The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) has formed itself into a corporate entity and merge with the Joint Innovation Lab. Formed in February, WAC unites 24 major operators in building an open platform for mobile applications. The Joint Innovation Lab is a mobile internet services initiative started in 2008 by Softbank, Vodafone and China Mobile. The transaction is expected to be completed in September. Peter Suh, the CEO of the JIL, will head the new company. The company also announced that Vodafone chief executive Europe Michel Combes has been elected chairman of WAC, and France Telecom deputy CEO Jean-Philippe Vanot has been named as vice chairman. In addition the WAC board of directors includes AT&T CTO John Donovan, China Mobile VP Li Zhengmao, Deutsche Telekom CTO Olivier Baujard and other executives from companies like GSMA, KT, NTT Docomo, SK Telecom, Smart Communications, Verizon and more.
At launch, WAC will allow operators to distribute applications through their respective application storefronts and charge users through their existing phone bill. In this model, developers will set the application price and will receive a revenue share for the transaction. The revenue share will be defined on an operator-by-operator basis. WAC is a not-for-profit organisation and will receive a small transaction fee for each application to cover its operating costs. In the future, WAC will offer business models that enable additional purchases from within an application, using network features, such as location, to enhance an application and enable the serving of advertisements to end users. WAC will publish its initial specification and components of its SDK to developers in November. This specification will be based on W3C standards, providing a platform for developing rich mobile web applications. WAC will also provide backwards compatibility for devices based upon the current JIL and Bondi specifications. Details of the developer roadmap and a preview of the WAC specifications will be available in September. Developers currently creating JIL applications can continue working with the existing JIL specification, tools and software libraries and these applications can be deployed on JIL based devices immediately. With the publication of the WAC specification, developers will also be able to deploy applications on a wider range of devices supporting the WAC specification in 2011.
