**mTLD hires WURFL Founder, Andrea Trasatti as Director of Device Initiatives***

[Vision]

Fantastic hire. This is further evidence that the mTLD is one of the leading players in the mobile space...

I'm really pleased to tell you that Andrea Trasatti has joined dotMobi as Director of Device Initiatives.

For those of you that don't know him, Andrea is an esteemed member of the mobile blogosphere and development community. He's an invited expert in the W3C's Mobile Web Initative, and has a career background in mobile content and analysis.

Oh, and did I mention he was one of the founders of the WURFL project?

For those of you that do know Andrea, he is a super-talented guy and I am excited about working with him.His brief is to help take his work and experience with WURFL to the next level, and create a public device database that will be run and supported by the dotMobi company. We think that tackling device diversity is the biggest challenge holding back efficient and competitive mobile development, worldwide.

For those of you that worry about what this means for WURFL, I'm sure you know (and I agree) that the current project is in safe hands with Luca Passani, and we'll continue to discuss and promote its usage on this site.
Also, we're not planning to reinvent any wheels. Our ambition is to ensure compatibility with both the upcoming W3C Device Description standards, as well as for existing WURFL users.

Nevertheless, we aim to provide extra value to mobile developers: things like global device coverage, modern device capabilities, test suites, and overall data accuracy. We'll also be getting involvement from our company's investors (who of course number manufacurers, operators and web companies).

But most importantly (because we know there's no power greater than the developer community itself) we'll be making sure that developers from around the world - people like you - will be easily able to contribute and share device data on the new platform.

We're gathering requirements and starting development right now. So if you want to help shape how things go, we encourage you to let us know.
Andrea will be running a regular blog column to track progress as we develop the platform. It's to be a community-led service (think Wikipedia, not Encyclopedia Britannica) - so we want to keep you appraised of what's going on as we bring it to life.

This is important stuff for the future of mobile, so we're taking it very seriously

[PRED]

Thanks Michael.
One small step for mobi........