Wireless Standards Mothership

Building wireless applications is risky. You have to dedicate resources carefully and place bets on which combination of carrier, network technology, and device are best suited to your applications. The wireless industry needs well defined, universally accepted standards if it going to deploy applications that subscribers are willing to pay for. To that the end the industry has come together under The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), which this week announced eight new voluntary specs for everything from messaging to content delivery. Not only can these standards help application developers, they promote applications interoperability across carriers. This is more of a problem in the US where carriers are trying to differnetiate their offerings across a number of angles. SMS and GSM roaming are perfect examples of how universally adopted standards increase the pie for everyone.

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