Smartphone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"Microsoft and Vodafone outlined their plans to help create mobile Web services standards that will enable new business opportunities for application developers and mobile network operators and deliver new integrated services for customers across wired and wireless networks. Vodafone has more than 123 million mobile customers throughout the world.

Mobile Web services will utilize existing industry standard Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based Web services architecture to expose mobile network services to the broadest audience of developers. Developers will be able to access and integrate mobile network services such as messaging, location, authentication and billing into their applications. The companies' efforts will help expand commercial opportunities for developers to further promote their applications and enable solutions that work seamlessly across PC and mobile environments. Customers will be able to use mobile Web services from multiple devices on both wired and wireless networks."

Web services are clearly a natural fit for applications targetted at connected mobile devices such as Smartphones. It will be interesting to see what exactly this partnership with Vodafone will mean for software developers. The information we have here is vague but I have high hopes. At the Professional Developers Conference later this month, Microsoft and Vodaforne are expected to go into more detail about their roadmap for this partnership.