Wind River Blog Network

Stark Bloggin' Mad!

By Emeka Nwafor

Wow!!! OK, so how is it that a few innocent tweets about the iPad gets me embroiled in a little Twitter / blogosphere skirmish with a colleague? Who would have thunk it? It's not just Schaefer, almost everyone seems to have formulated an opinion or a prediction about the future of mobile computing.

Following last week's announcement of the Apple iPad there has been an impressive flood of blogs, microblogs, and YouTube from pundits and pranksters, alike.  I don't recall a technology preview that had as much publicly generated hype and excitement as the iPad announcement.

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2010 Is The Year Of Embedded Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

I believe that 2010 will be the year of embedded virtualization, all the signs point in the right direction. It always takes a while for new technology to grab the imagination of embedded device developers.

Embedded developers are traditionally a conservative bunch, however, the benefits of virtualization can not be ignored, even by them.

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How Industry Software Expertise is Helping to Solve the Android Fragmentation Dilemma

By Jason Whitmire

It is no secret:  While Google continues to push for wide adoption of smartphones driven by its open source Android platform, most industry pundits know that manufacturers typically need upwards of a full year of development and productization effort (and often Google’s help) to develop an Android phone. Not surprisingly, it takes much longer for an OEM to reach a level where they can irrigate the operator ecosystem with differentiated phones based on Android (this of course applies to most new mobile device software stacks).

At the same time, we are all aware that there are multiple parallel efforts to enhance Android that have led many observers to believe that fragmentation is inevitable. Ultimately, it is said, this will become the bane to developers who will struggle to reach an economy of scale on a moving target where multiple variants of the Android OS co-exist.

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Smartphones, Smartbooks different by necessity?

By Doug Schaefer

Boy I'm having fun with Android. Maybe because it's the first time I'm getting the chance (albeit in my spare time) to do some real embedded development. And even in the playing I'm doing, I am experiencing the challenges that regular embedded developers face. Yes, believe or not, even with the latest and greatest hardware, you are limited by the amount of memory and storage your device has, and by the speed and capabilities of the processor. Not to mention power (feel like running your graphics loop at full speed, see how long your battery lasts doing that). You really have to think about these things and write your code carefully to be successful. (And I won't get started on Java again).

One thing you still see in the rumoursphere with Android is the spreading of it's wings into the "smartbook" world. I love that term, Smartbook. Mobile Internet Device is too vague and I think there is a clear delineation between the tree contenders: smartphone, startbook, netbook. Smartphones are the small handheld things we know and love today. Netbooks are the small notebooks which likely have a hard drive in them. But Smartbooks are an exciting middle ground between the two. They have usable screens, 5-9 inches, but everything else is like a smartphone, particularly in mobility and power consumption. A good smartbook should last the day without charging making it handy for carrying around conferences like EclipseCon, for example :).

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Open Source Symbian and the Inescapable Truth of Product Lifecycles

By Jason Whitmire

The announcement one year ago that Symbian will be open sourced under a license free platform in 1HCY10 was heard around the world. If we are to believe game theory, the motivations behind this move are not a non-zero sum game but rather one of rational choice by its major stakeholders. But what does Open Source Symbian really mean for all of the players involved?  Recent press commentary on the announcement might suggest that the leading ascendant contenders for the unifying Open Source platform – Android, Moblin, and LiMo – will somehow be cannibalized by a resurgent Symbian platform that is "free."

Indeed, in the mobile industry, invariably, there is always that big announcement that gains mindshare from industry pundits who can see the future (I recall WCDMA handset launches enjoyed similar attention in 2000). However I believe the opposite is true in the case of Symbian, that its demise as it nears an end to a natural product lifecycle will only be accelerated when it is made available under an open source license next year.

Here are 7 reasons why I believe this to be the case:

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When will my Smartphone be as smart as a fifth grader?

By Emeka Nwafor

Mobile mania is upon us.

In recent days, we've been introduced to the awesome looking Palm Pre. The Pre is Palm's attempt to share some of the spotlight with Apple's innovative and popular iPhone. Apple has had a big role to play in feeding the Mobile mania frenzy and it too was in the news this week. I have to acknowledge that I count myself amongst the multitudes that watched and waited in anticipation of The Big Announcement at this week's Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference where the Apple iPhone 3.0 was introduced. Since its first release, I have always admired the iPhone and its cousin the iPod Touch. I see the iPhone 3.0 at its pricepoint as being similar to a standing-up double in baseball; a great hit that puts them in scoring position, but it didn't bring the runner home. I was hoping for something different - more on this later in this post...

