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Though the annual Brew conference brings different kinds of applications to one place, gaming occupies the top of mind this year too

Java has a serious contender brewing for mobile applications. This message was evident and written all over the place at the annual BREW 2005 conference in San Diego. Not only are the applications getting smarter and better, it is attracting developers to come out with new applications for the ever increasing mobile subscriber base.

The three day conference started on June 1 and has brought over 70 developers face to face with operators like Verizon, KDDI and Tata Teleservices among others. Since its commercial launch BREW has seen 88 percent rise in brew enabled devices. Today almost 310 BREW models are there in the market. In revenue terms the total earnings from BREW applications has crossed $350 million in the past five year. Of this 75 percent has come in the last six months. And almost 340 million applications have been downloaded all over the world in the past five years.

Though the Indian market might be still some time away in adopting high resolution, real to life 3D applications like online game or other data-based applications but they are surely coming sooner or later. Currently the prime target for BREW developers are countries like South Korea and Japan, where gaming and data downloads on WCDMA network is a big market. However, markets China, Latin America, South East Asia and Europe are fast catching up on these applications.

The underlying theme for the conference is to look for revenues beyond voice services. And, the strategy seems to be working. The UIOne initiative combined with the BREW applications targets to bring complex application in simple user interface format for both the business as well as the retail consumers. “The UIOne would bring applications to the front in very simple way. This means smart phone like functionalities for the mass market. And, believe me application market is growing and we have not even got a glimpse of the real ones,' said Dr Paul Jacobs, CEO-elect, Qualcomm Inc at the conference.

BREW being an open platform in attracting more developers in the recent times. The participants at the conference are showcasing applications like voice identifier, which enables you to identify any music using your cellphone, or bar code readers over the mobile devices and remote monitoring through your cell phones. But the main attraction of the conference are the gaming applications which are getting better, faster and more exciting. The $400 million investment since 1999 by venture capitalists is an indication of the excitement on gaming front.

Anurag Prasad
(The author is in San Diego on Qualcomm's invitation)

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