PARIS – Fabless supplier of smart-card chips Inside Contactless SA announced it has concluded a partnership with Mobile Distillery, specializing in mobile Java technologies, aimed at developing an interoperable Java ME (Micro Edition) solution for NFC (Near Field Communication) developers.

Under the terms of the agreement, Inside Contactless (Aix-en-Provence, France) and Mobile Distillery (Marseille, France) said they would design a software solution for the development of portable NFC/Java mobile application across multiple NFC phones. The codeveloped solution, based on Mobile Distillery’s Celsius architecture, targets mobile software developers confronted to multiple implementations of NFC technologies.

Mobile Distillery claimed that, by using the NFC Celsius module, the developer would be able to work on the NFC/Java ME application once, and run it across all NFC phones without any further modifications.

Both parties said the partnership is divided into two phases.

The first phase concerns the codevelopment of a Celsius NFC prototype by the third quarter of 2007. The second phase will consist of the joint development of a NFC Celsius module, a complete set of Java ME NFC tools covering the commercially available NFC handsets and future ones.

“The NFC Developers Summit shows that there are great expectations from developers, content and service providers to supply mobile users with innovative applications based on NFC. As a reference mobile execution platform, Java ME enjoyed a tremendous success over the past 5 years, it is widely recognized by the mobile developers community, but it also undergoes an irresistible trend to fragmentation, with significantly different implementations in handsets from various vendors,” commented Philippe Martineau, Inside’s executive vice president of the NFC Business Line, in a statement.

He added: “As an NFC pioneer and market leader, Inside believes that interoperability is a key success factor in delivering NFC-based services. We have a role to play and the proper expertise to bring the full benefits of the NFC standard to the NFC developers community.”