Remember Symbeose? In April we featured a story about this new European initiative which, in exchange for €11 million of funding from the European Parliament, would strive to make the Symbian operating system the de facto OS of choice for the emerging M2M and connected devices market. That was in November last year, before the Symbian Foundation collapsed and was hovered up by Nokia, and before Nokia pulled the plug on making Symbian open source.
We asked what had happened to the €11 million.
We asked the only partners we could find – Nokia and Telefonica (there were no official details as to who the others were). Telefonica failed to get back to us, and Nokia responded twice by simply ignoring the question and omitting all mention of Symbeose. Very helpful.
Well, we are indebted to Bart Vuijk and the team at the Netherlands-based website ‘All About Phones’, who took up the challenge and have indeed discovered the truth behind Symbeose and the missing public money.
Carl-Christian Buhr, an assistant to European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes, told Vuijk in a tweet that:
“this planned research project (SYMBEOSE) has in fact been stopped, EU has not paid anything.”
So there you go, the money never left the Commission’s coffers. Looks like the project announcement back in November was a little premature and speculative. There no longer is a Symbeose project, and the prospects of the EU creating a global OS standard for connected devices based on Symbian (or anything else, come to that) are nil. Zip. Nada.
You can read the Google-translated report here:
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