Dublin software house gets behind the MUSIC


16 Jan 2007

SID2U, a Dublin-based software developer, has won a significant EU project working with HP’s Italian operation.

MUSIC (Applications for Mobile Users In Ubiquitous Computing Environments) is a multinational scheme that is funded by the European Commission under the EU’s sixth Framework project.

Specifically, the initiative aims to provide an open platform that makes it technically and commercially feasible for the wider IT industry to develop mobile applications. It’s hoped this will result in the development of an open platform for software developers, delivering relevant content in the right context to ‘any network’ and ‘any device’. The new platform is thought to be especially interesting to the open source community.

The project is intended to address several technical challenges, namely to devise an open platform for developing self-adaptive mobile applications, including methods, tools and middleware. The platform would then be used to develop trial applications.

In turn, this will drive research and development (R&D) and once the technical quality of the project results has been assessed, the results would be promoted to the wider industry.

The consortium backing the MUSIC project includes industry and academic organisations from all around Europe, including SID2U.com in Dublin, HP Italy, the Norwegian R&D group SINTEF, the University of Kassel in Germany and a division of Telefonica in Spain. Other participants include groups in Belgium, Portugal and Cyprus.

According to Tom Flynn, managing director of SID2U.com, being involved in the project will allow the company to showcase ASA, its ‘all in one’ desktop and network management product which was launched recently.

“Our role is to try out the middleware technology and use our product to work with the MUSIC platform,” he explained. “The beauty of this project is that it’s funding a lot of our R&D activity,” Flynn told siliconrepublic.com.

He said that there were potential collaboration opportunities for other Irish companies in similar projects. “It’s something other SMEs [small to medium-sized enterprises] could consider for the seventh framework [project],” he added.

By Gordon Smith