Symbian Foundation and China’s largest search engine Baidu agreed to co-establish a joint laboratory with the goal to bring wireless “box computing” to the Symbian platform. As a result, developers will be able to incorporate robust search functionality into their apps and leverage this “platform within a platform” to expand the Symbian/Baidu ecosystem.
From the press release:
Symbian Foundation will open the necessary platform technology interfaces for Baidu to enable wireless “box computing” deep within the Symbian middleware layer, facilitating the full integration of Baidu’s wireless “box computing” into the Symbian platform. Both sides intend to encourage third-party developers to incorporate “box computing” in applications and web services that support Symbian and the companies will jointly provide a complete “box computing” platform solution to handset manufacturers and operators. To promote “box computing” innovation on Symbian, the results of the Box Computing Joint Laboratory will be shared with the entire mobile industry and be made available through the Symbian Foundation’s open source efforts.
To be fair I’m not sure what this is all about. The only thing that hits my mind is that this is part of Nokia’s strategy to get a large chunk of the Chinese mobile market. Next thing you know, we’ll have Symbian and Baidu running their versions of Google AdSense and AdMob. If that’s the thinking behind this move, then way to go Nokia. 🙂