Discretix Industry Alliances

4C Entity is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable standards for the authorized sharing of premium content. IBM, Intel, Panasonic and Toshiba have joined forces to address the interoperability challenge of sharing copyright-protected content among a wide range of digital devices produced by multiple manufacturers. 4C Entity technologies are critical to providing consumers with flexible access to all forms of digital content, while ensuring that the content is high quality, easy to store and maintain, transferable to similar digital devices and copyright-holder friendly.

bmcoforum (Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum) is an international lobbying association, providing a discussion platform for companies and institutions dealing with the development of a worldwide open market for mobile broadcast services.
bmcoforum numbers more than 80 members world-wide from all parts of the mobile broadcast value chain.
Main work items are spectrum availability, interoperability, bearer technologies, network structure, generic business models as well as content and services.

The mission of the Open Mobile Alliance is to facilitate global user adoption of mobile data services by specifying market driven mobile service enablers that ensure service interoperability across devices, geographies, service providers, operators, and networks, while allowing businesses to compete through innovation and differentiation.

The OMTP group has been created by international operators with the aim of enhancing the subscriber experience in using advanced mobile terminal platforms - 2.5G and above.
The OMTP group will aim to:

• Allow mobile operators to provide consumers with a consistent subscriber interface, across their particular networks;
• Support and promote the development of open standards associated with appropriate technologies, ensuring that the underlying requirements for security and interoperability are satisfied; and
• Provide an organisation where mobile operators and manufacturers can work together in order to develop recommendations for devices that allow operators to improve their customers' service experience across multiple devices.

In January 2000, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic), SanDisk Corporation and Toshiba Corporation established the SD Card Association as a new industry-wide organization charged with setting industry standards and promoting wide acceptance for the SD Memory Card in digital applications.

The association aims to establish the technical and specification standards for SD Memory Card applications, to continuously promote the SD memory card as the de-facto industry standard, and to encourage the development of digital A/V, wireless communication, and digital networking products that utilize the many unique benefits of SD technology.

The OTA Flash Forum is a group of leading companies within the wireless industry that are involved in the development and/or deployment of over-the-air (OTA) firmware update solutions for mobile phones. The purpose for creating the Forum is to simplify the management of mobile handsets, and to accelerate the adoption of commercial quality software for OTA flash updates.

The MultiMediaCard Association (MMCA) is the open standard organization that defines the physical, functional and interface specifications of MultiMediaCards (MMCs), the postage-stamp size, removable memory cards used in mobile phone, digital imaging and portable consumer electronics applications. While removable memory cards are the primary focus, the MMCA also supports the adoption of the MMC interface standard in other embedded or removable components and subsystems, such as hard disk drives.

Founded in 1998, the MMCA provides a global forum for memory card and semiconductor component suppliers, software vendors and manufacturers of mobile electronic devices who jointly endorse and promote the worldwide adoption of MultiMediaCards and the MMC standards.

www.mmca.org