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Multicore and Unicore Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

Sometimes I get a chance to browse the web a bit, trying to find interesting tidbits. I ran into the following post from Hollis Blanchard. Hollis is an active participant in the world of virtualization, particularly on the Power architecture.

Hollis makes a point that I have been trying to get out as well: virtualization is clearly technology to look into when you are building multicore systems, but also when you are building unicore systems.

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The Mobile Device Investor and the Bubblegum Theory

By Jason Whitmire

While we still don't know the impact of Ovi, iPhone, or Android on the dynamics of tomorrow's device landscape, we know that "End Users" have evolved into sophisticated buyers of new devices, especially as subsidies gradually decline.  Although I don't think anyone quite knows where the value is going in the new mobile ecosystem (is it migrating to software, devices, services, networks, content…?), everyone is trying to understand how to best monetize the new mobile economy as relationships between all the players - operators, manufacturers, software developers and Internet /media companies - shift. There are no spellbinding stories yet.

In my last blog, I tried to formulate the term "mobile device investor" to drive as large a wedge as possible into the idea that mobile consumers are simply End Users - people who are unable to multitask when chewing bubblegum and only in search of a good application or service to contribute to self actualization. In today's world, mobile device investors are typically not End Users praying for the next killer application (these, as far as I have seen, do not really exist in the mobile market). Rather, consumers today are increasingly acting like investors and have heightened expectations for mobile devices - they expect these to continuously improve and evolve (Apple and Nokia are two of the few companies that deserve an underscore on this point). In this sense, devices increase the value of customer ownership in a big way (especially when combined with brand & access).

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POWERVR goes MP

By Doug Schaefer

I was just reading up on the news that Imagination Technologies has launched a new generation of their architecture that drives POWERVR. What's POWERVR, you ask? It's a good question, but chances are, if you have a mobile device that has 3D accelerated graphics, it's driven by this hugely popular silicon IP.

The big news is that even they're going multi-core to achieve scalable graphics. They claim they rival the performance of discrete graphics chipsets, which I assume means the nVidias and ATI's of the world. That's a pretty interesting combination when you look at the latest chips that have multi-core ARM processors combined with DSPs (digital signal processors) for audio/video processing, which can then be combined with these powerful 3D cores.

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Will the Software Stack Make the Market for Mobile Internet Devices?

By Jason Whitmire

I love the mobile industry because everyone, even my cat, has somehow turned into an industry sage, predicting that just about anything can and will happen in mobile as the dark clouds collect on the economic horizon.  Are there any bright spots (to use an overused analogy this week) left in mobile after we hear of precipitous drops in chipset sales and phone volumes, slackening subscriber demand, and workforce "adjustments?" Well, while talking to a group of executives from a large global operator recently about "killer" things (the talk was about signature applications) I had an epiphany: isn't the recent creation of an entirely new device category that every single ISV, consortia, chipset vendor, consumer electronics company, OEM or ODM, and service provider are starting to coalesce around something to take note of? Clearly making a market and getting an entire technology industry to move on a dime is no easy trick, not even for companies like Google and Intel.  Yet over the past two years, these companies have started to change the face of the mobile industry (I am not a sycophant in either camp so please reader, take heart).  Indeed, Intel's creation of the MID category has turned on a perpetual motion machine that especially mobile network operators can no longer ignore given the enormous role that new devices play in adding new subscribers. Given that the MID software coming out is truly next generation (I have seen it), my view (pundits aside) is that MIDs will be the bright spot of 2010, as terminals with 4" screen diagonals fully cannibalize the ancient meaning of high-end smartphones and cause everyone from Apple to Orange to Nokia create slots for this device type. 

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TV's are small, plus a little Clutter

By Doug Schaefer

So I was sitting watching my 40" HDTV the other day, and started thinking about why web browsing on a TV pretty much sucks, even with all the pixels you get at 1080i or what have you. And trust me, I tried it with our PS3 and other than watching YouTube videos, it's not a good experience.

