The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), an alliance of telecommunications companies committed to building an open applications platform, today announced its formation as a corporate entity, as well as the organisation’s leadership and board of directors. The company also announced that it will join forces with the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), accelerating the commercial launch of WAC-enabled application stores.
At launch, WAC will allow operators to distribute applications through their respective application storefronts and charge users through their existing phone bill. In this model, developers will set the application price and will receive a revenue share for the transaction. The revenue share will be defined on an operator-by-operator basis. This will ensure that revenue shares will be competitive in today’s application market. WAC is a not-for-profit organisation and will receive a small transaction fee for each application to cover its operating costs.
In the future, WAC will offer business models that enable additional purchases from within an application; leverage network capabilities, such as location, to enhance an application; and facilitate the serving of advertisements to end users.
WAC Specification and SDK Available in November
WAC will publish its initial specification and components of its SDK to developers in November. This specification will be based on W3C standards. WAC will also provide backwards compatibility for devices based upon the current JIL and BONDI specifications. Details of the developer roadmap and a preview of the WAC specifications will be available in September.
Developers currently creating JIL applications can continue working with the existing JIL specification, tools and software libraries and these applications can be deployed on JIL based devices immediately. With the publication of the WAC specification, developers will also have a clear path to deploy applications on a wider range of devices supporting the WAC specification in 2011.
You can read the full press release here.
You can find out more about WAC here.