Phone.com added to its mounting momentum by signing a definitive agreement to buy the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) products and operations of infrastructure software company APiON of Belfast, Northern Ireland. The deal provides an entry point to Phone.com for selling its WAP products to European GSM carriers, according to Phone.com. APiON supplies WAP software to about 10 GSM operators. The deal also essentially eliminates a market competitor since APiON’s WAP gateway is not based on Phone.com’s UP.Link Server Suite.
Phone.com introduced a WAP 1.1 compliant UP.Link Server.
In addition, Phone.com announced a strategic agreement with Motorola for both its server and microbrowser products. Under the software licensing and distribution agreement, Motorola will incorporate the UP.Link Server in its new Mobile Internet Exchange Communications Platform and Phone.com’s UP.Browser WAP 1.1 compliant microbrowser into Motorola’s entire line of handsets, regardless of airlink protocol.
Nokia announced it signed a deal with IBM under which Nokia’s WAP software will be available on IBM’s NetFinity servers, running Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system. In addition, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard signed an agreement under which the two will develop and promote mobile Internet solutions for enterprises based on Nokia’s WAP server software, to be made available on the HP-UK1 and Windows NT operating systems.
AU-System announced Korean manufacturer LG Information & Communications licensed its WAP browser for inclusion in LGIC’s CDMA products targeted at the Korean market.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute and the WAP Forum signed a cooperation agreement designed to drive interoperability of standards for wireless mobile Internet. The WAP Forum said this new agreement underlines the importance of collaboration between standardization groups to create protocol specifications that will work across different wireless network technologies.
Nokia Networks, the infrastructure arm of Nokia, said it and Mitsubishi Electric initiated interoperability testing between their products and solutions supporting WAP 1.1.
