Telekom Austria Group Drives Innovative Development Platform for Mobile Applications

Vip mobile, a member of Telekom Austria Group today announced that Telekom Austria Group has joined the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) as a founding member and Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO Telekom Austria Group, has been appointed board member of the newly founded organization with a three year mandate. The WAC is a worldwide alliance of leading telecommunications operators aimed at acting as a global interface between the developers of innovative applications and the end-customers. The WAC represents an open-source platform, which supports global standards and provides an ideal working basis for the developers of mobile applications.

Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO Telekom Austria Group, said: “The Telekom Austria Group has committed itself to the WAC to better meet customers’ individual information needs and offer a real value added on the basis of a wider selection of innovative applications and services. Apps providers also benefit from this open-source platform as they are granted direct access to the end-customers of all participating mobile operators. Furthermore, the platform independence significantly increases the overall application outreach. This ranges from globally available services to niche programs with a very specific small-scale target group. Recently organized developer challenges have demonstrated that applications with a regional focus are the most in demand.”

Going forward, the WAC will make a significant contribution to standardizing the currently highly fragmented mobile application market: Due to the great multitude of equipment suppliers and the great variety of operating systems currently available, the development of applications for a larger target group is very complicated, extremely time-consuming and cost-intensive. Against this backdrop, the WAC is offering developers a standardized and therefore cost-effective platform, on which any possible kind of service for mobile and smart phones can be conceived and programmed. This platform also promotes a closer cooperation among all suppliers of mobile end-devices.

In November 2010, the first specifications and software development kits will be published. This set of technical rules and standards will be based on HTML5 and lay the foundation for developers worldwide, providing a uniform basis for the creation of new applications for mobile and smart phones. The software developer kit will be based on the W3C standard.