Design guidelines and competition initiatives

The GSMA has announced new developments in its embedded mobile initiative, including work to establish standard design guidelines for embedded mobile applications and the kick-off of a competition to drive development in the embedded mobile market.

The goal of the program, which was launched in November 2008, is to foster new business opportunities by bringing the benefits of continuous mobile connectivity to embedded devices in the clean energy, education, healthcare, transport, consumer electronics and smart utilities sectors.

“The benefits of embedded mobile to businesses and consumers are nearly endless, from enabling a travelling family to transmit holiday photos to relatives at home, to helping a vending company automatically track stock levels and operating status of its machines, to allowing power companies to remotely collect data from across meter and power grids,” said Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer for the GSMA.

“As the programs demonstrate, we are keenly focused on reducing industry fragmentation in the delivery of embedded mobile solutions, facilitating economies of scale in design and production and driving cross-industry awareness of module designs.”

To further promote the development of the embedded mobile market, the GSMA has kicked off a competition with the goal of identifying best-in-class embedded modules across a number of categories, as well as mobile service applications and solutions.

The first stage of the competition, which will focus on leading embedded modules, will be held at the Mobile Asia Congress in November 2009.

The second stage will showcase innovative service applications and solutions at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2010.

To facilitate the creation of scores of embedded mobile applications, the GSMA also announced that it has initiated a work stream within the program to develop and publish a set of design guidelines for key categories of applications such as health, motor vehicle, smart metering and consumer devices.

This is a joint initiative involving mobile operator and module vendor representatives from across the world and the GSMA expects to make these design guidelines available in November 2009. More information is available from their website.