Open Mobile Alliance Rounds Out 2006 With Significant Milestones

WASHINGTON, DC--(CCNMatthews - December 14, 2006) - The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), an international specifications setting body, holds its first industry wide event where leading technology executives assess the challenges of standards deployment and the innovative new market drivers that will affect standards development in the future. The organization also marks the 1000th product implementation tested in its Interoperability (IOP) Program, and announces the public availability of its Charging Version 1.0, and Download over the Air Version 2.0 as Candidate Enabler Releases (CER). "We complete 2006 with the release of Charging and Download Candidate Enablers to improve content distribution and charging deployments. We look forward to building on the success of these new releases and the many enablers we have released over the last four-and-a-half years," says Jari Alvinen, Chairman of the Board, OMA. "As we approach our fifth anniversary next year, we felt the time was right to invite some of the foremost technology executives to look at the full body of our work, the current needs of the industry in standards deployment, and where the future might take us." OMAWorld2006 is the first such gathering hosted by the OMA and co-located with OMA's Annual General Meeting. Offering a single track program with 520 attendees, OMAWorld2006 brought together 11 chief technology officers, heads of research, deployment and product development to share their views on barriers to standards deployment and the kinds of technologies that will influence standards development in the years to come. Held Tuesday, the program offered a keynote from Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, http://www.media.mit.edu/, and two panel sessions moderated by Ben Wood of Collins Consulting, http://www.collinsconsulting.co.uk/, and John Jackson of M:Metrics http://www.mmetrics.com/. "Having just held our 17th TestFest in Montreal last week, and hitting our 1000th implementation test milestone at TestFest-16 in Dusseldorf in September, it's very rewarding to bring these kinds of results to OMAWorld2006 and share them with the leaders of our industry," says Fred Harrison, Chairman of OMA's Board IOP Committee and Vice Chairman of the OMA. "We have grown from two Enablers tested at our first TestFest in November 2002, to nearly 20 Enablers tested at the event last week. These events have involved over 100 member companies and more than 2000 participants over the course of four years." Two New Candidate Enablers OMA Charging 1.0 offers a flexible and network-agnostic framework for generating, processing and transferring service usage information. The specification defines interfaces and flows for charging information exchange. It supports quick deployment of new applications and services from operators, service providers and others wishing to access existing network infrastructure without building time consuming and complex integrations in multiple environments. The Enabler specifies two charging mechanisms (online and offline charging) to coordinate charging information flow from any service or application regardless of the underlying charging infrastructure. OMA Download Over the Air (DLOTA) 2.0 builds on the features supported by version 1.0 to provide additional functionality while maintaining a more reliable download solution than basic HTTP. Providing a mechanism for user-initiated download of content -- such as ring-tones, images, and specialized applications -- version 2.0 offers a flexible mechanism for downloading Media Objects of any type and size and also guarantees backward compatibility. DLOTA 2.0 specifies application level protocols and behaviors that provide transactional and life cycle management of content and applications on mobile devices. Operating independently of the content being downloaded, Version 2.0 allows extensibility of the protocol to multiple content environments. It also supports any associated DRM license information, consumption of the content as it is being downloaded, resumption of interrupted downloads, and control over the user experience to enable uses such as unattended over night downloads. For more information on OMA Charging 1.0 CER, visit http://www.openmobilealliance.org/release_program/charging_v1_0.html. For more information about OMA Download 2.0 CER, visit http://www.openmobilealliance.org/release_program/dlota_v2_0.html. For more information about OMA's TestFest Program, visit http://www.openmobilealliance.org/testfest_overview/TestFest_Overview.html. For more information about Products tested within OMA's IOP Program, visit http://product.openmobilealliance.org/. For more information about OMAWorld2006, visit http://www.openmobilealliance.org/2006agm/OMAWORLD/index.htm. About the OMA Release Program To date, OMA has published 51 Enabler Releases. The OMA continuously operates an interoperability program to validate Enabler specifications, as well as the implementations of member products and services. Using a clear working process, the Enabler Release Program is designed to deliver two key milestones for each enabler: /T/ -- A Candidate Enabler Release (CER) delivers an approved set of open technical specifications that can be implemented in products and solutions, and then tested for interoperability. -- An Approved Enabler Release (AER) represents Candidate Enabler Releases that have gone through the Interoperability Program (IOP) of OMA. The IOP tests interoperability between different member company's implementations -- either within the OMA or through other means. /T/ For more information, visit http://www.openmobilealliance.org/release_program/index.html. About the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) delivers open specifications for creating interoperable services that work across countries, operators, fixed and mobile terminals. Driven by users' needs and the expanding market for data services, the member companies of the Open Mobile Alliance stimulate the adoption of new and enhanced information, communication and entertainment services. The Open Mobile Alliance includes contributors from all key elements of the wireless value chain, and contributes to the timely and efficient introduction of services and applications. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) name and logo are trademarks of Open Mobile Alliance Ltd. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks or trade names of their respective owners.

Contact Information: Bobby Fraher OMA Communications +1.415.531.2680 bfraher@omaorg.org