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Kada platform enhances capabilities of Palm devices

A new company out of Andover, Mass., hopes to make the Palm personal digital assistant feel even more like a personal computer than ever before.

Kada Systems Inc. launched Monday with its Kada Mobile Platform, a software application platform it claims is the smallest and fastest of its kind available, and the first to support full-function Java applications on a mobile device.

Powered by the Kada virtual machine, or what is known as a “clean room” implementation of the Java virtual machine, the platform allows developers to test, optimize and deploy applications for wirelessly enabled PDAs. It is deemed a clean room implementation because Kada designed its virtual machine using only the public Java specifications from Sun Microsystems Inc., and not the actual source code.

“We implemented the functions virtually blind,” said Jim Acquaviva, chief executive officer of Kada Systems.

The Kada virtual machine supports full-function graphical database applications that can be deployed on the Palm OS 3.5 operating system now, the Windows CE and EPOC systems in June, and the RIM operating system in September.

“There are not many device manufacturers that are bundling in VMs right now,” said Shekar Mantha, Kada’s founder and chief technology officer.

With Kada Mobile, these applications can operate locally on the PDA, independent of a wireless connection. If no wireless connection is available, the device can synchronize with the server at a later time and the user will not lose any of the functionality. For example, a user could download account information for sales calls, access that information offline, and then when a wireless connection is available again, dial in for automatic updates that download the most current data.

Kada Mobile supports standard development tools such as Visual Cafe, Forte, PowerJ and Code Warrior. According to Mantha, the standard version of Kada Mobile takes up about 155 kilobytes of memory on a PDA. The compact version uses about 155 kilobytes.

“It’s definitely less than half that of any comparable version out there,” Mantha said.

Most PDAs have anywhere from 2 to 8 Megabytes of total memory.

Acquaviva said the company will market Kada Mobile almost equally to independent and internal corporate developers, and he estimates actual applications will be available to device manufacturers by May or June.

“Down the road we’re targeting to build relationships with device manufacturers, but to do that we have to have broad based developer support,” Acquaviva said.

A developer kit for a single developer license costs $300 and a basic subscription for Kada Mobile costs $900 a year, and includes access to Web downloads, online technical support and the ability to ship out test applications. The professional subscription costs $4,000 a year and also includes the features of a basic subscription plus a personal account manager and 100 commercial deployments, Kada said.

Kada Systems is funded by a $5 million investment from JK&B Capital. It has 20 employees between its corporate development and sales office in Andover, Mass., and its engineering and technical support center in Charlotte, N.C.

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