Twenty-four telecommunications operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community, an alliance to build an open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users. America Movil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KT, Mobilkom Austria group, MTN Group, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Orascom Telecom, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telenor Group, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, VimpelCom, Vodafone and Wind will create an ecosystem for the development and distribution of mobile and internet applications irrespective of device or technology. The GSMA and LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson also support this initiative.The alliance's stated goal is to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world. In the immediate future, the alliance will seek to unite members' developer communities and create a single, harmonised point of entry to make it easy for developers to join. The alliance plans to initially use both the JIL and OMTP Bondi requirements, evolving these standards into a common standard within the next twelve months. They will collectively work with the W3C for a common standard based on converged platform to ensure developers can create applications that port across mobile device platforms, and in the future between fixed and mobile devices. The alliance will serve as one point of contact for the industry and is open to all relevant parties.
