EU Chips In To Fund Symbian With €22 million

With just about a week to go before the Symbian Exchange and Exposition (SEE 2010), the beleaguered organisation has received good news. The Symbian Foundation has been awarded €11 million of European Union funding from the Advanced Research & Technology for Embedded Intelligence & Systems (Artemis).

This sum for the smartphone operating system development project will be doubled to €22 million by a consortium of 24 European organisations headed by the Symbian Foundation. The group has called itself Symbeose (Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe).

Project Based Initiatives For The Future

Richard Collins, technology manager at the Symbian Foundation, blogged: “The overall development project has been divided into smaller projects – each with its own workstream and objectives – and members of the consortium have committed to deliver these projects and provide half of the required funding.”

He explained that the Symbeose initiative will develop new core platform capabilities in power efficiency and optimising the system for multi-core processors used in conjunction with “new techniques in asymmetrical multiprocessing”.

The projects will also examine how a mobile device can work most efficiently in a cloud computing environment. Future mobile platforms and embedded devices will also feature in the R&D, with a team determining what common requirements underlie Internet-connected devices and how new hardware can best be supported.

The Artemis funding will spread some early Christmas cheer around SEE 2010 (November 9-10) in Amsterdam, which was shaping-up as a potentially moribund affair. It is being seen as a lifeline thrown to the Symbian Foundation.

Rumours that the Foundation, Symbian’s steering committee, would be wound down started to circulate when its CEO Lee Williams resigned last month. This would have left the open source developers, the Symbian Foundation Community, with no central core to hold them together.

Williams resignation came at a time when Symbian appeared to be losing traction with former supporters and implementers. Nokia appeared to downgrade the smartphone operating system in favour of its Qt cross-platform framework and MeeGo joint project with Intel, while Sony Ericsson and Samsung announced they were no longer interested.

Artemis is a public-private partnership between the European Commission, 21 European countries and the Artemisia association of more than 150 industry and research organisations. It was established in 2008 by the Council of the EU in the form of a Joint Undertaking (Artemis-JU).