I recently returned from a business trip to Munich where I attended the second Genivi member meeting. Genivi is a non-profit automotive and consumer electronics industry association, driving the development and adoption of an open in-vehicle infotainment ( IVI ) reference platform.  There are currently 79 members in the association, and that number is expected to grow as more industry and non-industry players join.

During that very same trip, I had a hands-on experience with infotainment systems.  My colleague and I rented  a gorgeous German car to visit a client. For a rental car, it was well-equipped and had a sufficient level of bells and whistles.  Early in the morning, we were in a hurry and wanted to secure a punctual and trouble free arrival by letting the navigator guide us to our destination.  Should’ve been easy…

Well, after 15 minutes of desperate trial and error, we finally called the rental guy for help with the settings, and after another 15 minutes of fumbling, we finally stepped on the gas and floored it on the Autobahn. Unlike with the Autobahn we had a very BAD USER EXPERIENCE with the navigator.  It seemed the engineers forgot about the users?

User experience is the driving force in the development of any handheld, consumer, even industrial device or system. In the case of a car, it is important to create an excellent user experience without distracting the driver (mind you that a terrible user experience before starting the engine can be equally distracting!) Safety still comes first, and creating a positive user experience for the dashboard is about optimizing technologies and system performance by intelligent software implementations. This is not and most probably will not be the core competence of car manufacturers nor of Tier1s. At any rate, high-level multimedia and graphics expertise are scarce resources in the industry.

The In-Vehicle-Infotainment system is a perfect example of converged technology: internet connectivity,  navigation, systems,  communication technologies, data acquisition systems, just to name a few. The sky is the limit for innovation and for companies to develop the iPhone of the infotainment system industry.

The automotive industry, as long as it has existed, has been a traditional and closed community. Now as electronics and software as we have seen them in mobile devices and consumer electronics are penetrating the dashboard, the industry players have realized that there is no point in reinventing the wheel. Genivi was established to bring industry internal and external knowledge to build a reference IVI platform with the ultimate goal of achieving considerable cost savings and more efficient product development processes. The future Genivi platform will compete with QNX, Microsoft, Microlton and other Linux variants. Those able to read the crystal ball predict that Microsoft and Genivi will rule the market for infotainment platforms.

Genivi welcomes new members, especially ISVs who can help solve complex user experiences and integration challenges, as well as those who have an in-depth understanding of the challenges of convergent devices and systems . User experience, open source technologies (especially Linux), convergence and internet connectivity are the driving forces in the development process.  Genivi has a very good understanding of the future requirements of infotainment systems.  Now it’s just a matter of implementing them.

Leveraging industry standards to accelerate time-to-market

Computing power to produce vehicle and driving information has been a commodity in cars over the years. The development focus of future infotainment platforms is on lower-cost CPU, smaller Flash and RAMS footprint, predictable response times especially for modern graphics rendering power and quality, which are key in producing real-time complex and parallel computing tasks on the dashboard.

Performance and scalability of an infotainment system has direct impact on the quality of real-time graphics content and user experience. Imagine a situation where a navigation map does not render properly on the screen or the lead time to access directions to your destination takes too long. These are just a few examples of frustrating user experiences.

Customized rendering implementation including rich multimedia features is not cost-effective in the long term. Industry standards and open multimedia interfaces defined by the Khronos Consortium and the GENIVI alliance for an In-Vehicle Infotainment reference platform (the GENIVI platform) offer cost-effective solutions for infotainment system implementation that provides quicker time-to-market.

High quality software implementation is key to safety

A well performing hardware graphics platform requires a well implemented software stack and UI framework to offer great overall user experience in infotainment systems. On the other hand, it is impossible to define a one-fits-all infotainment platform solution. Customization and variation exists between car manufacturers and on some occasions between different models of a particular car manufacturer. Some of the most important engineering skills and expertise contributing to robust performance and ease of use include:

• Implementation quality and reliability of software driver(s). Even the most powerful graphics hardware can be the slowest performing solution without optimized and reliable software driver stack with immediate impact on usability and stability of the infotainment system and applications.

• Optimized driver footprint and memory consumption for specific graphics technologies (OpenGL ES for 3D graphics and OpenVG for vector graphics) and overall system including video and audio in addition to graphics. Implementation of a native graphics driver can consume up to 10-times less memory and computing resources compared to some alternative solutions (e.g. made in Java or Flash) and therefore have an immediate positive effect on usability of the infotainment system.

