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IBM's latest Lotus targets mobile mash-ups
What's the weather like where you are?

By Adrian Bridgwater

Published: Wednesday 26 March 2008

IBM has released a new version of its Lotus Expeditor software, which is targeted at mobile application developers building both business and consumer web 2.0 mash-ups.

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According to IBM, Lotus Expeditor 6.1.2 supports laptops, desktops, kiosks and mobile-device clients. The company says it is designed for building mobile mash-ups such as services for the tourism market, where electronic map applications are integrated with information on local restaurants, weather or independent holiday review sites.

Angus McIntyre, product line manager for Lotus Expeditor, said: "We see great potential for mobile mash-ups in areas such as social networking, blogging and discussion groups as they become ever more widespread in terms of their adoption. A central part of Lotus Expeditor technology is its use of the Eclipse embedded Rich Client Platform application model. This allows applications to be created to span both desktop and mobile devices."

IBM's Expeditor news came at the same time as the announcement by US telecoms provider Sprint that it is providing a beta version of a software platform named Titan, based on IBM Lotus Expeditor software. Sprint says Titan allows developers, for the first time, to move business applications using the Eclipse development framework from the desktop to most Windows Mobile 6 smartphones.

Antony Edwards, vice president of developer product marketing at Symbian, said: "Mash-ups and web 2.0 technologies as a whole are proving popular in a variety of delivery formats, as they extend outward from the desktop to the mobile computing arena. What is crucial now is that the concept-to-delivery stage is completed in a robust and reliable way if this type of software development is to graduate from comparatively simple social networking to full-blown usage in business. Careful architecting for each mobile platform in question will be fundamental to the widescale commercial adoption of mobile mash-ups."