EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: The CEO of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) – an alliance aiming to enable developers to write applications that can be deployed across multiple platforms and operators, and address a potential global market of 3.5 billion customers – expects to release version 2 of its spec early next year while continuing its aim to sign up all the industry’s major device vendors as members. Speaking in a video interview with Mobile World Live during the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress last month, Peters Suh said WAC will make the next version of its spec available “in the beginning of next year” and is “looking for feedback and responses.” WAC announced version 1.0 of its spec for developers in October, a month ahead of schedule.  

The initiative is eager to create momentum that will attract new supporters so that it can compete with the established might of Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. Hence Suh is setting out an ambitious agenda for where he wants WAC to be 12 months from now. Firstly, he has a target of signing up more handset vendors as members. “We hope a year from now that we’ll have the majority if not all supporting that [WAC] specification.”  The initiative announced two new OEM members, Sharp and Sony Ericsson, during Mobile Asia Congress. The existing members from the handset vendor community are Samsung, LG, Huawei and ZTE. The second aim for Suh over the next 12 months is to integrate as many operators as possible into WAC. Then there are the developers who as well as gaining access to customers can effectively use the WAC system as “a common settlements solution” for app payments, he noted. “If I am a developer here in Hong Kong, and I want to…make applications available in Europe, the US, in Japan, then I’m able to do that but be paid in a common currency. That has a lot of appeal to them [developers],” explained Suh. View the full interview here.