In an effort to make up for a history of poor communication with application developers, Motorola Inc. held its first Application Developer Conference last week in San Diego.
Dubbed the Xtreme Developer’s Conference, some 300 developers met with Motorola and other industry personnel during the four-day event to receive education and training on the latest Motorola technology, as well as other open industry standards.
Traditionally, Motorola has been known to keep its innovations and technology fairly close to home. According to organizers, the developer’s conference was aimed at wiping that slate clean and showing that the new company philosophy is one of sharing and cooperation.
“We cannot go it alone,” said Geoffrey Frost, Motorola PCS Sector vice president, addressing attendees. “This company understands that the future of wireless will be co-created with you.”
Demonstrations and training included WAP applications, Bluetooth developments, VoxML, ReFLEX and Motorola’s flagship Mobile Internet eXchange platform, or MIX.
At the conference, Motorola unveiled plans to open its first U.S.-based Application Development Center in Boynton Beach, Fla., to provide developers with support, training, technology certification and interoperability training.
The center is expected to open in October. Other Motorola ADCs exist in Sweden and Spain and the company said it plans to open other such centers around the world.
The Florida center will focus on wireless Internet-enabling technologies such as WAP, Bluetooth, Java, VoxML, SyncML, GSM, CDMA and iDEN.
“Our goal with this center, and with other centers around the world, is to offer a dynamic, interactive atmosphere that fosters creativity and enables these professionals to construct innovative wireless Internet applications,” said Janiece Webb, senior vice president and general manager of Motorola’s Personal Networks Group. “The result will be faster delivery of services to market, which benefits consumers, network operators and enterprises alike.”
The facility will provide developers access to the resources of the other centers, the company said, as well as the Invisix Centres of Excellence, a joint venture between Motorola and Cisco Systems Inc. created to spur development of wireless Internet services through the construction of Internet Protocol-based systems.
The company’s PCS Americas Messaging Group demonstrated several software applications still in the development stage. The sneak-peak was designed to educate developers on the possibilities of upcoming wireless Internet developments.
The group implemented an application allowing show attendees to access the conference schedule from two-way messaging devices and WAP phones for access to such things as listing times, track numbers and locations, speakers and even a map of the venue.
Other content applications included weather, a fantasy sports game and the ability to access internal corporate database information to track such data as order quantities and shipping dates.
Motorola also announced it has submitted its WAP server to the WAP Forum for its reference pool interoperability testing process. The company will conduct another developer conference Oct. 23-26 in London and is planning yet another in Asia early next year.
