L.M. Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola have announced the creation of the Wireless Village initiative, a joint venture with the mandate to define and promote a set of universal specifications for mobile instant messaging and presence services.

The specification will be used for exchanging messages and presence information between mobile devices mobile services, and Internet instant messaging services. By opening the initiative up to other industry players, the three founding companies hope to address the lack of a common format and interoperability among devices. The founders of the initiative envision creating a truly global instant messaging solution, offering media rich content along with text messaging, while presence services will allow users to know the availability of friends and colleagues. Ultimately networks will be able to provide meeting and conferencing services with shared content.

"One of the key factors of this growth [of instant messaging and presence services] will be ensuring that different devices can talk to each other—this initiative will provide the solution to that interoperability issue," said Janiece Webb, senior vice president and general manager of Motorola’s Internet Software and Content Group.

The Wireless Village initiative will deliver an architectural specification, protocol specifications, as well as test specifications and tools for mobile IMPS. It will also define procedures and tools for testing conformance and interoperability of IMPS.

The new instant messaging specification will be based on existing technologies, such as XML, SMS, MMS (Multimedia Message Service), WAP and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). Specifications will be published at the end of the year, the companies said.

The service will address security issues by incorporating users authentication, secure message transfer and access control, and will be compatible with existing, 2G and 2.5G networks, as well as the emerging 3G network standards.

For more information: http://press.nokia.com/PR/200104/817796_5.html