OHA

The fine folks at AndroidGuys have posted the fourth installment in my 34 Weeks of OHA feature. In this week's action-packed installment: Broadcom, legal drama, and domestic violence.

Go here to check it out.

The 3rd installment of my 34 Weeks of OHA guest column is up over at AndroidGuys (a real blog.) This week we're profiling Audience, Inc.

Got some positive feedback on last week's article. The profilee, Ascender Corp., posted on their blog describing the profile as 'humbling.' This, in turn, humbled me, and everything quickly descended into choruses of "I love you, man!" The blogosphere makes me feel warm inside.

Head on over and check out this week's happiness!

The fine folks over at AndroidGuys, a far less silly Android blog than the one you're currently reading, have added a revamped OHA member profile feature (expanded, improved), composed by me, to the bevy of succulent fruits that their site offers.

Entitled "34 Weeks of OHA", it takes the "34 Days of OHA" feature that I completely failed to deliver daily and gives it a more realistic schedule.

The first installment is here.

I'm honoured that AndroidGuys have given me the opportunity to take this content to a wider audience. They run a great site (podcasts and everything!) that I definitely recommend you check out.

OHA member Wind River and embedded Linux gurus, have been chosen by LiMo to provide the foundation for their CIE (Common Integration Environment). From the Press Release:

To eliminate unnecessary complexity that increases time to market and development costs, OEMs and operators must reduce fragmentation in the Linux handset market. One means of reducing fragmentation is to standardize the mobile handset stack, from the Linux distribution to application framework and above – LiMo’s core objective. To integrate these stack components, a common integration environment is needed where all component providers’ contributions may be managed as both independent modules and an integrated whole.

By contributing key components of its commercial technology, Wind River provides a platform for LiMo to develop, test, certify, and deploy commercial products consisting of components provided by various members of the Foundation. The CIE will:

* Allow LiMo to easily manage components developed by the diverse engineering teams of its members, maintaining quality and ultimately time to market as different application and middleware components are contributed, assembled, and tested within the LiMo platform.
* Allow LiMo to easily update or exchange components, allowing OEMs and operators to differentiate their handsets while remaining within the LiMo standard.
* Allow LiMo to leverage a standard suite of components and applications for multiple projects, which is key to the LiMo mission of reducing time to market for Linux handsets while driving the greatest innovation and differentiation.
* Reduce debugging, test, and validation cycle time by minimizing challenges working with multiple versions of merged software.

This just further affirms that Wind River is the industry leader in Mobile Linux, and perhaps hints at some future LiMo-OHA love?

The most interesting bit of this piece over at The International Herald Tribune is not the it's-not-that-special, it's-just-an-announcement, we-could-have-done-it-too-if-we-wanted-to-but-we-don't rhetoric coming from Nokia. Rather, it's this sentence:

...Google did not invite Nokia to join its Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 companies that includes Motorola, Samsung, and other phone makers.

Now that got my attention. They weren't invited? I, honestly, cannot think of a good reason why not. Let's face it, Nokia is an industry leader because it, for the most part, makes pretty good phones. Maybe it has something to do with Nokia's unrepentant Symbian love?

Maybe it's 'cause Sergey is Russian, and the Russians and the Fins have a tempestuous history? (This is a joke, people, calm down.)

It makes one wonder--was Verizon 'invited'? AT&T (who is, apparently, "in negotiations" with Google)? Was there a method to Google's selection of OHA players? Were they purposefully looking for the second- and third-place carriers and makers (at least in America), who may be more likely to support an industry-changing movement?

For 34 days we'll be profiling one OHA member each day, in alphabetical order.

Company Name: China Mobile Communications Corporation

How the OHA site classifies them: Mobile Operator

What the OHA site says about them: Nothing. There's no blurb. Might be a translation issue.

What they do: Provide mobile service to more people than any other carrier in the world.

They have somewhere arounf two-thirds of the Chinese mobile market, which, according to Wikipedia, gives them 350 million customers. That's a lot. They also own Pakistan telecomunications company Paktel, which seems like an odd fit.

China Mobile is owned by the governmnet of the People's Republic of China, which may or may not be OK depending on how you feel about human rights and the decline of the West.

What they bring to OHA and Android: A massive subscriber base. Moral ambiguity.

BusinessWeek is reporting that Verizon is, indeed, going to support Android.

Hot on the heels of its announcement of an impending opening of its network, Verizon has shown the Google OS some love. Specifically, CEO Lowell McAdam told BW "We're planning on using Android...Android is an enabler of what we do."