• System critical issues such as alerts must be displayed without delay and not cause the system to crash. Real-time warning messages and alerts must be sent to the driver even if CPU/GPU is 100% engaged in other rendering and computing tasks.

• Pixel rate and 2D blitting speed and quality is an important factor. Some applications such as Google Maps are still using 2D bitmaps for content and therefore it is critical to optimize 2D blitting operations (alpha blending, rotation, etc.) for maximum usability of the system.

Towards a greener future

Advanced software technology in electronics will drive future product innovation in the automotive industry for the next 10 years. Today electronics and software makes up close to half of the overall vehicle cost, which puts pressure for improving the return on investment in the automotive instrument cluster. The development of vehicle infotainment systems is geared towards a standardized manufacturing process leveraging the software components in the development of model specific dashboards. By varying feature sets across different car models the car manufacturers are able to meet the expectations of the sophisticated consumer in a cost effective way. More cost savings will arise from reduced material in the production process and model specific prototype development. This is great news to the automotive industry as well as to the consumers’ growing environmental concerns. Technology is a key enabler for achieving a greener tomorrow in the automotive industry.

• Intrapreneurial Culture: Having an intrapreneurial culture means creating an environment where experimentation is honored and failure is just another step towards finding the right solution.  It means having a distributed decision-making structure whereby those closest to the action can make the right calls.  It means having a leadership team that treats its staff as constituents and respects honest, open feedback.  It means that good ideas that create value are rewarded and implemented regardless of whose brain it came from.  In short, it means respecting the intelligence of the individual, trusting them to come up with the best ideas, and rewarding them for creating value.
• Integrative Philosophy: An integrative philosophy is about utilizing ideas from anyone and anywhere.  The best intrapreneurial ideas are often incremental innovations that come from elsewhere.  I don’t believe that we just create the killer business model, or find the killer disruptive innovation in order to create business value.  Business value goes back to the fundamentals – 1) finding an opportunity, 2) putting the resources and advantages at your disposal towards harvesting that opportunity, and 3) instilling the operational discipline to execute day in and day out, reaping and sowing that opportunity to its maximum potential.  Intrapreneurial business value comes from the integration of these three main business value generation activities.
• Myth of Instant Perfection: A friend of mine from McKinsey once told me that the last 10% towards perfection usually burns 90% of your total effort. The technology world is littered with the carcasses of companies that had a better technology or a superior mousetrap.  Change is constant and there just isn’t enough time to create perfection, nor is it economically feasible to do so.  At Symbio, we strive for advancement, not instant perfection. Take for example, our multimedia and graphics team which develops and implements technologies that enable the best possible user experiences on mobile and embedded devices — the team makes sure that the critical 90% of the device is optimized for a targeted set of user experiences.  The team can then incrementally improve on that solution as additional changes are required.  It’s about knowing when to let go but still having a perpetual beta mindset.
• Global 2.0 Perspective: Today it is exceedingly important to have a global perspective towards talent and to create a workforce “mash-up” that combines the best processes and ideas that the world can offer.  This supports having an intrapreneurial culture but expands on the concept further, freeing the company to think outside the box, outside the four walls to tap the best and brightest minds and the most cost effective means to move the needle. Create an environment that fosters a global perspective.
• Clients – NOT Customers: This is a pet peeve of mine since the days I was a young investment banker on Wall Street.  There is a huge difference between Clients and Customers.  Customers buy something from you, usually a one-off transaction.  Companies with a customer orientation are continually trying to create new products to sell to their customers.  Clients are long-term constituents.  Having a client perspective means your team has a long-term perspective.  At Symbio, the services for which our clients spend their R&D outsourcing budgets on today are most certainly different from what they initially engaged us for.  The way we win in our business is by building relationships with our clients that last for years.
• Obsolescence Treadmill: Bill Gates once told the world that any product in Microsoft’s portfolio was on the road to obsolescence after just 6 months, and after 18 months, was completely obsolete.  This is especially true in the services business where services by nature are always changing, always advancing.  Accepting this fact is actually quite liberating.  At Symbio, it forces our software product engineering teams to continually look at ways to advance what we do, to reinvent the very core services that are our bread-and-butter.  Always look forward to see how you can create more value, more innovation, more efficiency for your clients.

