Zi joins group to design wireless device products
OTTAWA, (Reuters) - Zi Corp. , a Canadian maker of Oriental-language software, is teaming up with a mobile phone group and a string of other software developers to design and market new products for the wireless and Internet device market, the company said Tuesday.
Zi told a news conference in Santa Clara, California, Tuesday it will be part of a team of 11 software developers that will work with Symbian, a venture representing leading mobile phone makers.
``Operating systems lack some of the sophisticated language technology -- they tend to be based in English. What Zi does is bring global language to EPOC,' Roland Williams, Zi's senior vice president of technology, told Reuters in an interview.
EPOC is an operating system for mobile products used by the Symbian coalition.
``It means stuff is uniformly usable and for Zi this is just an improved access to market,' Williams said.
Calgary-based Zi develops software that reads and writes languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean for such devices as mobile phones, pagers, and set-top boxes that couple computers with televisions.
Zi said it will join software firms ARM, Cadence Design Systems, Dextra, Digia, Kanri Kogaku Kenkyusho, Omron, Phoenix, Teleca, Wipro, and Vanteon in the engineering and marketing effort with Symbian.
``We're creating skilled third-party resources to enable rapid product creation of Symbian based communicators and smart phones,' said Juha Christensen, executive vice president of Symbian, in a statement.
``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.'
The Symbian venture, which builds products around the EPOC operating system, includes such companies as Sweden's Telefon AB , L.M. Ericsson , Finland's Nokia , the U.S.'s Motorola Inc. , Britain's Psion Plc and Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd.
Williams said Zi's technology could also save manufacturers time and money.
``All the phone manufacturers have to make (a) product that works globally and one of the problems that you have with (a) global product is language,' Williams added. ``If you have to do language region by region it costs a fortune...we take all that headache completely away.'
Zi has caught investors' attention on a string of licensing deals in China.
``One of the things that Zi brings is guaranteed access to the Chinese marketplace,' Williams said. ``We basically remove some of the barriers that any manufacturer faces trying to put product into places which are Chinese-character based.' |
