data Ecosystem). In addition it will be important to add “game dynamics” to the user experience to provide a pleasant experience and incentives to be more active in bringing order to the chaos.

In this context, “chaos” is not such a bad word. Although its most common definition is a state of extreme disorder, I prefer its more cosmic definition, (which is #1 according to Merriam-Webster) “a state of things in which chance is supreme; especially : the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.” This connotes both the casino-like nature of making investments in C3 at this point (would you put your own $6 billion in Groupon?) as well as the unquestioned growth potential for business endeavors that bring us out of this “confused unorganized state.”

According to this article from the Wireless Federation, Orange (France Telecom) initially offered the service when breaking into the UK market in 1994. It has found, unsurprisingly, that businesses like to keep existing landline numbers both as a symbol of business continuity and as a way to provide a consistent link with customers. The importance of routing calls directly to wireless phones is a sign of the times as businesses join residential customers in cutting the cord and moving to mobile.

Orange’s approach mitigates many of the problems created by all the OS fragmentation involving smartphones (including the increasingly contentious battle between browser-based and “Native” applications). Still, the real game-changer in Orange’s approach is the adoption of the guidelines surrounding “open source” software as the basis for its distribution strategy. Developers, integrators, device manufacturers and carriers will be able to access a range of resources here. At that address (http://github.com/osmwp) visitors will find a platform that includes a “widget reader” which has already been embedded in the majority of mobile phones carrying the Orange branding; they will also find tools to manage a catalog of shared widgets; and application development tools for creating widgets – along with documentation and sample code.

Orange’s approach is revolutionary in its focus on “openness”. It partnered with Netvibes, earlier in 2010 to build the initial catalog of widgets, which it is sharing under the terms of an open source licensing agreement. It now supports and simplifies developers’ efforts to distribute their applications (instantiated as widgets) directly on their customers’ phones. It is part of a commitment to openness that dates back to a developer program established in 2004 and the publishing of APIs that started in 2008. From Slupowski’s point of view, it’s a matter of sharing know-how regarding getting widgets to the broad wireless subscriber population. It worked for Netvibes as part of its Universal Widget API management. He and his colleagues have done a great job of driving using the Orange brand and the concept of openness to overcome the long-standing reticence among operators to adopt the tenets and practices of open source software development.

Admittedly, there has to be a lot going on under the hood where service providers are sorting out the pros, cons and interdependencies of OAuth (for authentication), SAML (the Security Access Mark-up Language), OpenID (authentication), XRDS, Information Cards, CardSpace and other manner of generic and branded “ID federation”. Orange has distilled the alphabet soup into a “tool” which looks a lot like a Web site or landing page. It invites people to use their “Orange France Identity” or to select another “trusted” combo to apply as they surf secure Web services.

The idea is spelled out further in this video (in French with English subtitles). It centers around a site called Quizagain.com, so I’m not sure whether Orange has the unenviable task ahead of it of recruiting participating sites into its “single-sign on” efforts. Even though it will face significant challenges growing the base of participants, it’s nice to see such a clean interface and simple approach to a known problem.

I can only ask whether this trip is necessary and whether it will necessarily be effective. Atom-equipped devices running Linux-derivative operating systems are, indeed proliferating. Until the Orange announcement, MeeGo’s future was uncertain. The platform, itself, is the product of merged development efforts combining the Linux-based Maemo platform – an “open source” effort underwritten by Nokia – and Moblin (Mobile Linux) efforts initiated by Intel.

Application developers, integrators and software vendors are the force multipliers destined to make Recombinant Communications (RC) successful. When it comes to smartphones, for instance, applications developers have voted with their fast-moving fingers. And the results are pretty clear. In spite of Apple’s iron fisted control of the release process, the iPhone App Store offers more than 100,000 apps. That compares to Google’s 20,000 titles. Then it’s a long-distance call to the next tier of retail outlets, where RIM is approaching a five-figure total and Palm’s WebOS has just hit four figures. The proliferation of platforms will ultimately lead to “developer fatigue”. In the spirit of “Beta versus VHS” or “HDDVD versus BlueRay” it may turn out that even two is too many.

Even though success is by no means assured, choosing the MeeGo platform with Intel as a partner is a gamble that’s worth taking early. Orange is right to focus on the quality of user experience across multiple “screens” and, in case nobody has noticed, the iPhone OS, Android and MeeGo are all Linux variants. I’m not a coder, but I see a common denominator here. What the developer community looks for is fair-handedness in terms of support and revenue models. What users look for is consistency across multiple platforms. A service provider of Orange’s size and footprint has an opportunity to offer both.

Orange already offers social media service called Social Life in the UK. It provides a single site where users can access a number of social media websites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. The roll-out of Orange’s Twitter TV offering is expected to move from the UK to France, Spain and Poland, initially, and then more broadly in Western Europe.

This article in the online Guardian UK provides some details. Mobile Twitter will be offered to Orange customers as part of their existing phone service. They will be able to put limits on the number of Tweets they receive, in order to control costs.