All opportunities go cold if you don’t dig in, so for every meal your company is served, make sure that your team has the intraprenuerial urgency to “eat it while it’s still hot.”

Anyway, the spec is out and it’s time to take a look at what’s new. The new features include double precision floats, shader subroutines, instanced geometry shaders and arrays, as well as a heap of other new additions. Most importantly, however, OpenGL 4.0 introduces two new shader stages: sample shaders and tessellation shaders. The former enable the developers to have more control over sample operations, such as anti aliasing, while the latter offer mechanisms for programming the tessellation, e.g. LODing the geometry.

With these two new shader types, in addition to the already existing vertex, geometry and fragment shaders, it’s fair to say that most of the pipeline is now programmable. And if the developers are required to write shaders for most of the rendering pipeline anyway, why not write the entire pipeline by hand? This way you’d be able to implement any kind of rendering engine without having to deal with the limitations and rendering model of OpenGL. Think, for instance, non-triangle based rendering. This could solve the problem of having virtually every graphics-intensive game looking almost exactly the same. All you need is a mechanism for accelerating your “software renderer” on the GPU, which, of course, is called OpenCL.

Personally, I see no other way around the fact that developers want to customize every step of the rendering pipeline and the pipeline itself, than going back to writing “software rasterizers” and pushing them to the GPU using OpenCL or some such. This, of course, being only the intermediate step between the whole concept of a GPU and simply a mass of generic parallel computing power.

By the way, at least Tim Sweeney agrees with me.

Companies need to enable flexibility in their product development processes to accommodate market-specific customizations. And companies need to get more value out of R&D spending, and tap the best minds on the planet to create tomorrow’s products. Companies that are truly visionary are able to acknowledge without silos or bias — that there’s a wealth of talent around the world they can harness. The industry that continues to push the limit in globalization is of course, the technology industry. Globalization and technology innovation go hand in hand. One area in particular that is embracing the innovation aspects of globalization is the growing converging technology market.

Convergence Here and Now

Convergence has become a mainstream phenomena. Convergence is essentially the merging together of the Information Technology (IT) industry and the Telecom industry. At a more granular level, it’s about the melding together of mobile/embedded devices, web services, and the PC.

The poster child of convergence is the iPhone, and much has been written about Apple’s revolutionary user experience and design. It was also the first mainstream example of a mobile phone where the differentiator was not the phone but the software applications running on the platform. Apple fundamentally changed the economics and value chain of the telecom industry with the iPhone. Apple essentially took a PC business model and applied it to the telecom industry. Instead of carriers dictating consumer choices for what software and content that ran on their phones, Apple steered the user experience and created a direct channel via iTunes for consumers to get content and software onto their devices. Instead of the phone being the centerpiece of the device, it was now the applications that drove the popularity of the device — applications being developed all around the world.

The convergence of IT and Telecom isn’t just about industries bleeding into each other. There are many examples of entirely new forms of computing and communications devices that don’t tuck neatly into traditional categories. Cisco has been making major moves to bring their expertise and dominance in enterprise IT and telecom infrastructure into new markets, notably IP telephony and Web-based communications. Their Webex and telepresence technologies have become the de facto standard in corporate meetings, but they aren’t easy to categorize as products. Google Voice, Google Wave, and some of the new features in Gmail also defy classic categorization whether they are in the purview of IT or telecom — their new Nexus One smartphone has completely integrated web services directly into the device. This is just the beginning as mobile devices that provide a seamless user experience across the PC and television through Web services are becoming the de facto standard in computing experiences. Microsoft’s three screens strategy – small, medium, and large – running integrated applications over the cloud is the defining architecture for all future Microsoft products.

Finding a Way to Win: Staying Ahead of the Shift

The forces of globalization and convergence are creating disruptive change in all industries and markets – just look around at the changes the mobile Internet is bringing to the automotive industry, the financial industry with mobile payment options, smart metering and clean/green connected home applications. The winning companies are those, who are able to translate the continuing uncertainty and the breakneck speed of today’s technology into compelling products and services around the globe — and tapping into, for example, China’s skilled Android development community or Scandinavia’s multimedia and rich graphic designers.

In the face of increasing technological complexity, expertise has become a scarce resource and forming innovation outsourcing partnerships with trusted and established companies makes sense. The 21st Century innovator knows to look beyond their four walls to see the world of opportunity ahead.