But while I was sitting there on my couch (or sofa, depending on your English dialect) a pretty normal distance from the TV, I held my hands up to frame the size of the picture at arms length. Then lowering it to may lap, it struck me. The size of the picture isn't any bigger than a handheld gaming box, maybe slightly bigger than an iPod Touch (as I try to find one for my son's birthday on Thursday :( ).

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Operators return to Barcelona, (this time) armed with Open Source

By Jason Whitmire

Scene Setter
26 years after GSM was created to design a pan-European mobile technology, Mobile World Congress number 13 is set to take place in Barcelona in February. This time around, as they did when GSM World Congress was first held in Madrid in 1995, mobile network operators will dominate the scene. 

Next month, however, the topic of discussion will not be new network deployments, or the latest traunch of jazzy new devices, or the next best application. Rather, Open Source will be topic Number 1 on the operator agenda in 2009. As changing operator strategies include the need for a strategic terminal platform that they can influence, the tectonic plates that once defined how a device was created and deployed are shifting and fueling significant change in the value chain.

A Brave, New Ecosystem
Whether it be the proliferation of phone development activity around Google’s Android stack, the phenomenal operator gravitation toward the LiMo Foundation, or Symbian’s intriguing announcement to open source its end-of-life cycle stack, the mobile industry is breaking out of the traditional controlled development environment to favor collaboration that accelerates innovation. The use of open source software in mobile is exploding from the operating system all the way up to the user experience, and Linux-based open source stacks are moving well beyond alpha stage with backing by industry heavy weights.

Indeed, the ubiquity of open source is causing not only a fundamental shift in proprietary OEM software deployment, but also accelerating the opening of the operator walled garden. As VisionMobile’s Andreas Constantinou – arguably the industry’s most astute pundit of open source in mobile – has pointed out, strategic “shared” core software platforms are “in” (versus supporting and maintaining up to ten proprietary stacks in an operator portfolio).

Innovating on a Perceived Commodity
Given that almost every major operator has now launched some sort of Linux device, operator versions of open source stacks are entering the optimization phase, aiming to reduce costs of bringing new Linux devices to market, more rapidly evolve on-device and network-based services, and speed application testing and certification. These highly optimized stacks will allow the operators and their OEM and ISV partners to shift the focus of innovation from the baseline software to the applications, services, and user experiences that will ultimately provide the basis for differentiation and subscriber and revenue growth.

At the same time, the complexity of open source coupled with proprietary software assets has forced operators to quickly get smart – few companies in mobile offer the indemnification, quality metrics, warranties, and SLAs that were intrinsic to the fully proprietary software paradigm. Yet this is exactly what the operators and their partners seek to allow them to overcome the last business hurdle to open source adoption.

Take-aways, Before You Reach Costa Brava

• A number of trends (community content, me-portals, WiFi, etc.) will accelerate the crumbling of once venerable operator walled garden.

• Operators recognize that the mobile device software experience must improve across devices, with a critical need to bring all-internet experience to mobile devices.

• Chipset manufacturers will continue to rapidly embrace open source stacks (Android, Limo, Moblin) as service providers send downstream requirements that reward pre-optimized hardware-software combinations. Expect multiple commercial devices and demos on all three software platforms in Barcelona.


• As memory and CPU constraints disappear, open source will allow mobile device to become true application servers, not just smart mobile phones.


• Fragmentation in mobile device software is out, shared core software platforms are in.

• Nevertheless, fragmentation of developer ecosystems (LiMo, Android, Moblin, Symbian, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm…) will constrain the pace of innovation in the mobile market.


• Operators will be making fundamental decisions about which stacks to deploy (Android, LiMo, Moblin, Symbian, etc.) while larger ODMs shift their attention to learn open source.

• Operators will increasingly require commercial solutions that protect signature applications while leveraging open source’s innovation rate

Have fun !

Jason Whitmire has more than 15 years of executive marketing and management experience in semiconductor and system software. He currently serves as General Manager of Wind River’s Mobile Solutions business. Previously he was a managing director of FSMLabs, where he headed the worldwide wireless and EMEA businesses, and he was head of business development for wireless software at Infineon Technologies for four years. Additionally, Jason has held senior product management, marketing and business development positions at two European mobile network operators. Jason got his start in the wireless arena in 1993 while representing the US government in international spectrum and privatization negotiations.

J2ME? Why?

By Doug Schaefer

I was just reading the slides presented from the kick-off meeting of the Eclipse Mobile Industry Working Group. I believe this is the first working group at Eclipse and I think it's a great concept. Bring groups of companies together that are interested in the same or similar technologies and do some planning. Hopefully that will result in new investments in various Eclipse projects.

