Inside Contactless + Mobile Distillery - Mobile Marketing Magazine

Partnership Targets NFC Interoperability

INSIDE Contactless, which provides advanced, open standard contactless chip technologies, and NFC (Near Field Ciommunication) technology solutions, has announced a partnership with Mobile Distillery, a Java mobile porting software company, to develop an interoperable Java ME solution for NFC developers. The companies are aiming to design a software solution for the development of portable NFC/Java mobile applications across multiple NFC phones. Based on Mobile Distillery’s Celsius architecture, the solution is aimed at mobile software developers, who will need to cope with multiple implementations of NFC technologies, adding more complexity to the development of Java ME applications across multiple handsets.
By using the NFC Celsius module, the developer will be able to work on the NFC/Java ME application once, and run it across all NFC phones without any further modifications. The key benefits of the NFC Celsius module, the companies say, will be accelerated time-to-market, reduction of costs and an easy transfer to upcoming NFC phones.
The partnership is divided into two phases: firstly in the short term, the two companies will be develop a Celsius NFC prototype by the end of Q3 2007. The second step, planned for Q1 2008, will consist of the joint development of the NFC Celsius module, a complete set of Java ME NFC tools covering the commercially available NFC handsets, and ones for the near future.
“As a reference mobile execution platform, Java ME enjoyed tremendous success over the past five years, and is widely recognised by the mobile developers community, but it also undergoes an irresistible trend to fragmentation, with significantly different implementations in handsets from various vendors” says Philippe Martineau, INSIDE’s Executive Vice President of the NFC Business Line. “As an NFC pioneer and market leader, INSIDE believes that interoperability is a key success factor in delivering NFC-based services. We have a role to play and the proper expertise to bring the full benefits of the NFC standard to the NFC developers community.”