Smart, Nokia launch 1st SIP Apps Challenge

Convergence. Multimedia. Next-generation.

The tech landscape is driven as much by the relentless pursuit for innovation as these three key words.

Amid a very robust and competitive market for mobile and Internet applications, a new protocol for peer-to-peer connection between devices is now emerging in the tech horizon which is expected to bring even further to fruition the convergence of multimedia and next-generation technologies.

One of these technologies is a digital communications protocol for peer-to-peer connection between devices called the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

Hemant Madan, head of Forum Nokia for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, says that with SIP, applications such as video, messaging, gaming, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and push-to-talk technology will be easily implemented in a mobile network, accelerating, for example, the development of connected multi-player gaming and providing operators with added revenue opportunities.

SIP, he says, actually enables the convergence of fixed and mobile Internet domains as it establishes Internet Protocol (IP) connections between terminals or devices. This connection can be between two mobile devices, two PCs or between a PC and a mobile gadget. It is actually the leading signaling protocol for VoIP,

"In an IP-based world, SIP provides a direct channel between two devices or a group of devices and applications running in devices," Madan says.

Wireless and multi-player gaming, video sharing, audio and video conferencing, messa-ging, enterprise applications and multimedia are the key drivers of SIP.

It enables application developers and operators to offer new IP multimedia services, thus providing consumers a much-enhanced and wider range of applications.

To accelerate the development of SIP applications in the Philippines and discover new services that will be appealing to the mass market, a competition and skills-based program for Philippine-based developers was launched jointly by Smart Communications Inc. and Nokia, in cooperation with ePLDT and Wolfpac Mobile Inc.

Dubbed the 1st SIP Apps Challenge, the program calls for companies or teams engaged in content application development to create SIP-based applications.

"Our goal is simple. We want to train regional developers and equip them with the necessary knowledge of new technologies as this will, in turn, help facilitate the commercialization of these technologies and services for the larger mobile marketplace," Madan says.

Over 50 Filipino developer companies and start-ups will be invited to submit proposals and concept ideas and out of this number, 10 will be selected to submit final application proposals. Five of them will be awarded development grants of P1 million each to eventually bring the winning applications to market in the Philippines.

"We hope that the SIP Apps Challenge will help foster technological innovation among content providers," says Edgardo Bautista, Smart head for mobile value-added services operations and development.

Aside from the financial incentives, training and support for SIP-based applications development will be provided as well as access to SmartLab and Nokia series 60 terminals for application testing.

Madan says the goal is to stimulate the mobile mass market for the emerging SIP technology and to spur innovations in the developer community.

Nokia’s global developer program, Forum Nokia, actually provides tools, technical infor-mation, support and distribution channels to developers and operators all over the world to help them launch applications and services to consumers and enterprises.

"What Forum Nokia drives toward is to provide a profitable and sustainable business opportunity for the developers as well as accelerate the uptake of new technologies in the market," Madan says.

The partnership of Smart and Nokia in creating a developer base for SIP applications was forged out of the belief that SIP is the language of future IP networks.

Although Bautista admits that the uptake of the technology, especially SIP-enabled handsets, is hard to predict at this point, the two companies believe that once the applications are there, the market will follow.

And although handsets and gadgets using new technologies are definitely more expensive initially, prices actually go down as the technologies are brought to lower-priced handsets catering to the mass market.

At the moment, the only available SIP-enabled handset in the local market is the newly launched Nokia 6680.

Madan says SIP is actually very new and Nokia wants to promote it to encourage the development of applications that will drive mass usage.

"That is one of the objectives of the SIP Apps Challenge – to discover new and exciting applications," Bautista says.

Thus, the contest categories include games, collaborative applications, community applications, enterprise and corporate applications and convergence applications. But Bautista says entries outside of these categories will also be also entertained so as not to limit the creativity of the developers.

"We are very much interested in enterprise applications as well as corporate applications for wireless networks," Bautista says.

Developers who participate in the SIP Apps Challenge will get the opportunity to hone their technical skills for next-generation IP services and usage of standards-compliant software tools such as the SIP Service Development Toolkit (SDK).

Bautista says the developers of the winning entries will retain the intellectual property rights to their applications. Smart, however, will get the right to exclusively develop and market the applications locally although this doesn’t hinder the developers to sell their applications to other countries after their commercial launch in the Philippines.

(For more information on the SIPS Apps Challenge, log on to www.smart.com.ph.)