Ever since Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore published his infamous concept in the mid-sixties, Moore’s law has been used to predict the long-term evolution of exponential increase of transistor counts in integrated circuits. The trend of doubling the transistor count every two years has been maintained from 1970’s all the way into new millennia. However, even Moore himself recognizes that the Law has it’s end on the horizon – in ten to twenty years, the size of the transistor is approaching the size of an atom. Even before that barrier, the more ruthless laws of economics will interfere. The sheer cost of designing a circuit beyond 16 nanometer process, with nuisances such as quantum tunneling, will eventually render the path of miniaturization useless. The end of the progress as we know it?

Well, no. Multi-core Computing and Parallel Processing come to the rescue. The simple reasoning behind all this is – If we cannot increase the processing power of a single unit, let’s throw in a number of processing units to do the task faster and faster! But there is a caveat – already in the 60’s, when academic research of parallel processing was in its first bloom,  IBM’s computer architect Gene Amdahl  introduced the model known as the Amdahl’s Law. It simply predicts the theoretical maximum speedup achieved by adding multiple processors.

In any given problem, there are parts that can be executed in parallel, and parts that need to be executed sequentially. For example, let’s say that a program needs 10 minutes to be executed with a single processor, and 2 minutes of the total execution time requires sequential processing. The remaining 8 minutes can be parallelized, but even with millions of infinitely fast processors, the total execution time approaches the 2 minute mark – thus giving the theoretical maximum multiprocessing speed-up of 5x.

“Well, that’s not so bad”, one might say. However, the depressing fact is that throughout the history of modern computing, most of the programs, operating systems, and algorithms have been developed as sequential by design.

Parallelization of an algorithm can be a significant, often impossible task.

Any kind of synchronization or data dependency within the algorithm, or between two or more separate algorithms is bound to make the parallelization undertaking extremely difficult.  There are technology areas, such as pixel based graphics, which are well suited to parallelism due to nature of the algorithm or processed data. Therefore it is not surprising that it was the graphics rendering that invoked the renaissance of the parallel computing.

As each of the pixels in screen can be independently processed, graphics accelerator hardware design started to evolve towards the direction of highly parallelized pipelines and multiple cores. Eventually, the graphics processing units (GPUs) by-passed the CPUs in both transistor count and theoretical processing performance. GPUs became fine-tuned behemoths to perform one single purpose – generating life-like 3D objects and environments for entertainment and industrial design needs.

After introduction of programmable graphics hardware architecture, programmers suddenly had possibility to harness the millions of transistors in GPUs to their liking. It was quite easy to predict that this newfound freedom would attract attempts to do something else with this raw horsepower than just graphics geometry calculations or lightning models. GPGPU – general purpose computing on graphics processing units – was born.

The rise of the GPGPU

Algorithms from areas such as cryptanalysis, signal processing, bioinformatics and even the search for extra terrestrial life were ported over to take advantage of GPUs’ vast processing capabilities. However as the programming environment and data types in GPUs were designed with graphics in mind, the implementers had to resort to sub-optimal tricks in programming and data manipulation. Also the quality of the results was often compromised due to limited precision in GPU’s arithmetic units. The performance however was beyond any CPU implementations so far.

As GPU vendors witnessed the rise of the GPGPU, they realized that this could be the opportunity to conquer the market share from the traditional CPU vendors. They started to nurture the GPGPU community by introducing better, yet proprietary, programming interfaces such as Close To Metal from ATI and CUDA from NVIDIA. Hardware designs were modified so that the precision problems in computation got smaller. In their developer support programs and technology demonstrations, GPGPU became an important part of their software portfolio. With the assistance of GPU vendors, many 3rd party software developers added GPGPU support to for example, accelerate video encoding and decoding.

Parallel processing became commodity overnight

At the same time, the traditional CPU vendors were also moving towards parallelism. With the introduction of Symmetric Multiprocessing support in mainstream CPUs, and evolutionary transition towards multiple dies within single package (multicore), the CPUs feature similar possibilities and challenges as their GPU counterparts. When Sony chose to feature Cell, co-developed with Toshiba and IBM, in their new Playstation 3 game console, the parallel processing become commodity overnight. Game developers were forced to re-engineer their tools and engines to better adapt with parallel processing environments now found in consoles and desktop computers alike.

