AOL announced that five leading application developers – Aricent, Action Engine, Obopay, Infosys, and ShoZu – support the AOL Open Mobile Platform initiative and anticipate delivering a new breed of wireless applications based on the platform. The AOL Open Mobile Platform will provide developers with ready access to the tools and source code they need to build and distribute applications across all major mobile device platforms and operating systems including BREW, Linux, RIM, Java, Symbian, and Windows Mobile.

To help encourage further innovation and collaboration, AOL also announced, in addition, that it plans on making the Open Mobile Platform available under the widely-used Apache 2.0 software license.

Executive Vice President of AOL, Kevin Conroy, said: “Providing developers with open access to our technologies is a fundamental part of AOL’s new product strategy”. “Through our new AOL Open Mobile Platform, we’re further demonstrating our focus on the importance of mobile and encouraging developers to create new experiences for users around the globe."

Senior Vice President of AOL, Steve Murphy, said: “We’re thrilled to see the product innovation that’s being stirred by the AOL Open Mobile Platform”. “We expect that our open platform will unleash even more creativity in the development community and in turn give consumers more choice for mobile applications.”

Aricent, Action Engine, Obopay, Infosys, and ShoZu are planning to use AOL’s open mobile tools and source code, from media sharing applications to person-to-person mobile money transfer services, to create innovative applications capable of functioning on a wide-range of devices and operating systems. Examples of the ways the companies plan to use the Open Mobile Platform include:

* To offer developers who use AOL’s new platform the opportunity to have their applications embedded within the new AOL MyMobile application, Action Engine will work with AOL. Being released into beta today, AOL MyMobile is a new interactive suite of AOL services designed specifically for mobile devices and was built using Action Engine’s on-device portal technology.

* The Aricent News Center application will combine, using the AOL Open Mobile Platform, the power of RSS feeds and Web 2.0 technologies to deliver the latest content on virtually any mobile phone. Traditionally, content delivery to phones requires complicated transcoding and server-side formatting to suit various phone display capabilities. Aricent News Center, built on top of the AOL Open Mobile Platform, however, will be presentation-agnostic and will be able to run on any J2ME/BREW mobile device, without custom modification.

* Enabling consumers across all carriers to securely send, request and receive money via their mobile phones,  Obopay will use the Open Mobile Platform to continue to extend its leading mobile money transfer services.

* The leading provider of mobile social media services, ShoZu, plans to develop an AIM-based application that utilizes Open AIM in addition to the AOL Open Mobile Platform.

Being targeted for wider availability to developers this summer, the AOL Open Mobile Platform, will consist of three components: an XML-based, next-generation markup language; an ultra-lightweight mobile device client; and an application server. A dynamic presentation layer will allow for rapid deployment of new features and easy optimization for a wide variety of mobile devices, allowing developers to build and update applications once, and then distribute them across all supported devices and platforms.

By utilizing advertising resources provided by Platform-A’s Third Screen Media, the leading mobile display advertising network and mobile ad-serving and management platform provider, the platform will also give developers the ability to monetize their mobile applications.