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The future of cellphone software: in an exclusive interview, WBT speaks with frontier wireless technologies pioneer Dr. Nayeem Islam, vice president of DoCoMo Communications Laboratories USA, Inc.

Article Excerpt
DoCoMo Communications Laboratories USA was established in 1999 in Silicon Valley by NTT DoCoMo, the leading wireless data and application service provider in the world. Its mission is to explore innovative applications and related frontier technologies for next-generation mobile networks by taking advantage of the synergy of Silicon Valley's excellence in information technology and Japan's leading role in mobile telecommunications technology.

Since its start in 1999, DoCoMo USA Labs has grown to four laboratories and a corporate strategy group and excels in advanced areas such as seamless communication environments, overlay services over heterogeneous networks, mobile multimedia processing and coding, IP-based mobility, security protocols, and mobile applications. WBT was fortunate enough to meet its vice president of cellular phone platform software research and development, Dr. Nayeem Islam.

Nayeem Islam is that rare discovery in the world of technology: both a thinker and a doer. He has been involved with mobile data service infrastructure for the past decade, including stints leading the vision of mobile data service infrastructure at IBM, Amazon.com, and BEA Systems. But his latest job is perhaps the most demanding yet.

Based on the premise that software was becoming critical to the success of its business, the Japanese wireless telco DoCoMo--which the success of i-mode from 1999 onwards transformed into the largest company in Japan--established a research and development center in the heart of the U.S.'s technology sweet spot: Silicon Valley. DoCoMo Communications Laboratories USA Inc. was born, a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan, and Dr. Islam was appointed to head up the software R&D in the Labs.

"DoCoMo Labs USA," its shortened name, was from the get-go a mobile software laboratory devoted to investigating software structures for handsets and servers for 4G generation networks.

"The goals of our research," explains Islam, "are to enable the creation of new applications, the easy deployment of new applications, and the maintenance of network nodes and end-user devices."

DoCoMo's current generation of services, he explains, are based on i-mode and i-appli infrastructures. Most people in the world are now aware...

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