The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) has this week welcomed 32 new members, including operators, vendors and OEMs, to its project to build a comprehensive open applications platform, writes Martin Conway. This influx brings WAC’s total number of members to 48, echoing CEO Peter Suh’s assertion that “the WAC initiative is gaining significant momentum in the market.”

The new members are split into ‘board’, ‘operator member’, ‘sponsor member’ and ‘associate member’ level categories, and will work together to advance the WACs aims of providing developers with increased opportunities for writing apps for multiple platforms and users, as well as creating more attractive, compelling applications to appeal to a potential global market of more than 3bn users. All have access to WAC documents, specifications and code.

Those joining WAC at board level include Accenture, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, QUALCOMM Incorporated and Samsung, while operator member newbies include América Móvil, Bell Mobility, Bouygues Telecom, China Unicom, Hutchison 3 Group, KDDI, LG Uplus, MTS, Orascom Telecom, Rogers Communications and SFR.
Companies joining WAC as sponsor members include Alcatel-Lucent, Fujitsu, and LG Electronics. New associate members include Aplix, ASPire, Borqs, Capgemini, Innoace, LiMo Foundation, Myriad Group, Oberthur Technologies, Obigo, Opera Software, Oracle Corporation and ZTE.

This week also sees the body make available its WAC 1.0 specification for download. Based on the Joint Innovation Lab’s JIL 1.2.2 app, following WAC’s acquisition of the JIL assets on 1 October this year, the new spec aims to get the ball rolling in providing a backbone for cross-platform applications. WAC 1.0 can be downloaded from the main WAC website.