Does losing its iPhone monopoly spell doom for Ma Bell?
Not so far.

By: Ben Paynter June 18, 2011 - 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 network 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 flee 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 transform "from a telephone company to a technology company," Donovan says. And the first step is to create a new wave of apps to secure customer loyalty.

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