WAC is back

Wholesale Applications Community moves on

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) is delivering some more details of its progress today.

Already known is the following:

WAC business model:
Developers will set their own price per app, with revenue shares agreed on an operator by operator basis. There’s not much more information than this, at the moment, on this key aspect for developers.

Leadership:
WAC has also enobled some operator executives to sit on its board. Michel Combes, Vodafone Chief Executive Europe has been elected Chairman of the Wholesale Applications Community, and Jean-Philippe Vanot, Deputy CEO, France Telecom has been named as Vice Chairman.

In addition to Combes and Vanot, the WAC board of directors includes: John Donovan, CTO, AT&T, Li Zhengmao, VP, China MobileOlivier Baujard, CTO Deutsche Telekom, Alex Sinclair, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer, GSMA, Dr Hyun-Myung PYO, President of Mobile Business Group, KT Corporation, Dr Kiyohito Nagata, SVP, NTT DOCOMO, Sung Min Ha, President Mobile Network Operation Business Unit, SK Telecom, Napoleon Nazareno, President and CEO, Smart Communications, Tetsuzo Matsumoto, Senior Executive Vice President, SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp., Marco Patuano, Head of Domestic Market Operations, Telecom Italia, Vivek Dev, Group Director of Global New Services, TelefónicaDr. Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO, Telekom Austria Group, Morten-Karlsen Sorby, EVP and Head of Corporate Development, Telenor, Dick Lynch, EVP and CTO, Verizon.

Tim Raby, CEO of the OMTP, who has been handling matters for WAC in an acting-CEO capacity was not mentioned in this morning’s release.

Structure:
The company also announced that it will join forces with the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), accelerating the commercial launch of WAC-enabled application stores. The transaction is expected to be completed in September 2010.

Specs
As previously announced, WAC says it will publish its initial specification and components of its SDK to developers in November. This specification will be based on W3C standards and provide backwards compatibility for devices based upon the current JIL and BONDI specifications. Details of the developer roadmap and a preview of the WAC specifications will be available in September.

Developers currently creating JIL applications can continue working with the existing JIL specification, tools and software libraries and these applications can be deployed on JIL based devices immediately. The idea is that with the WAC specification, developers will also have a clear path to deploy applications on a wider range of devices supporting the WAC specification in 2011.

There’s a press call this afternoon which Mobile Europe will be a part of. We’ll hope for more details on these and other matters then.