C TO John Donovan,
left, sees digital
water balloons as
a fun primer on
handset-to-handset
apps—and a lure
for way ward
subscribers.
does losing its iphone monopoly spell doom for Ma bell? not so far.
by ben paynter
meet the
app man
at at&t
photographs by
darren braun
when rory donovan went
to college last fall, his father,
AT&T chief technology officer
John Donovan, wanted to check
up on him. Sure enough, there
was an app for that. Donovan and
his net work even helped popularize it. FamilyMap is a tracking
service on Donovan’s smartphone
that shows the real-time locations
of everyone on his family plan.
Now, if Rory is out late at a party,
Donovan can call him up. “I say,
‘What are you doing?’ He usually
says he’s going home,” Donovan
says, chuckling.
FamilyMap is one of AT&T’s
10 most popular apps—and a key
part of Donovan’s effort to hang
onto customers who might be
tempted to f lee to Verizon, now
that AT& T has lost exclusive rights
to the iPhone. It was those iPhone
sales that had helped AT&T
dethrone Verizon, last January, as
America’s largest carrier—which
means its victory may be short
lived if the company can’t find a
new way to please the fickle phone
crowd. The challenge is to trans-
form “from a telephone company
to a technology company,” Dono-
van says. And the first step is
to create a new wave of apps to
secure customer loyalty.
