LiMo Foundation News

  • LiMo Foundation and GNOME Foundation Partner to Catalyze Further Open Source Innovation

    Alignment between these two key organizations will accelerate mainstream adoption of open source technologies and will empower open source developers worldwide

    THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS – 26 July 2010 – LiMo Foundation and GNOME Foundation today announced a key partnership with the objective of collaborating closely on open source software innovation. Starting immediately, LiMo Foundation will become a member of GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board and GNOME Foundation will become an Industry Liaison Partner for LiMo Foundation. This development represents a natural formalization founded upon the significant use of GNOME Mobile software components within Release 2 and Release 3 of the LiMo PlatformTM.

  • Korea LiMo Ecosystem Association Holds Inaugural Meeting

    Cooperation amongst the top players in the Korean Mobile Industry to boost the Korean application developer ecosystem

    LONDON, ENGLAND and SEOUL, KOREA – 10 May 2010 – LiMo Foundation, a global consortium of leading companies from the mobile industry, today announced the formal inauguration of the Korea LiMo Ecosystem Association (KLEA) on May 4 in Seoul, which aims at catalyzing the Korean mobile application developer ecosystem and generating innovation upon the LiMo Platform. The event attended by dignitaries from the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Samsung Electronics, SK Telecom, KT and LG Telecom amongst others, saw the election of Hoojong Kim from SK Telecom as the Chairperson of KLEA.

    KLEA will leverage the LiMo Platform to create LiMo World, an application development, publishing and distribution program that will act as a single point of entry for Korean developers wishing to develop for the LiMo Platform and will provide them with the necessary tools and localization support that will springboard them into the international mobile application market.

    "With KLEA, the leading Korean mobile companies which have a long history of innovation are uniting to unleash the apps potential of the Korean developer community for the benefit of a broader...
  • Open Letter to the Wholesale Applications Community

     

    Dear Industry Colleagues:

    Further to the public announcement of 15 February 2010, I am very pleased to write this open letter to the initiators of the Wholesale Applications Community on behalf of the Board of LiMo Foundation offering a) our full support, b) our committed participation, and c) our immediate practical assistance in a spirit of whole-industry cooperation.

    It is clear to us that the highly complementary areas of focus, shared belief in true openness and common industry vision create an exceptional opportunity for deep and long-term collaboration between LiMo Foundation and the Wholesale Applications Community to release unfettered innovation across the industry and fully ignite the mobile internet in a way that is compelling and life-enhancing to consumers everywhere.

Zen and the Art of Mobile Software Management
Written by Richard Kinder – VP Technology, Red Bend   
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 14:19

In his 1974 book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig argues that embracing both the creative, “in the moment,” and rational views of the world may afford the individual a higher quality of life. Pirsig expressed this concept through the description and exploration of a long distance motorcycle journey across the United States, contrasting the approaches toward motorcycle maintenance of the two central characters in the book. I shall explore the same concept through the medium of mobile software platform development and maintenance. Perhaps I will even succeed in drawing some parallels!

Should mobile technologists strive to understand intimately the systems that they work on or instead rely on an intuitive feel for what is right and “in the moment”? Clearly, as Pirsig suggests, we need to embrace both. Without a rigorous framework and approach, a software platform becomes a “bag of bits.” On the other hand, without freedom of creative expression within such a framework, opportunities for innovation and revolution are removed.

Traditional mobile software platform development has proceeded along functional lines, with clearly defined frameworks, entities and schedules of work. This gave birth to successful platforms but has arguably reduced the pace of innovation in certain areas given the inertia associated with such success. Meanwhile, the open software movement has come from the other direction of enabling “in the moment” development of new features by individuals and has struggled to shape these features into a cohesive platform.

Initiatives such as the LiMo Foundation attempt to blend the best of both approaches. But what is true in all cases is that genuine innovation can and will occur, and a key challenge is to get the results of such innovation into the hands of the public, within certain constraints, as quickly as possible.

Software development methodologies, release and testing processes all impact the speed with which innovation can be brought to the public. Now that we are entering a new model of mobile platform development, these should be optimized to ensure that the customer gets the latest, greatest (and hopefully) best software into their hands as soon as possible.

Solving the final part of the puzzle involves defining a way for the platform and its applications to be delivered in small chunks of innovation to the customer. The industry has been hard at work at this for a while, and we are now beginning to see the adoption of the Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMA DM) and the Software Component Management Object (SCOMO) standards to enable the delivery of small fragments of Zen innovation to customers.

Mobile Software Management (MSM) enables this ability to update software components discretely and dynamically that will result in speeding up time to market for new and exciting mobile applications, creating new business opportunities for mobile operators, device manufacturers and software developers and providing the foundation for greater consumer satisfaction with their mobile experience.

Combining creativity and rigorous rational views of mobile platform development will lead to a better life for both the owners and users of these software platforms. Red Bend is working hard on software products to deliver these fragments of innovation to mobile devices. We hope that together with the LiMo Foundation, we can enable a better life for users of mobile devices through the application of controlled “in the moment” innovation! 

 

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The LiMo blog will include a rich assortment of entries reflecting perspectives that span market segments, geographies, and job responsibilities.  Our mission is to engage in direct conversation with a variety of stakeholders and thought leaders – this dialogue will be valuable as LiMo’s members work to collaboratively advance the LiMo Platform for the mobile industry.  The blog posts reflect the opinions of the individual bloggers, and not necessarily that of LiMo or its members.

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