Stepping boldly in where many before have faltered, the European Union has committed to funding the Webinos initiative to build a “universal applications platform" that will work across networks, devices and operating systems. The EU said it will put $13.4 million initially into the three-year project.
Partners in the Webinos project (full title: Secure WebOS Application Environment) include Sony Ericsson, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Samsung, along with the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. It is headed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems.
"We have a lot of different platforms that apps run on – the iPhone, Android, Symbian – and that's only on the mobile side," Stephan Steglich, the project leader at the Fraunhofer Institute, told BBC News. "Companies can afford to have an app on two or at most three platforms — they're extremely costly to develop and ensure the user experience.
Several earlier attempts have been made to create a cross-device application environment, including the Wholesale Applications Community, created earlier this year by a group of wireless carriers. Threatened by the growing dominance of Apple’s iPhone and the Android mobile operating system, from Google, carriers are seeking a way to reassert their pre-eminence in the mobile space. Such efforts have met with little success to date, and news of the Webinos initiative was greeted by a chorus of skepticism.
“Strong ecosystems are already very active and globally established for the development and delivery of applications and services for mobile platforms," wrote an analyst in a research note from consulting firm Gerson Lehman. “It will take a very different kind of initiative than Webinos to pose a serious challenge to the influence of Apple, Google, and other mobile ‘outsiders,’ such as Facebook."
Webinos participants say they are not setting out to create a new mobile OS but to make use of existing software and standards from industry organizations such as the W3C to create a Web-based technology framework that will allow developers to create applications once and have them run across multiple platforms and devices including PCs, in-car and IPTV systems.
The project is slated to take three years – a couple of generations in the mobile and wireless sector – and cost nearly $19 million.