Anyway, one of the examples of work environments shown was for a J2ME developer. The first thing that jumped into my head, and of course I'm writing this entry without thinking more so I may come off a bit misinformed here but hey I'm just the dumb C++ guy, but who cares about J2ME any more? With the rich mobile development environments provided with Android, the iPhone, the new Palm Pre, and even Qt for mobile devices, why would you do J2ME development any more. Isn't there much more opportunity for greater riches writing apps for these new and wildly popular environments?

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Palm Pre and WebKit

By Doug Schaefer

I've been following the Palm Pre story a bit the last few days. While the technical details are still pretty sparse, it appears that one of my predictions for 2009 is already starting to happen.

My understanding, and I hope it isn't coming from sources who are also using the same technique to guess at the architecture of this thing, is that the UI for the Palm is rendered totally using WebKit. It appears that the applications for this device are written in JavaScript and use HTML and maybe WebKit's SVG support to render the graphics. Hell, maybe it's even using Dojo to make things look really sharp.

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A busy day for Khronos

By Doug Schaefer

My Khronos.org News feed filled up all of a sudden today. Looks like they've been busy and had a couple of announcements to make.

They released a new version of the 2D OpenVG spec.

They added some APIs for text glyphing to make it easier to draw good looking text. I'm not sure anyone really uses OpenVG, especially when you are most likely to be drawing 2D in a web browser with Adobe Flash or SVG (and even then, most likely Flash). From the news release, this is probably most interesting to the mobile crowd.

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BMW wants to go open

By Doug Schaefer

Ian Skerrett, our fine director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, pointed out this article from MotorAuthority.com. BMW apparently is feeling out the market to see if there is an appetite by tier one manufacturers to work together on an open source stack for in-car infotainment systems.

The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.

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Google has their own browser!???

By Doug Schaefer

Apparently the word leaked on an unofficial Google blog site and they followed up with an "oops" official blog post. Either way, the word is out and the web browser "industry" is in for a shake up. Google is releasing their own web browser called Google Chrome. Apparently it includes pieces from Webkit (I'm guessing the browser part) and Firefox (I'm guessing the chrome part) and will be developed as an open source project.

The first beta will be released tomorrow (Tuesday). I've heard rumors but always dismissed them. Why would they do that when we have a handful of pretty good browsers already. I guess the rumors were true and given the beta comes out now, it's been in the works for a while.

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Open Source Handhelds

By Doug Schaefer

Quite a while ago now I posted about the open source gaming device from Korea know as the GP2X. At the end of the day, it ended up with a storied history and while I love the concept of a handheld mobile device for which you can write your own applications, their execution as a company out side of Korea wasn't that great and only a distributor in the UK was able to make any kind of splash with it.

At any rate, I found on Slashdot that they have announced a new generation of the product called the Wiz. The links lead you to the UK site and a big JPEG of the brochure in English. The specs look pretty good, ARM9 processor at 533MHz, 3D accelerated graphics, Linux of course, and support for audio and video making it a pretty cool multimedia gaming machine, for which you can write your own applications. And hopefully they'll be a bit more successful at delivering it than the last one.

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Android SDK goes beta

By Doug Schaefer

Well, if you follow the embedded industry even from a distance, the news that the Android SDK has gone beta is old news by now. I've been so busy p2-izing our upcoming Wind River products that I haven't had time to write here. Time to get my priorities straight :).

Any whoo, there's a lot of competition all of a sudden for mind share in the mobile Linux game. Android has been pretty quiet lately but they've clearly been busy beavers and a real Android-based device seems imminent, so it's time to take them seriously.

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Android will be open source…eventually

By Doug Gaff

It's been a few months since the initial buzz of the Android SDK release, and the technology itself continues to look great. Ed Burnette recently posted a blog indicating Android will be 100% open source. In it he notes that Google says they fully intend to open up all of their code using appropriate open source licenses (including EPL!), but they're not yet ready because some of the API's aren't done. They're afraid of having to support bad API's forever. Yes, that sounds familiar, and of course the Eclipse response is: maybe if they opened up their API's, others could then help them evolve those API's to a point where the overall community was happy. We have provisional API's in Eclipse for exactly this reason. At a minimum, I wish Google would publish a timetable (gasp!) for getting this code opened up. Ed says Google will open (most) everything by the end of 2008. Please see the comments for details.

