Wavefront connects Vancouver’s wireless, new media communities to new markets

British Columbia commercialization centre, Wavefront, celebrated the grand opening of its new facilities this week in Vancouver with the unveiling of two major agreements that forge closer ties with the Chinese and Japanese markets and strengthen Canada’s position as a go-to country for mobile content development. Wavefront, which provides commercialization support to BC’s 1000 wireless and new media development companies, inked deals with the Mobile Computing Promotion Consortium (MCPC), an organization that promotes the expansion of mobile computing in Japan, and the Hong Kong Wireless Development Center (HKWDC), which promote awareness, development and usage of wireless application technology in Hong Kong and China. Jim Maynard, president of Wavefront, says both deals are significant: they open doors for Canadian companies looking to exploit the lucrative Asian market, while giving Japanese and Chinese companies access to North American markets. “ to fast track Canadian companies into that ecosystem and also to take companies from their ecosystem and advance them into the North American marketplace through the Wavefront centre here,” Maynard tells Report on Wireless. He adds that Canadian companies will get immediate access to sell their applications and services to more than 100 million 3G subscribers. The Japanese wireless market is massive with mobile operator data revenue at about $30 billion. The content portion of that is about $15 billion. “So there’s no place else in the world that has that level of synergy between operators mobile data revenues and the content piece and we’re directly connected into the MCPC,” Maynard says. The deals also send a signal to the international wireless community that it needs to come to Canada to prepare for the next generation of mobile content. Canada, according to Maynard, is unique in that it has Research in Motion and its development efforts along with strong content and gaming expertise. “When you start talking about sophisticated media in the wireless space, which requires strong wireless engineering plus the creativity piece, there’s not many jurisdictions in the world that can compete with what we’ve got going on here,” the Wavefront president says. These two most recent deals bolster agreements the organization inked last year to enhance its technical testing capabilities. Wavefront 2.0 The opening of the organization’s new facility marks the end of one stage and the beginning of another. Wavefront can now begin offering all of the technical testing that it promoted when it was first created. Applications and service developers can test their wares on nearly 300 different types of handsets for the North American market. The organization also has received R&D spectrum licences from Industry Canada to conduct over-the-air testing of services for not only the Canadian market but also the Chinese and Japanese regions. Since last year Maynard has been on a whirlwind world tour forging relationships with many other countries and believes that Wavefront will facilitate the entry of Canadian wireless companies into about 50 markets by the end of this year. While the organization won’t have offices in all of these locations, the goal is to provide acceleration paths, or “hunting licences” as Maynard says, for Canadian companies to exploit in those markets. And the deal making isn’t done. Wavefront has also forged a partnership with one of the world’s largest providers of wireless infrastructure and one of the world’s leading wireless providers.

Wavefront connects Vancouver’s wireless, new media communities to new markets

News | 08/20/2009 5:34 pm EDT

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