Presenters: Ricardo Varela, WAC; Kevin Smith, Vodafone R&D
Time: 14:30 – 15:30, Marquee Corner

The Wholesale Applications Community is an open global alliance made up of the world’s largest mobile phone network operators and manufacturers and is dedicated to making life easier for developers to create and distribute compelling digital content.

You may have heard about WAC apps, an initiative that enables developers to create and distribute applications based on HTML5 technology with the addition of mobile specific functionality. However, in this talk, we are going to address a different topic: the WAC Network APIs WAC has been developing a standard set of APIs that allow developers to leverage mobile operator backends for features such as in-application billing, location or messaging. The first one of these to hit the market is the in-app billing API, currently launched in Beta phase. These APIs leverage industry standards, like GSMA OneAPI, and work across different operators and mobile platforms, from Android to pure HTML5 apps on the web.

This session aims to give an overview about WAC, introducing the purpose of the Network APIs project, explain the technical details about how to use the APIs and discuss with you the future plans for the platform.

Ricardo Varela works as Product Director for Network APIs at the Wholesale Applications Community, an joint initiative from the world’s biggest mobile players, including Vodafone, AT&T, Telefonica, China Mobile and up to 30 other operators, OEMs and vendors. Ricardo and his team work in enabling a platform that allows mobile applications across different ecosystems to leverage operator enabler APIs, such as billing, location and messaging, across the combined customer base of all of the members.

Previously to WAC, he has led the engineering team for Yahoo Mobile in London, engineered several projects for Google Mobile and tinkered with some components of Windows Mobile for Microsoft.

In the startup side, Ricardo founded his first company while at university, which grew and got sold to a TV channel. He is now working on Espresso Collective a company that aims to help people access, search and organize their information in a meaningful way.

Ricardo is a regular speaker in conferences related to mobile development and collaborates in several developer community initiatives, mainly related to mobile web applications. He also tweets random mobile nonsense at @phobeo
In a not-so-distant future, he hopes to own a bakery near a beach and never worry again about the differences between the iPhone and the Motorola RAZR.

Competition Category: Best use of In-app Payment APIs from WAC or BlueVia

The best use of In-app payment in any app using WAC or BlueVia APIs will win a Samsung Galaxy S, donated by WAC. A random selection will be made from those signing up their interest for WAC Network APIs to win another 4 phones (2 per day) at  goo.gl/OS0qH  or  www.wacapps.net/ota11. See the event wiki for more information