WAC initiative could spur more widget adoption, Snac CEO says

As the Wholesale Applications Community takes steps to form in July, widget companies like Snac are hoping to see operators embrace widgets as another way to drive data traffic, said Snac CEO Mark Caron.
The WAC initiative, announced at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, is a way for wireless operators to make themselves relevant , and get relevant revenues, from delivering mobile applications to end users. Today device manufacturers/operating system providers and developers share that revenue, leaving operators largely out of the picture. As such, 29 companies, mostly operators, now have joined the WAC community to re-insert themselves into the revenue equation.
WAC laid out an aggressive timeline to launch earlier this month. The group will officially form in July, announcing its board of directors and laying out its business model, said Tim Raby, who is acting CEO of the WAC and also the managing director for the Open Mobile Terminal Platform. The first specifications will be announced in September and the group plans to hold its first applications developer event in November. Then at MWC in 2011, the WAC initiative should be open for business, Raby said at an analyst briefing earlier this month.
The problem with so many OSes and devices is well documented: the market is fragmented, forcing applications developers to choose which platform and device to pin the success of their app on. For many, the Apple iPhone has been the first choice. (Apple is not a member of WAC and not likely to join.) But Apple only represents a small percentage of the overall market, Caron noted. WAC is hoping the 3 billion end users its operators count and its global geographic scale will lure developers to write for the specification, which blends three application platforms: the Joint Innovation Lab, or JIL, OMTP’s Bondi platform and the GSMA’s One API. “The application world is becoming increasingly decoupled from the investment that’s required to support them,” Raby said. “The investment is required to support the applications going forward, whatever the platform.”
Operators will be able to use their network assets, including billing and customer care, to enable all kinds of new applications once the WAC initiative is working, Caron said.
“A long-term opportunity for us is to license our technology to carriers and device vendors,” Caron said. “We’re talking with carriers but we’re not waiting for them.” Today Snac courts it partners to have their own widgets for people to download off-deck.
Widgets are still important, even as smartphone adoption increases, Caron said, because widgets can drive so many more applications than native applications preinstalled on a device. People will access wireless applications three ways, Caron noted. Native applications are flourishing and will continue to do so, he said. The deep integration that happens when an app is written to run on a specific device is impressive, but it is expensive to write and limited to one OS. At the other end of the spectrum are mobile applications that access the Web, which also brings scale but not always a great user experience.
In the middle sit widgets, which run in the background on a device, and are light and fast so they don’t drain a device’s battery.
As such, widgets are easy to access and designed for people who like to get access to information quickly. Widgets are ideal for information that people like to check throughout the day, like sports scores. “Widgets make it easier for the end user,” Caron said.
Over the next few months, the WAC community will work to standardize the technical requirements for widgets, aiming to bring that ease of use to 3 billion end users by February. “It’s aggressive,” Caron said, but the end result should be an explosion of light-weight apps to access a wide range of content.