Qualcomm builds a Plaza full of widgets

Mike Dolan — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:31:25 -0400

By Dan O'Shea

During a press conference yesterday, Qualcomm gave greater detail about how it is further feeding the open mobile Internet frenzy with Plaza, a new framework featuring collected, certified catalogs of mobile widgets-the increasingly-popular thin Internet clients that reside on mobile devices.

BREW and non-BREW carriers alike will be able to present "widget walls" giving users "quicker and easier personalized access to the Internet," while allowing carriers to take the lead in presenting it to them, said Andrew Gilbert, executive vice president and president of QIS/MediaFLO Technologies and Qualcomm Europe. "There are other widget platforms out there, but what makes Plaza different is that Plaza is very purposely focused on the traditional wireless value chain. We're keeping the application evolution in the hands of the companies that know customers the best. Our technology platform aggregates a number of developed widgets so that phones can be pre-loaded with them-the understanding being that the operator has pre-selected the widgets based on user demographics and customer information."

Gilbert said Qualcomm is working with several carriers to determine how those widget walls will be presented. Yet, end users still will have a high degree of choice in the matter as well. "The individual subscriber can add or remove widgets, pulling them from the operator catalog," Gilbert said.

He acknowledged that users could still go off-deck and download other widgets not included in those carrier catalogs. But, they will not have passed Qualcomm's certification muster. "The opportunity here is really to give the operator a trusted widget platform to offer their customers," Gilbert said. "They can take control of their own applications destiny. For the end user, as long as you have a Web browser, you're good to go. This is not tied to a particular SDK."

Also at the press conference, Steve Sprigg, senior vice president of engineering for Qualcomm, offered more details about the new BREW Mobile Platform. Sprigg said BMP helps Qualcomm fulfill its goals of expanding the BREW developer community and pushing advanced capabilities traditionally available only to high-end phones out to mass-market mobile devices. "We've added more APIs and have made BREW more modular and scalable," Sprigg said "We've simplified license agreements for developers and we're providing them with more source code."

Sprigg also said the previously announced teaming of Qualcomm and Adobe will see more BREW resources passed to Adobe developers. "We're bringing two developer communities together, uniting the Web community and the mobile community, bringing millions of developers to hundreds of millions of handsets."

Qualcomm goes with Plaza

Thu, 29 May 2008 11:23:19 -0400

By Sue Marek

Building on the growing personalization phenomenon, Qualcomm Internet Services is announcing a platform-agnostic service, called Plaza, that provides a framework for widget development that will enable operators to provide users with personalized access to the mobile Internet. Plaza will let operators and developers produce and deliver Internet-based content across devices. "We are leveraging our service delivery ecosystem with BREW and bringing it to the Widget delivery platform," said Andrew Gilbert, executive vice president and president of Qualcomm Internet Services, MediaFLO Technologies and Qualcomm Europe. Plaza is intended to let operators personalize their subscribers' mobile Internet experiences and drive additional revenue.

According to Gilbert, Plaza lets subscribers build a widget catalog easily and seamlessly. "It's a great way to deliver and consume content in a mobile environment. It's easy to get access to the Web. We will help the operator ensure these widgets are trusted, certified and part of the good experience for customer," Gilbert said. "We also will strengthen the brand value of the operator and deliver it as part of an overall package to the operator. It ties with recommendation and profiling. They come together as part of this rich and open BREW experience."

Plaza is not device dependent but operators can personalize and certify them. Qualcomm is also working with developers to develop widgets for Plaza.