Based on Open Standards
Open standards give everyone a level playing field and opens up for healthy competition among implementers of the standard. Investing in an open standard based technology always gives the investor freedom to move on with another provider of the technology in case it would be necessary; the openness guarantees that there is interoperability between the two. Evolvement of open standards continues as long as there is any party interested in the development. By contrast, proprietary technologies rely on a specific company's implementation leaving content creators, operators and device managers locked into a one supplier solution.
Open standards are developed by a community under insight of any interested party. The standards are accessible on equal terms to the community users. Open standards help the mobile industry strive towards de-fragmentation, a key success factor to mass market take up of services and applications.
Mobile SVG
Ikivo’s solutions, which are built around Mobile SVG enable a rich media experience on all types of mobile phones, regardless of memory, bandwidth or processing constraints. Mobile SVG, or SVG Tiny 1.2, is an open standard defining an XML language for rich internet application. SVG does not only define rich vector graphics allowing creation of virtually any graphics you can imagine. It also combines the best features of document management, animation, scripting and multimedia handling to enable light-weight compelling services with full interactivity.
Mobile SVG is developed and maintained by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) and has been endorsed by several other leading standards groups such as 3GPP, OMA, Khronos Group and the Java Community Process (JCP). Since it is based on XML it can be seamlessly integrated with any real-time data source as well as being easily combined with xHTML, Java, Ajax and RSS.
Ikivo offers the most widely used Mobile SVG Players in the world, fully compliant to current specifications. Ikivo is actively shaping the future of the standards via active involvement in standard bodies such as the W3C, OMA, ETSI (3GPP) and the Khronos Group.
Ajax
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a programming paradigm established on the stationary web and now also gaining ground on the mobile arena. The basic ideas in Ajax consist in updating the displayed page by requesting only the data that has changed and using asynchronous communication for the data transfer is perfect for mobile devices, which are constrained by bandwidth processing power. Ajax can be used together with any XML language that has scripting interface and supports the httprequest interface. The adoption of a DOM and scripting in SVG Tiny 1.2 has opened up for creating Ajax applications with SVG as the basic XML display language. There are many initiatives going on within the mobile Ajax framework and Ikivo is taking active part in the development. The open Ajax alliance http://www.openajax.org is currently working on developing standards for Ajax solutions.
Ikivo is using the AJAX paradigm in its delivered solutions running on the Ikivo players.
JSRs for SVG
Java is one of the most spread technologies on the mobile devices. The interface to Java is constantly being increased by the work in the Java Community Process, JCP, resulting in new and improved APIs called JSRs. There are two JSRs defining APIs from Java to SVG: JSR 226 for SVG Tiny 1.1 and JSR 287 for SVG Tiny 1.2. These APIs make it possible to create rich graphics and multimedia application from Java applications opening up for appealing graphics even on low end devices.
JSR 226 is part of the Mobile Service Architecture; MSA, the common Java API advocated by Nokia and Vodafone.
Ikivo offers state of the art implementation of JSR 226 and JSR 287.
Rich Media
Rich media application frameworks allow applications containing video, audio, graphics with animations and text to be presented to the user in one context. Frameworks for such applications are emerging and the standard developing organizations 3GPP and OMA have been working on defining these. The specifications for these frameworks are Dynamic and Interactive Media Scenes (DIMS) specified by 3GPP and Rich Media Environment (RME) specified by OMA. Using the standardized frameworks advanced applications can be created. The specifications also define novel mechanism for pushing out updates to the clients from the server.
Open VG
Ikivo is not only working on the high level interfaces to the content creator but is also active in the standards bodies defining low level interfaces to the hardware accelerating the graphics rendering. One such interface is Open VG, which defines an API for vector graphics to hardware accelerated rendering chips. Open VG is now compatible with SVG and thanks to this work it is now possible to easily integrate the Ikivo players on devices with Open VG compatible hardware acceleration. |
