Prior to AOL, Jaisimha was Vice President of Product Development for Medio Systems, a pioneer in the Mobile Search and Advertising space. While at Medio, Jaisimha oversaw development teams that created and deployed industry leading text and voice-enabled search and advertising solutions for Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, TMobile International, Telus Mobility, Sprint and others. From 2003 to 2005, while at Microsoft, he was involvedinconnectivity solutions development for the portable digital media device market, including handsets, for the Windows desktop OS.

Global Web services giant AOL’s foray into the mobile communications space was expected and the recent unveiling of its Open Mobile Platform is expected to unleash a dazzling array of applications and services for users. JAI JAISIMHA elaborates… Doubtless, there has been a lot happening in the mobile telephony and integrated communications space in the past two years or so. Convergence and confluence of platforms and mediums and also the intersection of players straddling different businesses and domains getting involved in a chain of development activities in the ecosystem necessitates that a lot of issues have to be clarified.

With the amount of development and work being done on Operating Systems, the UI layer and the Services layer, the true vision of integrated services and perhaps unified communications - and the iPhone is a good example of that - on a single hand-held device is finally beginning to emerge. There is certainly a lot of desire to replicate the Apple model by many many players and this they hope to do by way of controlling the end-to-end path of the value chain. On the other hand, we also need to understand that devices come in many shapes, formats and with different capabilities –and these will continue to be developed in the future as well – and are offered by many different providers and that heterogeneity will be actively promoted by carriers because of their large subscriber bases; at least in the foreseeable future.

The moot point now is that with customers increasingly seeking variety in the choice of cell phones and mobile communication devices offered and at different price points.

it is going to be quite interesting to see how key players will create services for addressing specific markets while also maintaining a global vision.

In much the same way that a primarily US-based and highly successful player like AOL has expanded into a lot more markets and countries with highly tailored offerings. And how a predominantly Web services based model has been broadened to include both desktop and mobile products. This is being made possible through a string of partnerships with carriers in different markets wherein both parties aim to add value to the alliance.

Now, we have quickly cottoned onto the multi-farious capabilities and advantages that can be derived from Open Source technologies and in many ways feel that Open Source technologies will power the mobile experience and open up multitudinous opportunities for a host of players in the mobile, media and communications ecosystem.

The whole suite of services that we have been offering through the desktop due to various advancements in UI interfaces and browser capabilities can now be made amenable for next-generation handsets and mobile communication devices. So whether it is video, search, email, games, location-specific information tools and guides-all of these can now be made available on virtually any form of communication devices.

Therefore, it becomes pertinent to point out the challenges in mobile for media companies who are at the forefront of revolutionising the communications industry and the very availability of content and services to an increasingly burgeoning –and yet different and fragmented –consumer base. These challenges primarily center around the increasing development time and costs, integrating network services between Online and Mobile. Apart from these, media companies also have to contend with porting (of deployed applications) costing 60-80% of project costs and increasing.

Seen in that light, the emergence of the AOL Open Mobile Platform initiative aims to actually bring more applications to the fore and especially help users across the spectrum to easily develop applications using markup language familiar to Web developers. Further, this stems from the firm belief and realisation that the current (and future) mobile application landscape and the ecosystem of involved players is at a crucial inflexion point. Large masses of consumers are bedeviled with numerous complicated and highly confusing choices with regards to technologies, services, Operating Systems and devices. It is critical to simplify the choices for consumers and equipping the developer community with access to the tools and source code that they need to create applications for a wide variety of mobile devices that work across popular mobile Operating systems is a crucial step.

Expectedly, the “open” nature of the platform will enable platform capabilities to continually expand through widespread and pan-national developer participation and through various levels of innovation prevalent in regional markets. The AOL Open Mobile Platform will provide developers with ready access to the tools and source code they need to build and distribute applications across all major mobile device platforms and operating systems including BREW, Java, Linux, RIM, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. Further, the AOL Open Mobile Platform works on three main components: XML based UI mark-up language -MML (Mobile Markup Language) which allows users to define an application user interface in an OS/platform agnostic fashion; Lightweight OS/platform specific client which renders MML on a specific device; and Application server which allows users to build application specific business logic and provides standard devices required by all applications.

Some of the advantages of AOL Open Mobile Platform encompass dramatically reducing application development time and costs, no porting time or cost, working across a wide array of handsets available in the marketplace, online and network services integrated with Mobile services, Content Management and Publishing Controls and availability of License on-deck, off-deck, pre-set. The beauty or leveragability of the platform is such that independent and enterprise players can also avail of the open nature of the platform. Commercial and enterprise players while taking advantage of the platform can tailor their set of applications and services according to specific needs and requirements of different user or consumer segments. For instance, if the Tata group wants to build an application for mobile phones, they can develop their own application, deploy their own servers and make the applications available for download from their own Website.

But, in the future, developers who might not have the wherewithal to distribute their own applications can either go to the carriers as they do today or they could come to AOL. AOL would be able to provide them with the markets where we have a strong audience in and make these products available to this captive audience. And the services or mobile products could be for video, IM, locationbased services, games, search options etc.. Of course, there will be cost-side and revenue side challenges. The cost side of it is the amount of investments that will be needed to support all these handsets and innovation through better R & D.

What we are propositioning to developers is, “use our source code (so that you don’t spend a lot of time in coding), but we hope that if you make any changes to the platform , you consider contributing back to the community so that other people can also use it.” We have also outlined the opportunities for monetising a range of mobile applications developed on our platform. These could be through mobile Web advertising on WAPenabled phones, streaming video services, SMS/MMS (universally popular amongst a huge mass of users) services and other downloadable applications such as Java/Brew.

More importantly, we also feel that innovation can no longer be centered in North America (our early forays in Asia and Europe and especially development centers in India showcase that in many ways) and the successful premise and expected popularity and acceptance of the Open Mobile platform will go a long way towards proving that.