Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens to develop industry initiative for Universal Mobile Games Platform - Mobile leaders define API's for Mobile Games Platform; benefiting operators, developers, and consumers.

Ericsson, Motorola, Inc. and Siemens Information and Communication Mobile, today announced plans to develop an industry initiative to define a universal mobile games platform, using existing and emerging standards. With this initiative, the three companies aim to help mobile operators offer a broad selection of games content and to provide developers with a standardized platform. Mobile consumers will benefit through a rich, interactive, multiplayer game experience.

Mobile operators and developers of mobile games are faced with an overwhelming array of choices for mobile game services and lack a platform that is open, standard and extensible. Without such a platform, operators face greater complexity and cost in offering a wide range of games that access their network functionality, such as billing, authentication and location services. The initiative will focus initial efforts on agreeing upon open Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) and a Software Development Kit (SDK), which, once developed, will be available to software developers subject to license. The three companies expect to have specifications available in Q3 of this year.

Once the initiative is formally launched, Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens plan to work with other industry leaders and innovators to extend the benefits of this universal games platform, including mobile phone and infrastructure vendors, platform technology providers, games developers, mobile operators, games service providers and systems integrators. The objectives of the proposed initiative are to: · · Support mobile network operators and Application Service Providers (ASPs) to deliver the most compelling selection of applications · · Attract games developers to create applications that can easily be deployed to reach the largest number of mobile consumers · · Supply consumers worldwide with access to a wide variety of engaging interactive mobile games content - driving the demand for next generation networks and devices

"We believe that offering compelling mobile games will act as an effective catalyst for the Mobile Internet market as a whole, so we are convinced that operators, as well as the game developing community, will benefit greatly from this initiative," said Jan Lindgren, vice president of Ericsson Internet Applications. "Our aim is to promote an open approach to the mobile games market by supporting current - and future - standards and by collaborating with all interested industry players. This co-operative approach clearly demonstrates Ericsson's strategy of supporting network operators wherever and whenever we can."

"We're seeing that developers of mobile games are resorting to writing their own platforms or having to multiply the efforts to support many platforms," said Tim Krauskopf, vice president and general manager of Core Solutions for Motorola's Internet Software and Content Group. "As a result, costs are increasing and distribution options are limited. As an industry we need to provide an integrated development environment that unites mobile networks, devices and game servers as a mass market games console."

"One of the Siemens IC Mobile objectives is to make it possible for users in Tokyo to sit and play a multi-player game with some friends in Washington and Munich at the same time, on different networks and platforms, with various models of mobile phones," said Thorsten Heins, President of Solutions within the Siemens Information and Communication Mobile Group.

Ericsson, Motorola, and Siemens have agreed to work with Metrowerks, a leading development tools organization, to support this platform with the company's CodeWarriorŪ Integrated Development Environment (IDE). CodeWarrior, a leading IDE for the consumer and wireless markets, is used by the majority of developers for Sony Playstation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Palm OS, and also supports Java (J2ME for wireless) and Symbian. With more than 400,000 developers worldwide using CodeWarrior development tools, Metrowerks will play a major role in expanding the developer community for this platform.

Developer support, test facilities and application certification will be provided through Ericsson Mobility World, which includes Ericsson Developers' Zone, Motorola's Applications Global Network (MAGNET) Program, and Siemens' relevant program.


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