WAC Forms Company, Reveals Future Plans

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), the alliance of telecommunications companies formed in order to create an open applications platform, has formed a company and appointed a board of directors, just over five months after the initiative was announced at Mobile World Congress in February. The company has also revealed that it will join forces with the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) by the end of September, in order to accelerate the commercial launch of WAC-enabled app stores. Finally, WAC has outlined the business models and technology evolution path it will follow to enable developers, operators and other commercial organisations to monetise applications and services.

WAC has appointed Peters Suh as its CEO. Most recently he was the CEO of the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), a joint venture between China Mobile, Softbank Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone. Prior to JIL, Suh held a number of executive positions at Vodafone, Fremont Communications and AirTouch. The company announced that Michel Combes, Vodafone chief executive Europe, has been elected chairman, with Jean-Philippe Vanot, deputy CEO, France Telecom, named as vice chairman. There are a further 14 board members.

At launch, WAC will allow operators to distribute applications through their respective application storefronts and charge users through their existing phone bill. Developers will set the application price and will receive a revenue share for the transaction, to be defined on an operator-by-operator basis. WAC, which is a not-for-profit organisation, will receive “a small transaction fee” for each application to cover its operating costs, though the size of this fee has not been disclosed.

In the future, WAC says it will enable in-app purchases, leverage network capabilities, such as location, to enhance an apps, and facilitate the serving of ads to end users. 

“Developers will see great benefit in a single process through which they can create, distribute and profit from their applications on multiple retail outlets,” says John Delaney, research director for consumer mobile at the analyst, IDC. “Unification with JIL will prove a significant boost for the Wholesale Application Communitys efforts to achieve a global, open development platform.”
WAC will publish its initial specification and components of its SDK to developers in November. This will be based on W3C standards and create a platform for developing rich mobile web applications. WAC will also provide backwards compatibility for devices, based upon the current JIL and BONDI specifications. Details of the developer roadmap and a preview of the WAC specifications will be available in September.

Developers currently creating JIL applications can continue working with the existing JIL specification, tools and software libraries, and these applications can be deployed on JIL based devices immediately. The WAC says that with the publication of the WAC specification, developers will also have a clear path to deploy applications on a wider range of devices supporting the WAC specification in 2011.