NOKIA – Support for the Symbian Foundation gains momentum on the road to Mobile – Burgeoning community committed to creating unparalleled open mobile software platform

Joined by many of our existing partners, the Symbian Foundation will be on stand 8A77 in the Fira Hall 8 from February 16-19. We will participate at various MWC activities throughout the show, including the Mobile Application Developer Garage and WIP Jam: Day for Developers, and Lee Williams will deliver his view of open source in mobile (details below). We invite you to come and join us.

“We’re in a unique position to continue the rapid growth of the most competitive open software platform. Every single member of our community has a chance to influence the way we evolve and develop our offering,” said Lee Williams, Executive Director, Symbian Foundation. “The foundation will provide, manage and unify the platform but it’s the community which will make it great.”

“We already have fantastic support from across the industry and Mobile World Congress will provide an excellent forum to meet and share ideas, perspectives and insight with both new and existing supporters, with the ultimate aim of benefiting our community members.”
Seventy-eight industry partners have now pledged their support in making this vision reality; Atelier, Bank of America, Gemalto, HP, Imagination Technologies, Mobica, MySpace, Nanoradio, OMRON SOFTWARE, Qualcomm, SanDisk, SESCA, SiRF Technology and VirtualLogix all add their endorsements to the other companies already announced.

“Atelier is very excited about the Symbian Foundation initiative,” said Pascale EDOM, CEO of Atelier. “From a pioneer in the use of Symbian OS we have become a leading independent vendor in telephony integration. We believe that the Symbian Foundation with its open platform will attract more players and will generate many innovative new products. Atelier intends to join the foundation and support our customers and the foundation’s members as its platform evolves.”

“The Symbian Foundation’s platform will allow us to further enhance the mobile banking experience for our customers,” said Douglas Brown, SVP, mobile product development at Bank of America. “The Symbian Foundation’s  commitment to choice and open industry standards  will ensure Bank of America’s ability to offer more value added services to our industry leading 2 million active mobile banking user base.”

Since plans for the Symbian Foundation were announced, hundreds of organizations have registered their interest in joining the foundation via the website at www.symbianfoundation.org.