MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, BARCELONA: London and San Francisco - The Symbian Foundation today took time out from Mobile World Congress to talk about the variety of ways in which members have been contributing to the success of the open source platform, while giving their own business a boost.
"Symbian is the only mobile open source project in which active members truly determine the future of mobile," said Lee M. Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. "Members are raising their profile in the ecosystem and generating new business opportunities for themselves through the diverse ways in which they are engaging with the project. These range from making major technical contributions in code to platform direction and organizational governance. We have active member representatives from around the industry leading platform evolution on the four technology Councils, and many companies sponsoring and leading regional events and developing new web-based services that serve the Symbian community."
An example of one of these services is the Collaborative Test Database, currently in development by foundation member Comarch SA. It will offer a web-based interface for accessing test suites for the Symbian platform, saving developers both time and money.
"At Comarch, we are very proud of the fact that we are delivering world-class expertise through the design and implementation of the Collaborative Test Database – a potent web-based tool that will increase collaboration, sharing and innovation throughout the Symbian community," said Pawel Bieryt, EVP, Telecommunications Business Group, Comarch SA. "Comarch experts are contributing their time and extensive know-how to ensuring the continued growth of the most recognized community in the mobile world."
Symbian has also begun holding member events around the world that are planned and sponsored by member companies. The purpose of these events is to update members on the latest innovations in the Symbian roadmap and provide unparalleled regional networking opportunities.
Foundation member Teleca has recently established a presence in India, so it was beneficial to them to help sponsor the first member event in Bangalore. "As a company with many years’ involvement with the Symbian platform, we are committed to promoting the development of the Symbian community in India," said Edwin Moses, Senior Vice President and Head of Europe and APAC Organization at Teleca. "It was a pleasure for us to sponsor the Bangalore member dinner, at which we met new customers and networked with existing customers active in the Symbian ecosystem.
"We look forward to solid growth in India. Sponsoring this dinner gave us the opportunity to show the development community our expertise and global strength."
The Symbian Foundation manages the release of the platform source code, but the foundation itself has no development resources and so members are wholly responsible for creating and contributing feature enhancements to the Symbian platform.
Foundation member ISB Corporation saw an opportunity to enhance the platform with a camera implementation. "We have three reasons for contributing the ECAM source code to the Symbian platform," said Shohei Yoshida, Senior Manager, Sales and Business Promotion at ISB Corporation. "Because our primary business is engineering services, this contribution will prove our Symbian expertise and promote our high-level engineering ability in the Japanese and global markets."
"Another reason is to promote our vertical integration services to businesses that want to integrate their camera engines and codecs with the Symbian platform. Finally, this contribution is part of a larger project we’re working on, a distribution of Symbian that will include a Japanese-language SDK, targeted at Japanese carriers, semiconductor manufacturers, OEMs and application developers."
Foundation member Tieto attended the first two member events, in Finland and in India, and found them valuable. So when Symbian members requested an event in Beijing, Tieto took a leading role in both sponsoring and planning the event.
"Tieto firmly believes that in order for any open source community to be successful, members need to actively participate," said Mika Yletyinen, Senior Vice President, Head of Tieto’s Mobile Devices business. "Tieto has long offered world-class services and solutions on Symbian and actively supports the Symbian Foundation, since we believe in their activities and the platform. As a demonstration of this, we seized the opportunity to help make the forthcoming Symbian China Forum happen."
"In all ways, we are member led," concluded Lee M. Williams. "This is a unique aspect of Symbian’s model, as no single company controls the direction of the platform or our organizational efforts. In our second year, we expect members to be ever more active and to generate even more ideas for the evolution of the platform."
Labels: Symbian
0 comments:
Post a Comment