The OMTP team were in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2010 to promote the BONDI terminal initiative, and taking inspiration from the name they tirelessly carried a BONDI branded surf board around the exhibition halls, taking snaps of delegates posing with it as they went. It was a great PR effort, designed to raise awareness about the program, and they captured hundreds of delegates / companies posing with the board. I only got snapped with the ‘mini-board’, but check out their Flickr stream to see the full size board on its tour of Barcelona. Good work chaps!

The Bondi terminal initiative is run by the OMTP.  It was created with the clear rational to ensure that mobile developers have a clear way in which they can develop a single web application which can be executed on multiple platforms, independent of the underlying OS.

This is the traditonal problem of developing for the mobile platform – there’s little commonality between handset features, form factors etc. It can often mean laborious (and costly) porting between platforms and can see the developer community gracitationg towards devices / OSs only once they’ve reached a critical mass in the market.

BONDI uses web technologies and builds upon them to provide new APIs to the key mobile phone functionality like Contacts, Calendar, Messaging & Location. BONDI seeks to build upon the success which has been seen in the creative deployment of new services in the PC Internet domain, whereby a web application which works in one browser in Linux can also work in a different browser using Windows.