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Ericsson has been moving steadily further into the software business, and an important, if underplayed, element of its strategy is the Ericsson Labs Portal, opened in November. This is where Ericsson opens up its key software projects and APIs in order to work with third parties on areas of mobile growth, and its first major partner is mapping specialist Idevio. The smaller firm will power Ericsson Mobile Maps, an early platform to emerge from the Labs.

The Swedish giant is interested in broadening its software reach for several reasons - enhancing the hosted multimedia services offering it increasingly aims to offer to carriers; putting itself in a leadership position in driving open mobile frameworks, preferably cross-platform; and tapping into the latest innovations out in the wider software world, going at least halfway to jumping on the open source bandwagon and encouraging input even from non-programmers with so-called 'DIY tools'.

The Labs is the focal point for this, and at launch Ericsson described it as "a focal point for open innovation and to gather all such projects under one umbrella". It went on: "On this site, Ericsson research and innovation teams will publish applications, APIs and resources and be available for collaboration. Very likely we will see the birth of new applications and technologies here before long."

The first such application is Ericsson Mobile Maps, underpinned by technology from the RaveGeo mapping, geocoding and routing platform from Idevio. Mobile Maps will offer developers a toolkit to build rich mobile applications with integrated map displays and functions such as locational search and directions. With this deal, Idevio's technology moves up a notch into carrier land - it currently powers the Locago open mobile map service, which has 600,000 users worldwide. It is cross-platform, supporting any phones with Java Mobile Edition - another sign of the increasing revival of Java as a technology to span the operating system wars.

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