By Monica Alleven
It’s been a little over a year since Qualcomm unveiled its
Plaza Mobile Internet solution. So where does it stand now?
The company historically has been patient in building up its customer base for specific areas, establishing the BREW ecosystem and evangelizing FLO technology for mobile TV.
With Plaza, the company continues to hold discussions with operators in North America, Europe and Latin America, where there’s an interest in providing a better mobile Internet experience on mass-market phones, says Noam Raffaelli, managing director of Plaza Mobile Internet at Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS).
Operators see widgets, which is part of the Plaza platform, as means to drive more data traffic and data users. The aim of Plaza is to offer end-users the familiar Web channels they’re used to daily on their desktop – but in a format geared for the small screen of a mobile phone.
QIS has a deal with a customer in South America, but it’s not ready to name the customer, which is expected to deploy the Plaza platform by the end of summer or early autumn. Stay tuned for more details.
Meanwhile, handset OEMs are offering up their own widget solutions. Doesn’t that pose a challenge for QIS in getting its solution out there?
Not necessarily, according to Raffaelli. Widgets are small Web apps that provide snippets to things of interest to end-users, like local weather or news. Some OEMs offer five or six pre-installed widgets, but they don’t offer the kind of customization that end-users desire. And there’s usually no ecosystem behind it, which is what Plaza is all about, he says. Qualcomm is leveraging its many years of experience with the BREW ecosystem. “It’s a very natural step forward,” he says.
From the developer’s perspective, Plaza provides a way to use common Web standards for their applications so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel for mobile. For operators, it offers the kind of sticky, branded data offering that’s open enough to create a true mobile Internet experience and flexible enough to allow for new means of revenue, such as advertising that relates to what people are most interested in.
Plaza’s widgets include the ability to get e-mail from commonly used programs geared for consumers as opposed to the type of e-mail offering via BlackBerry for enterprise consumers. It can be pre-embedded on devices or deployed over the air to reach devices already in the market.