Fast forward to spring 2008. Apple hands over their parallel programming API specification to the Khronos Group, the standardization body responsible of developing royalty-free standards such as OpenGL.  The OpenCL working group is formed, and with record-pace the new OpenCL 1.0 standard is ratified.  On August 2009, Apple releases their latest operating system, OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. Within the Snow Leopard’s core, holding hands with Apple’s task parallelization engine Grand Central Dispatch, is OpenCL. Clearly, they are ready for The Parallel Revolution.

Embracing the inevitable

With this seemingly small step, Apple was liberated from need to predict the direction of the future hardware evolution.  Their operating system was now capable of dividing processing load to multiple CPUs, and GPUs, provided that the programmers knew what they were doing. For this, Apple needs the open standard. By embracing the inevitable parallel future this early in their operating system, they ensure that the developers learn to take full advantage of underlying hardware.  It is interesting to see how Microsoft will respond, their Parallel Extensions for .NET 4.0 are in development.

Meanwhile in the embedded space, ARM is moving rapidly towards multiprocessor architecture. At the same time multiple solutions with highly parallel architectures targeted to portable devices are emerging. OpenCL in your cell phone may easily be a reality in very near future for very same reasons as on personal computers.

For us software engineers, parallel programming poses truly a refreshing challenge. We have to abandon most of our well served, yet serialized designs and start the learning process. Designing parallel algorithms is by nature a difficult task for the human brain. Representing the algorithm with current programming languages is even harder. New programming languages are needed to better describe the problem, and the solution, for the machine to process. OpenCL is just a beginning of a new era in computer science, and the industry itself.

This year’s show marked an important entry for Symbio as a new challenger in the emerging markets of converged technologies. Symbio’s offering and expertise in mobile and user experience driven multimedia and graphic technologies was excellently received by hundreds of industry representatives and clients.

I would like to summarize my perceptions from MWC in three points: First, one of the strongest messages at the event was that graphics and multimedia performance and capabilities are and remain key driving forces in product differentiation. The sophisticated consumers require more flashy UIs and high quality user experiences across different devices. What’s noteworthy in this situation is that the amount of technological challenges to meet the market’s demands are unequal to the amount of available expertise to solve these needs. This leaves great opportunities for companies specialized in turning fancy demos into high-quality products that are ready for mass production and fulfill the requirements of low energy consumption. This is especially important as the composition of video, graphics and voice are gaining ground in future devices.

Second, time is money and companies are pressed to deliver new products and services to market as new business opportunities and product categories emerge. Very few companies are able to maintain a large and highly specialized workforce and keep it up-to-date with the industry development. Critical time and cost savings can be achieved if product development resources are allocated wisely. Strategic partnerships can be key in shortening the time to market while maintaining core expertise in-house.

All this boils down to product and service innovation, the third key conclusion of my visit to MWC. Even if the term is somewhat vague and difficult to define it certainly entails the notions of novelty and uniqueness.  Everybody is still talking about iPhone, and the lack of its successor. Who is next? Where are the augmented reality cases? Or who is able to leverage existing technologies in an innovative way?

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona surpassed our expectations and we are also confident that we are able to add value to our clients now and in the years to come.

This summer Taiwan will declare its independence.

Not from China. Not from America.

From Microsoft.

Symbio CEO Jacob Hsu has been working with Taiwanese OEMs for 10 years and says they are finally ready to kick off the traces and become their own brands.

This surprised me. I was at last year’s CompuTex show, in Taiwan, looking for Linux, and it just wasn’t there.

While many of the Taiwanese businesspeople I talked with expressed a desire to go outside the Microsoft orbit, every booth featured Windows gear, usually with Intel chips.

But Android, the mobile operating system Google has built on top of Linux, is turning heads. “Google put together a complete package” for Android, Hsu said, with “software Development Kits (SDKs) and other things people could use.”

Working with programmers on the mainland, Taiwanese companies have spent the last months seeking to innovate on top of the operating system, Hsu said. The result is “holistic, complete packages, customized and differentiated products on top of open source systems.”

By June this will become obvious in a wealth of new Android tablets — Hsu expects CompuTex this year to be a “tablet show” — followed next year by netbooks running Google’s Chrome OS.

This also spells opportunity for U.S. companies like Symbio, which can deliver “market-focused” software designs based on an understanding of buyers, usability, and retail channels.

What Hsu sees as opportunity, however, is also Taiwan taking big risks.

