It’s the ambition of the Symbian Foundation to grow the most productive and valuable software community on the planet.

Different groups within the community will have their own reasons for taking part:

• Device manufacturers will participate because of the breadth of features in the devices they can create using the Symbian Platform, the fast time-to-market, and the options for low cost and low risk projects;
• Service creators will participate because of the wide range of rapid rich development environments supported, all resulting in solutions that run without change on multiple different types of device;
• Developers will participate because of the huge market opportunity, the improving tools and support, and the buzz within the community;
• End users will participate because the platform gives rise to the best devices, the best services, and the best applications.

But this isn’t just a community that uses the output of the Symbian Foundation.  Instead, it’s a community that collaboratively develops this output.

Participants in the community will, between them, contribute the following:

• Requirements
• Designs
• Defect fixes and code enhancements
• Marketing initiatives
• Brand new packages of code
• And ideas on the future of mobile.

Potentially one of the most significant of the forthcoming new initiatives from the Symbian Foundation is to provide an open infrastructure to gather and highlight the best ideas on the future of mobile.  The vision here is that the Symbian community will be the place where everyone gathers to gain and/or trade insight about what’s coming next (and what should come next) in the world of smart mobile devices.

This initiative will build on existing projects in and around the Symbian community.  For example, Symbian Software Ltd ran a Student Essay Contest earlier this year.  The theme of that contest was Architectures to enable breakthroughs for mobile converged devices.

It’s my pleasure to announce that, in that contest, the authors of the following three essays have each won a prize of £1000 (winners are listed alphabetically by surname):

• Kirill Alexandrov, Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University, Russia (FRUCT): Ideas on driving-oriented converged devices for cars, going beyond mobile phones in cars, proposing innovative onboard mobile systems for the automobile;
• Gerald Madlmayr, Johannes Kepler University, Hagenburg, Austria: An excellent analysis of security issues for Near-Field Communications, with recommendations for industry;
• Richard Tee, Tanaka Business School, Imperial College, UK: An insightful business-oriented survey of software architecture issues from a point of view of the governance of mobile platforms.

The winning essays will shortly be published on one of the Symbian websites.

In addition, the following three entries are commended with Honourable Mention:

• Ashwin Bhat K S, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India: A good survey and analysis of the benefits of Open Source for mobile software;
• Pankaj Nathani, Bhavnagar University, Gujarat, India: An excellent broad survey of architecture issues for mobile devices with insights for device developers;
• Aleksandra Reiss, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia (FRUCT): An innovative review of ideas for medically-oriented converged mobile devices, with specific focus on the needs of developing countries.

I personally thank these authors and all the entrants, for their innovative spirit and insight .  I wish them success in their future studies and look forward to their further participation in the grand task of creating the future of converged mobile computing.