I want to revisit the two requests I made in my original post.

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Mobile phones clear for take-off?

By Paul Parkinson

A few months ago I commented on some of the technical developments in passenger in-flight systems ('In-flight Internet access...and mobile phones too?'). In recent weeks, there have been some rapid developments, not on the technical front, but in terms of regulation and operation, with announcements from the UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom and the European Commission.

On the 26th March, Ofcom published the results of its consultation on the use of Mobile Communications on Aircraft (MCA). The executive summary summarizes the findings and Ofcom's decisions, but the full statement (PDF) provides much more detail, revealing a mixture of social, operational, safety and security issues.

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Mobile Broadband dongles find success in UK

By Paul Tingey

There seems to have many news stories about the imminent rise of 3G technology in the UK over the last few years. Looking back these stories would seem to have heralded repeated false dawns with 3G being relegated to little more than another mobile voice calling technology. However we now seem to have positive proof that 3G based mobile broadband is becoming a viable alternative to (or addition to) more traditional broadband technologies for UK users.

In a blog entry titled Mobile net takes off, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC includes what he describes as "an extraordinary graph" showing how the amount of data crossing the 3 mobile operator's 3G network has increased 14 fold in just six months.

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An Industry and Technology Revolution is on the Horizon

By Jason Whitmire

Limo, and in a slightly different way Android, have killed the standards-based approach to open source development in mobile. In the Linux world, creating an esoteric, theoretical application standard not based on market-driven code requires too much speculative investment without any clear mitigation of ROI risk for anyone to take up anymore. Indeed, the days of a bunch of representative techies flying to exotic locales to dream up the theoretical perfect system are over. It’s just too expensive to completely retool an entire stack without a known intrinsic return.

Because of the concentration in the mobile market (83% of handsets manufactured by five companies), when market leaders have invested in a stack, it is a standard whether certified by an arcane standards body or not.  The  Open Handset Alliance has created a de facto market standard not because a group of market leaders have adopted the standard, but because of Google’s overall singular market weight. The effect is the same (Trolltech and OpenMoko did the same thing that OHA did, and took it one step further by actually building a phone, but no one came running to embrace their reference designs because they lacked the market weight that Google has).

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In-flight Internet access... and mobile phones too?

By Paul Parkinson

I read a business article in the Economist ('Mobile Phones on planes - Your call') during the Christmas holidays about the current developments in passenger in-flight systems, specifically the provision of Internet data access and the potential to support mobile (cell) phone voice calls during flight.

The article reports on trials of a Wi-Fi data service by JetBlue and Quantas, and a forthcoming mobile phone voice call trial by Air France (which follows on from the mobile phone SMS text messaging described in this Air France press release); it then goes on to discuss the social impact and acceptability of Internet data access and mobile voice calls during flight, which makes interesting reading.

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The Check is in the Mail, Do No Evil and Other Matters of Trust

By Jason Whitmire

All will agree that mobile Linux suffers from fragmentation today, and that fragmentation
•    creates significant challenges to Linux adoption in mobile phones (lack of interoperability et. al.) 
•    presents barriers to innovation
•    increases the carrier cost to Linux terminal deployment.

For Linux to succeed in the mobile market, we need to minimize fragmentation and its resulting incompatibility.  In the early days of the PC revolution, this type of incompatibility was similarly rampant, and the Wintel monopoly provided the standard.  More importantly, the Wintel monopoly created the incentive to rally around the standard. 

But suggesting that the industry set up Google as the mobile Linux gatekeeper, including issuing all the keys to the various feature phone middleware/applications framework kingdoms (which account for about 90% of all phones deployed today), to take on the monumental role of software guardian for mobile Linux, is possibly antithetical to the open source movement, regardless of Google’s motto.  And perhaps this is not the role that Google ultimately seeks in the mobile market.  Indeed, there are multiple thrusts to Google’s mobile terminal strategy, all of which are underpinned by the principle of radically improving the efficiency and experience of the end-user’s mobile internet time.

