Part 1 – Organisational differences

JIL – Joint Innovation Lab

It’s unclear exactly when JIL begun, though this commercial joint venture under Dutch law was founded by:

Later Verizon joined. So four rather large mobile operators from each territory.

Can JIL scale to include other operators or members in respective territories? It’s unclear.

Notice there are no Web browser vendors involved in the venture.

After looking at JIL, it seems they have adopted most elements of the W3C widget P&C specification and extended it in some (minor) ways. However JIL has not contributed any specification material back to W3C discussion.

Collectively they aim to launch a software applications store to rival that of the Apple Itunes store.

BONDI from the Open Mobile Terminal Platform

BONDI is an initiative from the OMTP that begun around March 2008. The need for device APIs on mobile devices were identified and BONDI was founded with members largely based in Europe.

Opera is the latest member of the group. Both Opera and Access are browser vendors, with a lot of mobile experience involved in BONDI.

OMTP are members of the W3C.

Nick Allot on OMTP’s BONDI W3C positioning says it best:

From the outset W3C has been the target SDO (Standards Organisation) for
the BONDI specs. Considerable time and effort has been expended by both the
office and the members on this relationship. To date I think we can
congratulate ourselves on two major successes. Firstly, we have successfully
contributed to the Widget P&C spec ensuring all the core feature and
requirements of BONDI have been adopted in the current specification. Secondly,
through the Device API security Workshop which OMTP co-chaired and the efforts
with the Web Applications group, the new Device APIs and Policy working group
is now set up and scoped precisely to mirror the BONDI work.

To date, BONDI contributes to the Web standards track whilst JIL adopts (and fragments) W3C widgets.