By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

September 15, 2006, 1:10 PM

One of Motorola`s oft-stated goals is to make the applications with which people interact flow seamlessly between what it calls ``the different screens of your life.`` A global citizen of the world these days is inundated with screens - on the phone, PC, car, even the refrigerator.

Cross-platform development is by no means a new topic, but in recent months, Motorola has discovered that, insofar as its business extends to at least most of these platforms, it needs to start fostering the notion among developers that all development should be cross-platform.

To that end, last May, Motorola began the first stage of its Motodev project - an online resource for developers among its many platforms. Motodev effectively replaces a handful of separate online resources, such as MotoCoder in the handset space and Horizon for the set-top box (STB), whose very separation stood in the way of implementing any kind of cross-platform vision.

With the second stage of Motodev, announced Monday, Motorola is implementing a concept called Fast Track. Unlike Microsoft`s MSDN, which is one of the most successful developer community platforms to date, Motodev`s second-stage initiative will go so far as to offer business consulting and even investment seeking services for small and medium-sized developers looking to expand into the cross-platform field.

The term is ``ecosystem,`` and here Motorola uses it to refer to the self-sustaining development environment whose various agents work to support one another. It`s a bit altruistic, maybe, for something as devoid of poetry as a digital IPTV tuner, but it may take this level of subtle, aesthetic persuasion to lend new appeal that the raw technology has failed to generate over the last decade or more.

BetaNews spoke with Christy Wyatt, whose title is Vice President for Ecosystems Market Development for Motorola. From Wyatt`s perspective, her goal is to generate the necessary convergence for the new ecosystem to come about. But what`s getting converged are ecosystems themselves, thus presenting more than merely semantic challenges.

``We`ve had a very healthy developer community around our mobile devices business for a very long time, through Java, our existing platforms [Microsoft, Linux],`` Wyatt told us. ``So I think that ecosystem is intact, as is the [digitally] connected home. I think what we`re looking at now is the evolution, the convergence of those ecosystems.``

However, there needs to be a technological foundation -- a basic set of APIs and SDKs -- for developers to actually build the ecosystem going forward. ``I do believe we`ll see more innovation, and it`ll be easier to bring those kinds of services to market when a lot of that infrastructure is in place,`` Wyatt explained.

``But if I put myself in the shoes of a major content or service provider - even a simple example like Google or Yahoo - there`s really nothing that would prevent them from creating an experience with an ID that`s shared among all of those different screens...if we can show them how to take advantage in each one of those different areas.``

While Google and Yahoo probably don`t need the financial assistance right now, Motodev will be offering more categories of assistance to its new developer community than just tutorial. For instance, Wyatt said, Motorola has pre-negotiated licensing agreements with certain classes of software that have yet to be developed, through the company`s own partners, as a way to generate incentive for developers to claim work that`s out there waiting for them.

It has also established agreements with testing resources including NSTL and ReIQ to aid in certification. Software outsourcing firm Vanteon has also been retained to enable developers to actually hire out some of the tasks before them.

Mobile software download portals Handango and Motricity have reached ``pre-agreements`` of a sort with Motodev, assuring developers of availability of virtual portals once their products come to market. And finally, the company will be making the resources of Motorola Ventures available for groups seeking funding and business guidance.

``We have business development ISV management teams and partnership management teams that are working with partners in very specific areas - for example, location-based services, or music in media, or video, enterprise and productivity,`` said Wyatt. ``Those managers are looking at all the trends happening within [each] space, and what are its compelling technologies, and really working with partners within those areas [that are] interesting for Motorola as a company. We want to make sure we have a healthy community of partners in the ecosystem that are headed in the same direction.``

``Motorola talks quite often about the seamless mobility vision,`` Wyatt continued, ``and for services to sort of change content and follow the user. That doesn`t necessarily mean having the same application running on multiple devices. If you think about it, users expect to listen to music very differently in their cars than they do in their homes, than they do on a mobile device - how they find it, search it, what the interface should look like, how you control it. Your expectations for what that experience is, are going to change depending on where your current context is.``

While the underlying technologies behind devices are continuing to converge, she said, they haven`t yet broken the bubble separating them, to create any kind of singular framework that transcends all devices, or at least all of them under Motorola`s purview.

``The reason why we brought the ecosystem together in advance of these technologies being ready,`` Motorola`s Wyatt explained, ``is that I believe there`s lots of really intelligent developers out there that are going to get it, even before we have the perfect framework to enable it. [They] already understand context, what these experiences need to look like on what we call `the different screens of your life.` They`re already in a position where they can create these applications and services that share experiences or share content or share data across those different screens, even without that. So I would say it`s a parallel approach. We want to enable the ecosystem to get there even in advance of us. That`s definitely our direction.``