from the company's view
Zi and Symbian partner to expand marketing and engineering reach
SANTA CLARA, CA, Feb. 15 /CNW-PRN/ - Zi Corporation (NASDAQ: ZICA - news; TSE: ZIC - news) today announced it has partnered with Symbian to extend the development of a wide range of smartphones and communicators. Zi's experience and dominant position in Asia as well as engineering expertise with the Symbian platform prompted Zi's selection for the Symbian Competence Center program.
``We are one of the few companies that have placed software applications on the Symbian platform and this partnership is a natural extension of our existing work,' says Roland Williams, senior vice president, Technology Solutions, Zi Corporation. ``Zi's development centers in Beijing and Calgary and international technical support centers allow us to integrate and support Symbian with high-level resources in the world's main markets.' The global wireless market is expected to reach one billion subscribers by 2003 according to research provided by the Strategis Group.
Zi will support Symbian's licensees, engineer wireless Internet applications based on the Symbian platform and provide Asian exposure to EPOC in addition to providing a mix of business development, engineering and project management skills to Symbian's licensees. Symbian is partnering with ARM, Dextra, Digia, Omron, Wipro, Kanri Kogaku Kenkyusho, Vanteon, Teleca, Phoenix, Cadence and Zi Corporation to develop new products for the wireless Internet device market.
``We're creating skilled third party resources to enable rapid product creation of Symbian based communicators and smartphones. Acting as an extension of Symbian's organization, the Symbian Competence Centers are independent companies who have the skills and expertise to manage, create and develop products in close cooperation with Symbian's licensees,' said Juha Christensen, executive vice president, Symbian. ``This new initiative demonstrates our commitment to evangelize opportunities for the wider wireless community, with the end result of growing the mass market for wireless information devices.'
Symbian owns, licenses, develops and supports leading software, user interfaces, application frameworks and development tools for wireless information devices such as communicators and smartphones. Symbian aims to promote standards for the interoperability of wireless information devices with wireless networks, content services and messaging and enterprise wide solutions. With headquarters in London, Symbian has offices in Tokyo and Kanazawa, Japan; Ronnenby, Sweden; Cambridge, UK and San Francisco Bay Area, USA. Symbian is owned by Ericsson, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia and Psion. |
