INSIDE Contactless and Mobile Distillery Join to Create New NFC Mobile Application Development Platform

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--INSIDE Contactless and Mobile Distillery today announced that they have formed a unique industry partnership to create a new NFC mobile application development platform. Through this partnership, the two companies intend to boost the development of NFC applications for the Wave-Me™ NFC services platform by making it easier for software makers to write applications once and deploy them across a broad range of NFC-enabled handsets.

“As the leader in solutions for mobile application development, we are excited to be working with the leader in NFC technology to create Celsius for Wave-Me”

Called “Celsius for Wave-Me,” the new NFC mobile application development platform combines Mobile Distillery’s Celsius mobile application production framework with INSIDE Contactless’ Wave-Me™ Service Engine, a key component of the Wave-Me NFC services platform, an end-to-end solution mobile carriers and third-party service providers can use to give subscribers easy access to a broad range of NFC consumer services and applications through their handsets. Celsius for Wave-Me will also include deeply integrated connectivity to INSIDE’s market-leading MicroRead® NFC chip and software, enabling NFC mobile applications to be optimized for performance with access to advanced proprietary features of the NFC chip.

“Along with our Wave-Me services platform for carriers and third-party service providers, Celsius for Wave-Me will be a key component of the NFC ecosystem, providing a platform NFC application developers can use to efficiently address the diversity of handsets on the market today and in the future,” said Loic Hamon, vice president of marketing, NFC Business Line at INSIDE Contactless. “We look forward to working with Mobile Distillery as we take this important step forward in the NFC market.”

Celsius for Wave-Me will help overcome a major hurdle facing mobile network operators who want to begin providing easy access to services but who are reluctant to wait until the deployment of NFC-enabled handsets fully ramps up. Celsius for Wave-Me allows developers to use its patented Parametric Development feature to automatically adapt their source code at compilation time to create applications that can read either QR Code (visual 2-D bar code tags) or traditional NFC tags, depending on the capabilities of the target handset.

“As the leader in solutions for mobile application development, we are excited to be working with the leader in NFC technology to create Celsius for Wave-Me,” said Vincent Berge, CEO at Mobile Distillery. “Developers addressing the Wave-Me services platform will now have a powerful way to deploy their applications across a wide range of handsets.”

A beta release Celsius NFC for Wave-me for selected partners is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2010. The Celsius for Wave-Me license will be free for the development stage of any project, and will be updated to include new NFC phones and additional NFC stickers and add-ons as they become available, offering the widest and deepest access to NFC functionality.

About Mobile Distillery

A specialist in mobile technologies and in-depth handset knowledge, Mobile Distillery was founded in 2005 to solve the platform and handset fragmentation issue that developers face when developing mobile content and services. Its software solutions reduce porting cycles by up to 80 percent, generate cost savings and accelerate time-to-market of Java mobile applications while ensuring their easy updates to new devices in European, North American and Asian markets. Its testing services allow corporations to ensure quality of their mobile applications and products with professional QA testing to mobile, NFC or SIM card applications.

Mobile Distillery’s customers include developers, publishers and system integrators across the mobile application ecosystem, web specialists, mobile game publishers, mobile marketing agencies and IT service companies.

Mobile Distillery has offices in Paris, Marseille, San Francisco and Singapore. For more information please visit www.mobile-distillery.com

About INSIDE Contactless

INSIDE Contactless is the global leader in open-standard contactless payment and Near Field Communication (NFC) semiconductors and software that power the next generation of payment, transit, identity and access control applications. The company’s intelligent, microprocessor-based platforms offer the flexibility to be embedded in smart cards, mobile phones and other consumer electronic devices, documents, badges and other items to support a wide range of innovative contactless applications and bring new levels of convenience to users. INSIDE has delivered more than 300 million contactless platforms worldwide to customers and partners that include many of the leading payment card and mobile phone manufacturers, systems integrators and financial institutions. With a portfolio of 60 families of patents, including several essential NFC patents, the company has played a leading role in NFC and contactless innovation. INSIDE is headquartered in Aix-en-Provence, France, with offices in Shanghai, Singapore, Warsaw, Seoul and Silicon Valley. For more information, please visit www.insidecontactless.com.