the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, known as CalConnect. CalConnect is focused on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between different software programs, platforms, and technologies.

Synchronica is committed to developing mobile messaging and synchronization software based on open standards and is widely recognized in the industry as being a leading proponent in the implementation and development of standards.

Already an active member of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), Synchronica has opted to join CalConnect because of the consortium's focus on providing mechanisms to enable the interoperability of calendaring and scheduling methodologies, tools, and applications.

CalConnect regularly holds interoperability testing events of which Synchronica will now become an active participant. In addition to this, Synchronica representatives will sit on both the TC Mobile and TV CalDAV committees which develop recommendations for open standards-based calendaring on mobile handsets and define use cases and requirements for CalDAV respectively.

Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica, comments: "We are pleased to be a part of CalConnect and look forward to working closely with the consortium and our fellow members to help further the adoption of industry standards-based calendaring and scheduling solutions for mobile devices. Open industry standards represent the future of mobile technology, and I am confident that our partnership with CalConnect will help us to enhance our solutions. Our industry-standards approach is particularly important when dealing with high-growth emerging markets, such as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, where more basic mass market phones are more popular and proprietary technologies aimed at more complex devices have less relevance."

David Thewlis, CalConnect's Executive Director, adds: "As an organization committed to enabling interoperability between different programs, platforms, and technologies in the calendaring and scheduling sector, we are constantly looking to encourage more vendors to join the consortium. Synchronica has long demonstrated their commitment to open industry standards, and we are very much looking forward to working with them."

Synchronica's award-winning Mobile Gateway is based on the dominant open industry standards Push IMAP (LEMONADE) for mobile email and SyncML (OMA DS) for contact and calendar synchronization and works with the built-in email and synchronization clients found in more than 1.5 billion phones.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, www.calconnect.org, is a partnership among vendors, developers, and customers to advance calendaring and scheduling standards and implementations. The mission is to provide mechanisms to allow calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate and to promote broad understanding of these methodologies so that calendaring and scheduling tools and applications can enter the mainstream of computing.

The consortium develops recommendations for improvement and extension of relevant standards, develops requirements and use cases for calendaring and scheduling specifications, conducts interoperability testing for calendaring and scheduling implementations, and promotes calendaring and scheduling.

Organizational members are Apple, Boeing, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke University, Eventful, Fresno State, Google, IBM, Kerio Technologies, MailSafe, Marware, Microsoft, Mirapoint, MIT, Mozilla Foundation, New York University, Open Connector Groupware, Open Source Applications Foundation, Oracle, PeopleCube, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Scalix, Sony Ericsson, Stanford University, Stockholm University, Sun Microsystems, Symbian, Synchronica, TimeBridge, Trumba, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Yahoo, Zimbra.