limofoundation.org

LiMo sees rapid early expansion of membership
LinuxWorld, San Francisco, Calif., August 6, – The limofoundation.org announced today that it has experienced a significant membership surge as some of world’s most innovative, well-known mobile industry players have joined as new members of the Foundation during the past six months.

This is a significant development signalling that the fully transparent, inclusive and not-for-profit approach of the limofoundation.org is successfully attracting broad industry engagement. Aplix, Celunite, LG Electronics, McAfee and Wind River have joined as

Core members and will participate on the limofoundation.org Board. Additionally, ARM, Broadcom, Ericsson, Innopath, KTF, MontaVista Software and NXP B.V. have joined as Associate members.

Founder members Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone announced the formation of the limofoundation.org in January. Its goal is to create the world’s first globally competitive, Linux-based software platform for mobile devices. The limofoundation.org is blending community-based development benefits of transparency, innovation and scalability with the best development practices from the mobile community worldwide to create an innovative new business model with widespread adoption. The Foundation expects to see the first handsets supporting the LiMo platform to reach market in the first half of.

Industry experts predict that there are currently two billion mobile subscribers worldwide who are consuming one trillion minutes of service and purchasing more than one billion mobile phones annually. Industry analysts project the mobile software and services market to exceed $6B by, with open platforms as the fastest growing sector of the market.

“The Founder Members are delighted to welcome this initial wave of new members to the limofoundation.org. Their capabilities and talents will help to realise a competitive step change in the delivery of handsets and service propositions to consumers,” said NTT

DoCoMo’s Kiyohito Nagata, chairman of the limofoundation.org. “By joining the limofoundation.org, members will be able to help guide the development of an open mobile terminal platform based on Linux that will speed up the delivery of handsets and further enhance the consumer experience.”

The Foundation is open to device manufacturers, operators, chip set manufacturers, independent software vendors, integrators and third party developers. Foundation members will be involved in building an active ecosystem and will have the opportunity to influence the evolution of the platform, leaving them free to provide compelling and differentiated services to customers.

About limofoundation.org
limofoundation.org is a dedicated consortium of mobile industry leaders working together within an open and transparent governance model—with shared leadership and shared decision making—to deliver an open and globally consistent handset software platform based upon Mobile Linux for use by the whole mobile industry. A full description of LiMo, including its vision, goals, charter and membership information, can be found at limofoundation.