After dropping this little nugget, the article goes on to detail McAdam's year long push to more openness for the mobile giant. It's an inspiring tail of triumph over adversity and stuff.

At this point the momentum towards a more open US (and hopefully Canadian) mobile market seems unstoppable. Give it a year, though, and we'll see what the reality is.

For 34 days we'll be profiling one OHA member each day, in alphabetical order. The feature has been on hiatus for a few days, but we're now focused and ready to continue.

Company Name: Broadcom Corporation

How the OHA site classifies them: Semiconductor Company

What the OHA site says about them: Broadcom Corporation is a major technology innovator and global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, providing products that enable the delivery of voice, video, data and multimedia to and throughout the home, the office and the mobile environment.

What they do: They build chips.

Wikipedia proclaims them "...among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders." Their site list their offerings as including Bluetooth products, network processing solutions, digital cable products, digital TV solutions, satellite devices, DSL chipsets, mobile multimedia processors, mobile phone solutions, networking components, security processors, I/O integrated circuits, storeage solutions, VOIP solutions, WLAN solutions, and Ethernet solutions. They got solutions.

Broadcom is probably best known for their NICs. There's a good chance that the network card in the PC you're currently reading this article on was designed by Broadcom.

Of course, Broadcom doesn't really build any of this. Rather, it employs Asian people to do the building for them.

In July 2007 the US International Trade Commission blocked blocked the import of cell phones based around Broadcom's future OHA cohort Qualcomm's chips because those chips infringed on the former's patents, A ruling against Qualcomm resulted in that company paying up.

What they bring to OHA and Android: Semiconductors. And, given their history with Qualcomm, domestic violence.

Earlier this month Broadcom announced a partnership with EA with the goal of delivering high performance gaming for mobile phones. EA will be delivering titles designed for Broadcom's VideoCore® Mobile Multimedia Solutions. We can only hope that some of these titles wll show up on Android.

Verizon has issued a press release announcing that...

...it will provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company. Verizon Wireless plans to have this new choice available to customers throughout the country by the end of 2008.

In early 2008, the company will publish the technical standards the development community will need to design products to interface with the Verizon Wireless network. Any device that meets the minimum technical standard will be activated on the network. Devices will be tested and approved in a $20 million state-of-the-art testing lab which received an additional investment this year to gear up for the anticipated new demand. Any application the customer chooses will be allowed on these devices.

While not directly Android related, the news that Verizon will allow third party hardware and software on its network means that, OHA member or not, Android-running handsets will be welcome on the network.

Of course, the more cynical among us may accuse Verizon of making this move in order to show good intentions to the FCC in their bid for the 700mhz space. And the inordinately pessimistic among us may may worry that, when push comes to shove, Verizon's technical standards may be so stringent that third-party products are effectively shut out anyway.

But I'm not a sardonic person person, really, so I'll just hope that Verizon's announcement is the next step in a wholesale revolution in the US mobile carrier scene.

UPDATE: FCC Chairman Martin has published a positive opinion regarding the Verizon announcement. From his statement:

Today’s announcement, along with the Open Handset Alliance’s previous announcement of an open platform capable of working on multiple networks, is a significant step towards fulfilling these goals. I am optimistic that Verizon Wireless’s commitment along with the upcoming spectrum auction will ensure an exciting new era in wireless technology for the benefit of all consumers.

Andy Rubin, head Android maker, sat down with ZDnet.co.uk for a well-padded interview.

Some highlights:

• The current UI is a placeholder, and will be replaced.
• "There is no direct-advertising component in the platform."
• Users will have the option of choosing their own browser.
• Android has been "contemplated" on different platforms including, as the buzz lately has been, set-top boxes.
• Andy uses an iPhone.

The most interesting thing to come out of the piece for me is the concentration on mash-ups. Andy says:

We've been building it as a mobile mashup platform. That is a new concept for [mobile] phones. So the developer can now stand on the system platform and take advantage of other developers' work for the first time. So, that just creates more flexibility for the developers, less work, faster turnaround, rapid prototyping, and all that stuff, and we're really, really excited about that concept.

As Lawrence Lessig would tell you, the concept of the mashup is central to the way the internet generation interacts with information. From the Grey Album to movie trailer recuts, the hallmark of open access to information and the tools necessary to manipulate it has been new creations from the building blocks of what came before. Yahoo Pipes and the Google Mashup Editor are officially-sanctioned examples of this paradigm. If Android can really embody the concept, rather than just paying it lip service, it could represent a revolution not just for the mobile space but for the entire OS space.