“Taiwan is capacity constrained right now,” Hsu said, unable to increase hardware production, which is growing on the mainland. China also has more software expertise than Taiwan, which is hardware-focused. Taiwan has to step up and start building brands.

“An original equipment manufacturing (OEM) business has less than 5% margins. Companies with brands are at 15% plus.” Taiwan must march up the value chain.

In that march, the success of HTC, which makes the Google Nexus One phone, is illustrative. “HTC acquired a design shop in California that became their software innovation group,” Hsu said, while some competitors built software shops of 1,000 developers on the mainland and are still spinning their wheels.

“Now it’s a question of execution,” Hsu concluded.

But that means more than it did last year, when you could look at a USB stick shaped like a piece of sushi and estimate its market success. Now reviewers will be looking at user interfaces, and at marketing plans.

Independence is not an easy thing to pull off.

For most of us, Flash is familiar at least from web ad banners. They usually display fairly simple vector graphics animations and possibly a link to some web site. Nowadays, all this can be achieved using HTML5, by utilizing the Canvas element. The smarter ads probably provide some sort of interaction, which, again, is completely doable with HTML5 and JavaScript.

Another, today perhaps more relevant use case for Flash is video. Some of us spend half of our working days in YouTube, or so I’ve heard. This alone would be a good reason for Flash to survive, unless video, too, wasn’t supported by HTML5. YouTube already has an experimental support for HTML5, so I dare say Flash isn’t really required there anymore, either.

And now that HTML5 will introduce Web Sockets, the argument of Flash being a complete platform with bells and whistles, diminishes further. I’m already waiting for the major outbreak of HTML5 games. Flash 10 obviously fights back with its new features, such as 3D support. WebGL will also play its part in this battle, but I guess that’s a subject for another blog post.

I suppose the key argument here is that since HTML5 will eventually be supported by all modern web browsers by default, why would you want to use an external plug-in, which, on top of all things, is unstable and keeps crashing, as Mr. Jobs pointed out? Well, at least for the time being, Flash has an unparalleled content pipeline. Even if the player capabilities were directly built into web browsers, you still need tools to create the content whenever the content isn’t trivial. And this is where Flash gets its competitive advantage over all the alternative technologies.

These valuable content tools are the reason UI designers, for instance, are willing to use Flash for creating modern user interface prototypes and the content itself. However, the problems begin when this content has to run in a performance-critical and resource-constrained environment. It’s very much a non-trivial effort to integrate Flash into embedded environments. And being a closed “standard”, Adobe practically needs to be involved. For this problem, there isn’t an existing silver-bullet solution, as OpenVG is too low-level an API and SVG pretty much a failure.

This is an issue our customers are indeed facing: they want to be able to use Adobe’s content tools (or something similar) to create vector graphics content, but the player isn’t suitable for embedded environments. In the web world, on the other hand, the player is becoming less and less relevant as the same features are being built directly into web browsers.

So where does that leave Adobe? A quick look at Adobe’s product portfolio illustrates that content authoring tools is what they do. Just consider Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects… So it’s not the Flash Player that brings the money into the company, but the authoring toolset. This is also the reason the tools are as good as they are. As long as the authoring toolset is superior to all the other, largely non-existent alternatives, Flash has a huge headstart over any other technology, no matter how much better integrated into the underlying platform.

But Apple’s announcement made a lot of people wonder: should we be using possibly outdated or otherwise inferior technology just for the sake of its accompanying tools, or should we move on and trust that great authoring tools will emerge, as more and more people will abandon Flash and choose other alternatives for whatever reasons? Theoretically, this could also be a potential business opportunity for anyone willing to compete with Adobe. But of course Adobe has some tricks in their bag. Eliminating Flash Player and re-targeting their toolset (or a fork of it) to HTML5 could be one. But what piece of software will render the vector graphics UI on my microwave oven? I suppose there’s a business opportunity there, too.

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Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service’s mobile website plus most of the WAP portals in China.

According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month.  John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson’s International Education business, said, ““China is the world’s largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.” By combining mobile giant Nokia with UK-based Pearson, this joint venture allows the two companies a fantastic opportunity to capitalize on China’s opportunities.

The new joint venture company will deliver a wide range of services to meet the demand for digital education in China. It will begin operations immediately and will be managed by Angela Long, formerly head of Mobiledu at Nokia.