Motorola Inc’s Ronjon Nag, vice president and general manager of the company’s Lexicus division, has called to clarify the position of Online Anywhere in the future of Motorola’s Internet and Networking Group. Last Wednesday Motorola picked up a minority stake in San Jose, California-based Online Anywhere (CI No 3,522). Nag explains that Online Anywhere’s software can automatically convert ordinary web pages for display on PDAs, telephones and other devices on the fly. A number of ways of doing this already exist, including HDML and VoxML. However each of these requires that site masters manually convert their pages. Online Anywhere will automatically reformat content, either to one of those formats or to a form factor, Nag explained. This is one of the building blocks to complete our story. Philippe Kahn’s Starfish Software, which handles personal information managers and synchronization and which Motorola acquired back in July (CI No 3,452), is another. The Symbian project, of which Motorola is a member alongside Ericsson, Nokia and Psion (CI No 3,439), is intended to provide a platform for all such applications as these. This is yet another piece in the puzzle to allow people to access web sites from a number of areas, Nag said. Hence the formation of Motorola’s Internet and Networking Group. One of the objectives of the group is to get some critical mass on the internet space, Nag said. There are a lot of groups inside Motorola working on the internet. The group will make those separate efforts more coherent, he hopes: Instead of working separately we are working together to give our work a more co-ordinated spin.
