Telekom's charm offensive

Deutsche Telekom will invest more to enhance cooperation with business partners, especially start-up companies, the company announced on Tuesday at "Next" - Europe's leading conference for the digital industry in Berlin.

Telekom Chief Executive Rene Obermann said his company would create a society named T-Incubator with a view to supporting innovative business ideas. It promised to provide adequate financing for selected start-ups as well as the provision of appropriate office space and high-end telecommunications infrastructure to help young talent get off the ground.

"With T-Incubator, we aim to promote promising business ideas and establish contact with innovative talent. The idea is to recognize innovations and growth markets and tap into new business fields at an early stage," Chief Product and Innovation Officer Thomas Kiessling said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mutually beneficial initiative

"We must attract innovation, we need to open up more," CEO Rene Obermann said. "Big companies simply have to learn to how to dance properly and treat their partners well," he added.

T-Incubator will help Deutsche Telekom move away from simply providing cables and connections to customers, meaning it no longer just wants to make available simple bandwidth and network speed without influencing services and applications.

On the contrary, smart connectivity will increasingly be the name of the game for Telekom, enabling partners to switch between data transmissions modes automatically, be it UMTS, LTE or WiFi. "Devices will connect to the best network without clients having to interfere," Telekom said in a statement.

The company is also planning to allow start-ups to use more of its application programming interfaces (APIs) which ensure proper communication between software components.

hg/nk (dpa)