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OHA, Android and Eclipse

By Doug Gaff

It's been amusing following the fervent speculation around the gPhone, especially the collective sigh of letdown heard 'round the blogosphere when Google announced the Open Handset Alliance and said in a video, "there's no such thing as a single gPhone... we're enabling an entire industry to create thousands of gPhones." Apparently the gadget-hungry among us just wanted a sexy competitor to the iPhone, even though there are already several reasonable contenders and one knock-off.  After the announcement, there was the usual talk about vaporware and who was or wasn't a part of the alliance.  However, things got a lot more exciting today with the public release of the Android SDK.  Yes, Google is doing things in reverse order... putting the platform out first and then letting the mobile devices follow.

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Open Handset Alliance and LiMo – Why both initiatives are here to stay

By Jason Whitmire

It's easy to take the fragmentation of the mobile phone industry for granted. With over 40 different proprietary and Open Source Middleware and Application Frameworks addressing Ultra Low Cost, Entry, Feature and Smart Phone market segments, software costs have exploded and are expected to hit some 25% of the entire Bill of Materials on a mobile phone this year. No wonder mobile network operators are asking the industry to stop the madness and consolidate around a limited number of pre-defined platforms.

Many operators very clearly see Microsoft, Symbian and one to two versions of Linux as the only future software platforms that will comprise their terminal roadmap.  Linux is unique in that most Tier 1 OEMs – with the exception of Nokia – plan to gradually replace the proprietary software addressing the feature phone segments (where by far the most volumes of phones are shipped today and in the future).

With this in mind, two juggernauts – Open Handset Alliance and LiMo – promise to alter the landscape for the third software platform – Linux – for good. The LiMo Foundation’s goal is to defragment the Linux handset market by creating a Linux-based mobile platform that lowers development costs, increases flexibility, and yields differentiated devices. The goal of the Open Handset Alliance is to deliver solutions to enable complete open software, open devices, and an open ecosystem. Are these movements destined for perpetual conflict?

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Final Plug for Embedded/Mobile Symposium

By Doug Gaff

Eclipse Summit Europe is now less than 2 weeks away, but there's still time to register and participate!

In our "System Engineering for Device Software" symposium, we will discuss what's missing in Eclipse for the embedded and mobile developer. We hope to come away with a better understanding of how you are using Eclipse and what you'd like to see next from the Eclipse community and ecosystem.

Please drop me a line if you're planning on attending.  Hope to see you there!

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Integrated Modular Smartphone?

By Paul Parkinson

The title of this blog might suggest that I've got mixed up between Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) and consumer devices, but if you bear with me, I'll try to explain why I think there are some parallels.

I was recently given a shiny new smartphone (wikipedia), which will enable me to keep up to date with important emails when I'm out of the office, rather than get a couple of days behind which can happen  sometimes when I'm travelling.

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Climber makes "worlds highest mobile phone call"

By Paul Tingey

Mobile telephony reached another frontier yesterday when the British climber Rod Baber set a new record by making the world's highest land-based mobile phone call from the summit of Everest. According to his sponsor (Motorola) Rod Baber made a call from 29,035 feet (8848 metres) to a voicemail box. You can listen to his message via a link on the BBC website.

It would seem that the phone call was well outside of the normal operating envelope for both the caller (who dialed prepared speed dial numbers using a small pointer because it was too cold to remove his gloves) and the phone itself (Mr. Baber had to tape the batteries to his arm to ensure that they remained warm enough to operate the phone). Mr. Baber also called home to his family as well as sending the world's highest land-based SMS message reading "One small text for man, one giant leap for mobilekind – thanks Motorola".

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Hello from 3GSM in Barcelona

By Paul Tingey

I am writing this during the third day of the of the 3GSM Conference and Show in Barcelona. Having walked the halls (or at least some of them) over the last couple of days it is apparent to me now just how huge this show is; in the region of 1,300 stands spread over six huge halls and approximately 60,000 visitors make for a very lively atmosphere.

If I had to choose the most "talked about" single technology then it would probably be WiMax. However, maybe that is because it's the most recently maturing of the "convergence enabling" technologies. And in truth, convergence is the strongest theme of the show with converged networks, converged handsets and even converged silicon featuring widely in the show.

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Report from the International Telecommunications Union Conference

By Glenn Seiler

I’ve been in Hong Kong the last week visiting the ITU Telecom World 2006. The theme of this show, as articulated by a keynote speech from Vivian Reding, the European Union commissioner for Information Society and Media, is “Living in the Digital World”.  The fact that someone from the EU was giving the keynote at a Telecom show in Asia shows just how international this trade-show is. There are pavilions from nearly every major country, with Telecom providers from each country showing how they are bringing to their markets new Fixed Mobile Convergence services such as VoIP to cell phones.

