I’ve not been keeping up with the news as much as I should have, nor my R&D, which is why I’ve missed until now the news that dotMobi have appointed Andrea Trasatti as Director of Device Initiatives (how many people claim that as their job title?) with the goal of developing a ‘global mobile phone database for developer community’

Andrea certainly has a suitable pedigree - having been co-founder of WURFL, an active participant in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative’s Device Descriptions Working Group, and I’ve used some of his PHP code in my tinkering with mobile device detection. In his inaugural blog posting, he says “We don’t want to re-invent the wheel, but we want to learn from past experiences and then try to make some steps forward. When the meeting started everyone had a number of ideas that did not really seem to work out very well with each other. I have to say that after two days drawing on a blackboard, talking, writing notes and sharing ideas, we have come to a very interesting solution. … I am very excited about all the features we have thought so far and I am confident that most developers will be BLOWN AWAY by the software that we are going to build.”

I’ll follow this development with interest - but my first questions are ‘What will this do that WURFL doesn’t?‘ and ‘What will this mean to WURFL‘?

I have to say I’m immediately suspicious of a corporate entity trying to do something in an Open Source sort of way - it may get swallowed up in bureaucracy, or it may be that the commercial drivers make it a great tool.