Open Mobile Platform 0.5: One Month to Release

With the economy seemingly in a decline, the Beijing Olympics set to begin in a week and Jon Miller joining the Yahoo Board tomorrow (see Alleyinsider), the activity in mobile continues to excite. Apple stores post 'Out of 3g iPhones' daily even though cracks are appearing in the botton of the new 3G iPhones Opera has released their beta browser (for Windows Mobile only), mSpot has hit 4 million subscribers to their mobile music/video service and Skyfire has made available their early beta Symbian based browser.

Verizon profits continue to be driven by their increasing mobile revenue (although FIOS growth seems to stall without their free HD-TV promotion). HTC had a solid 3rd quarter and Motorola continues to thrash attempting to right their cellular ship.

Even with all of this churn, the Open Mobile Platform team continues to target August 31 for OMP 0.5 release. The source code of this release will be available on SourceForge for the public to download. Included with this 0.5 release will be user documentation, sample reference applications and the platform code. Sample reference applications will include an OpenAIM client, a MapQuest application and an RSS Reader. The OpenAIM client is OpenAuth based. The RSS Reader and Open AIM development clients are currently running on Blackberry devices. Monthly releases to SourceForge will continue through the fall with the OMP 1.0 release targeted for the beginning of 2009.

For now OMP is "pre-release" and sometimes staying below the radar can be a positive. The lifestream blog reviewed www.buddyupdates.com and it is a great story (http://lifestreamblog.com/aol-launches-buddyupdates-lifestreaming-service-and-nobody-noticed/). Frank used Twitter as his marketing tool and the net result of the review -

'Overall I’m pretty impressed with AOL’s entry into the Lifestreaming game. Not so much based on the functionality of their offering, but more because they seem to know their audience well and have created a service that is tailored specifically to them. The site is designed well and simple enough to ease people into the joys of Lifestreaming'.

This lends itself to John Milton's (Al Pacino) advice to Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) in the Devil's Advocate - '...No matter how good you are don't ever let them see you coming. That's the gaffe my friend. You gotta keep yourself small. Innocuous. Be the little guy. You know, the nerd...'.

Come to SourceForge on August 31 to get your copy of the Open Mobile Platform.