As with any large trade-show – and this show is one of the largest – it’s a little overwhelming. There are so many vendors all trying to get their message heard above the others. There are ten halls of vendors with everything that has anything to do with telecommunications – from coaxial cable vendors with cable as big as my arm (for FTTP – Fiber-to-the-Premise) to consumer electronics. It is the latter of course that drew my attention. It was hard to escape the hype around triple play. Not just to the home or office, but to the phone itself.

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DSDP: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

By Doug Gaff

Following up on today’s announcement of milestones in three of the DSDP projects—eRCP 1.0, MTJ 0.7, and TM 1.0—I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on DSDP…how it started, where it is today, and where it’s heading. First, let me start with a timeline of project events.

March 2005. Unofficially, the DSDP project got its start at a BoF session during EclispeCon last year. At the BoF, several device software tools vendors assembled to discuss the need for more embedded-specific functionality in Eclipse, specifically in the debugging area. There was acknowledgment of CDT and its extensive contribution to tooling in the embedded space, but there was also a desire to see more enhancements in the Eclipse Platform and more of a breadth of functionality around device software development. Shortly after EclipseCon, Wind River proposed the DSDP project and its two initial sub-projects, Target Management and Device Debugging. The TM project set out to build a framework and UI for managing remote embedded devices. The DD project initially focused on working with the Eclipse Platform Debug team to create a more customizable debugging framework in the Platform.

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Live from Amsterdam: Day 2 Observations from the 2006 Inaugural Open Source in Mobile Event

By Glenn Seiler

The audience was a little lighter today. I guess that’s to be expected since we are in Amsterdam and there just might be some other distractions this fun city has to offer.

Today’s sessions started out with a bang by continuing the fragmentation theme. The first two presenters were from .orgs focused on establishing standards in the mobile Linux industry: LiPS, (Linux in Phone Standards) followed by OSDL MLI, the Mobile Linux Initiative. These two .orgs communicated a noticeably different approach to solving the Linux mobile phone solution versus what we heard from the X Foundation yesterday.  It was interesting to hear both standards representatives zero in on the fact the Telco industry, as it stands today, was defined by standards. The LiPS representative even posed the very question I was pondering: “How can you have a Linux mobile phone without telecom standards?” Anyone out there who can offer up a compelling answer?  It was clear from the LiPS and OSDL MLI presentations that they have defined their focus areas and have created standards initiatives that are very complimentary to each other. LiPS is focusing on the middleware and application layers. OSDL MLI is focusing on the kernel.

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Could the Mobile Phone be the Next PC?

By Glenn Seiler

Will 2007 be the year for mass adoption of Linux in smart phones? This question is the one on everyone’s minds here at the inaugural Open Source in Mobile Event. Taking place in Amsterdam today and tomorrow, this event brings together service providers, carriers, software and hardware vendors, ISVs and everyone else involved in the open source in mobile community. Day one just concluded and since I’m here I thought I’d share some observations that caught my attention.

Needless to say, as this is the inaugural event, my expectations were low. Much to my surprise though, the event has been well attended with over 100 paying attendees. Worth noting to anyone who doesn’t believe Linux will have an impact on the mobile phone market: given the level of attendees participating, I feel pretty safe in concluding that manufacturers are taking the opportunity in mobile Linux very seriously.

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“Hugging it Out” with Open Source…

By John Bruggeman

Congratulations Microsoft. Responding to your community? Embracing an open source model in a non-trivial way? These are big, admirable steps I thought I would never personally witness. It always makes my day to see another industry leader make business decisions based on the same market premises I believe. Customers want choice and flexibility. For those of us in the industry that haven't learned the lesson by now, the key enabler has become community developed standards. By working together, we only make each other stronger.

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Four Commercials

By Dinker Charak

Four commercials running across India caught my attention.

The first one is a TV commercial which shows a couple of tennis players playing over the rooftops and jumping off the building during play. It ends with a person inside one of the buildings managing to catch an excellent return with a digital camera. A voice-over describes the wonderful features of the camera.

The second one is also a TV commercial and has couple of people listening to music as they go about their day. A voice-over talks about the ease with which their music is now accessible on the go.

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