Operator keynotes at this morning’s GSMA Mobile Asia Congress called for an end to disparate application environments and hailed the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) initiative as a potential saviour. “In the world of applications we’re missing what made mobile so successful; a common format instead of an array of islands,” warned Michael O’Hara, CMO of the GSMA. “We’re not creating something that runs across all devices and operating systems, the one thing that made GSM a success,” he said, citing examples of application stores from the likes of Apple, Nokia, RIM and Android. “We need to find a way to eliminate these islands. We need a widget app so that if I change device I can actually move my apps to that device. The iPhone is a wonderful experience but I’m trapped. JIL is a key step to getting to those apps.”

Established last year and supported by some of the world’s largest operators – China Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone and Softbank, as well as tier one handset vendors – the initiative has a potential customer base of over 1 billion and aims to provide a widget specification that will enable developers to create applications that can be rolled out across the JIL operators’ global footprint. “We will create a single platform we can share with one another,” commented Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of Softbank. “JIL is trying to bring widgets shared across all handset vendors and operating systems so that applications can all be shared. We are starting something very exciting. Next year we will have more information to reveal and we would like to invite other companies to join us.”

Allen Lew, CEO (Singapore) at SingTel, backed the initiative, although his company is not yet a member. “We see this as something the industry needs so we can recover investment from building high-speed networks.” Lew reflected that his company had changed strategy in recent years from being a “pure telco” to a content provider, a point picked up by the GSMA’s O’Hara who noted that “we need to work together and make sure operators become a key part of the value chain and not just pipes.”