its all about the people
I'm happy to announce that Luca Passani, an expert in the area of mobile engineering and the driving force behind WURFL and WALL, has joined us here at AdMob. In addition to his work on WURFL, Luca has authored articles and co-authored books on Mobile development. Recently, he published the so-called GAP guidelines, Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, which helps developers create mobile sites with minimal effort.
For those of you not familiar with WURFL here is a brief description:
"WURFL, the Wireless Universal Resource FiLe, is a so-called Device Description Repository , i.e. a database of device profiles, which can be programmatically queried by applications to deliver tailored content to mobile devices. Given the wide array of devices in the market, all with different capabilities, producers of mobile content have a formidable obstacle to overcome. WURFL has come to their rescue by offering an Open Source alternative to expensive (and proprietary) DDR-based systems.
WALL is a WURFL-based application that lets developers build mobile pages using a simple mark-up, WALL will automagically ensure that the mark-up delivered to those devices is intelligible to them. This is no little achievement in a world where devices may or may not understand XHTML and may or may not understand WML."
So why is this important for AdMob? Firstly, it gives us access to one of the most experienced minds in mobile, which is in and of itself a wonderful thing. Secondly as part of our arrangement, we will be supporting WURFL by allowing Luca to spend a considerable amount of his time supporting the project, as well as putting some additional resources into WURFL in order to make sure it continues to run smoothly.
To be clear, we are not trying to take over WURFL or any of the open source projects that support the growth of the mobile web. All of the resources we put into the project are done with no strings attached. AdMob uses WURFL as part of our platform as do thousands of other mobile applications and services (The WURFL repository was downloaded 50,000 times over the past 18 months alone). A free, open, and well resourced WURFL is good for AdMob, and good for the mobile ecosystem as a whole, which is in turn, good for AdMob.
- Omar
For those of you not familiar with WURFL here is a brief description:
"WURFL, the Wireless Universal Resource FiLe, is a so-called Device Description Repository , i.e. a database of device profiles, which can be programmatically queried by applications to deliver tailored content to mobile devices. Given the wide array of devices in the market, all with different capabilities, producers of mobile content have a formidable obstacle to overcome. WURFL has come to their rescue by offering an Open Source alternative to expensive (and proprietary) DDR-based systems.
WALL is a WURFL-based application that lets developers build mobile pages using a simple mark-up, WALL will automagically ensure that the mark-up delivered to those devices is intelligible to them. This is no little achievement in a world where devices may or may not understand XHTML and may or may not understand WML."
So why is this important for AdMob? Firstly, it gives us access to one of the most experienced minds in mobile, which is in and of itself a wonderful thing. Secondly as part of our arrangement, we will be supporting WURFL by allowing Luca to spend a considerable amount of his time supporting the project, as well as putting some additional resources into WURFL in order to make sure it continues to run smoothly.
To be clear, we are not trying to take over WURFL or any of the open source projects that support the growth of the mobile web. All of the resources we put into the project are done with no strings attached. AdMob uses WURFL as part of our platform as do thousands of other mobile applications and services (The WURFL repository was downloaded 50,000 times over the past 18 months alone). A free, open, and well resourced WURFL is good for AdMob, and good for the mobile ecosystem as a whole, which is in turn, good for AdMob.
- Omar
posted by admob at 2:52 PM
2 Comments:
Congratulations to AdMob!
ditto - I hope the spirit of WURFL continues to thrive... suffice to say the world needs good quality device data!
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